Cars, Cars and Sat Navs in Cars

This weekend has been somewhat car related, obviously I am trying to replace my current car and after looking at 2 cars on Saturday and getting a good deal on the trade-in value of my old rattle-mobile I was ready to put a deposit down. However in what is now becoming a tradition, I managed to have a minor prang between getting a trade-in-value and actually handing the car over. Last time it wasn’t my fault, turning right at a roundabout, the car coming from the left obviously forgot what the brake was for and coasted into the side of the car. Thankfully the garage were giving me minimum trade-in so weren’t too worried about the minor damage. This time round it was my fault as I reversed into a post I couldn’t see in any of my mirrors. Again thankfully the damage is fairly minor just the bumper and tail-light and again the garage aren’t too worried about it. Why do I think my car is heading for the breakers yard for spare parts!!! So anyway new(ish) car Tuesday evening, Woo Hoo!!

Sunday saw me and the Mrs driving up to London to see my God-Mother for her birthday, after deciding to drive up last minute we were relying on the good old Sat-Nav for directions and I can’t fault the fact that it got us there, however it’s choice of route left little to be desired. When I plugged the details into the AA website that morning, it gave me a travel time of 1hr 15mins. When we actually left and used the Sat-Nav it gave us an even nicer 55mins. However once we had pulled off the M4 and started going across town, the Sat-Nav seemed to decide that every possible area of slow moving traffic was the way to go and what had initially looked as us being rather early for the 2pm party having left at 12:15 (arrival estimate of 1:10), was soon touch and go as to whether we would arrive on time. As we finally pulled into the Kilburn area, already at 2:05pm, out route was suddenly blocked by a police roadblock around some kind of incident and we had to find another route to cross the railway. In the end that last 2 miles of travel took us another 30 mins and we finally arrived at 2:35pm, some 2 hrs and 20 mins after leaving.

Thankfully the route out to the A40 is one I know and the return trip took us 1hr 5mins. I tell you now that if the Sat Nav hadn’t been worth nearly £200 it would have been a pile of circuitry sitting in the gutter of a West London street at about 2:30pm yesterday.