Our Garmin GPS

We were making an around-the United states trip of a lifetime in 2010, when we decided that our old GPS unit was just too tired and senile to continue to serve us.

We were traveling through Louisiana at the time and were visiting RV friends that we had first met in Quartzsite, Arizona, a few years before. We were lamenting the fact that our old GPS unit was giving us fits. As we were being shown around the Lake Charles area, we were impressed with the Garmin GPS unit that Mark Didelot was using to guide us around.

Being the very talented computer savy person that he is, Mark was soon showing us all of the different things that the Garmin Nuvi 1350 could do—as well as showing us the very nifty add-ins that he had downloaded from the Internet.

Needless to say, seeing a first-person demo of the Garmin convinced us that it was the "new" GPS unit that we needed to have.

We visited a local Sam's Club and found the Garmin Nuvi 1350T at a good price, so we dragged out our credit card and purchased it.

Our good friend went right to work and downloaded onto our new GPS unit the latest maps and the many extra goodies that he had found—and then gave us a tutorial on how to use many of the features. Yes, we were very much impressed!

One of the things that opened our eyes to the possibilities with a new GPS, was being told about a web site on the Internet where we could download all sorts of different "locations" onto our GPS— from different types of restaurants, to roadside attractions, rest stops, fuel stops, and a whole host of other interesting places to visit. We were shown how to select the different POIs (points of interest) for our GPS, and then how to download them from the POI Factory and get them functioning on our new Garmin GPS. Wow! What a bunch of fun stuff.

There are three aspects of the Garmin Nuvi that we especially appreciate, being RVers traveling in unfamiliar areas.

• The ability to immediate try to recalculate our route if we miss a turn or choose to go a different direction (instead of screaming at us to "make a U-turn whenever possible").


• The wonderful feature of telling us in which of several lanes to be for the next upcoming turn (especially in metropolitan areas with many lanes of traffic in a busy city).


• Having compatibility with the special RV-related add-on features offered by a third-party vendor.

We are thoroughly enjoying the many features and the RV-friendly functions of our Garmin GPS.