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The 800 is a waste of money.

THere are plenty of paper based map books that are as useful as they ahve always been.

Get out there and explore! What have you got to lose!:bike::bike::bike:

I wholeheartedly endorse this attitude! I do like maps, printed maps to be precise, and they've never failed me: they rarely run out of batteries you see! :) And personally, I pick up a map of every city I visit, as a sort of memento.

There's just something fascinating, picking up a map and just... having a look at it, discovering possibilities and potentially interesting places.. and I'm not old, mind you!

Just ask Doug3, who kindly went into trouble to return my map after I forgot it at the Aldgate during the TCC kit fashion show! (btw, again, thanks a lot mate! It was great seeing you! :D)

One problem with paper maps is they don't tell you where you are. Some people find that easier to cope with ("there's that railway line and that looks like the river, I must be here...") than others.

Ahhh, practice makes perfect my friend! :D Relying on the navigation systems makes you weak :cool:. my .02$
 
Having just returned from my holiday let me put my oar in. After reading reviews here about the Garmin 800 I went and bought the 705 instead and coupled with the UUD maps it was invaluable. Although it did have a strange idea of the kind of "roads" I might be prepared to ride down. I wish I had bought it a couple of years ago.
 
Ahhh, practice makes perfect my friend! :D Relying on the navigation systems makes you weak :cool:.

My wife practised map reading as my passenger for 15 years. It didn't make her strong, only car sick! :eek:

In a way it's like learning a foreign language. Some people thrive on it and would also learn a second or third foreign language, others never proceed beyond "Haro, mai nehm izu Suzuki, purizu tsu mihtyu". Personally, I have always loved maps, looking at maps of new places for hours and wondering about what they're like. That's a different matter though from trying to get to a specific point using one.

The key to not getting lost with a map is to keep matching map details against observations as you progress ("ah, there's that railway bridge and that's this traffic light", etc) so you always know where you are on the map and what's coming up next. It works best if either you have a dedicated navigator (passenger in a car) or can take time to stop frequently. It doesn't work so well when you're on your own, traffic is busy and you'd like to keep moving. That's when I really appreciate a navi.
 
A minor dislike of google maps is that rivers appear mostly as very thin blue lines--not representative at all. Do the UUD or native garmin maps also do this?

Any Mapple does a better job on that feature, and depending on scale also provides some other good geographical info.
 
My wife practised map reading as my passenger for 15 years. It didn't make her strong, only car sick! :eek:

In a way it's like learning a foreign language. Some people thrive on it and would also learn a second or third foreign language, others never proceed beyond "Haro, mai nehm izu Suzuki, purizu tsu mihtyu". Personally, I have always loved maps, looking at maps of new places for hours and wondering about what they're like. That's a different matter though from trying to get to a specific point using one.

The key to not getting lost with a map is to keep matching map details against observations as you progress ("ah, there's that railway bridge and that's this traffic light", etc) so you always know where you are on the map and what's coming up next. It works best if either you have a dedicated navigator (passenger in a car) or can take time to stop frequently. It doesn't work so well when you're on your own, traffic is busy and you'd like to keep moving. That's when I really appreciate a navi.

My current girlfriend instantly gets car sick if she tries to read anything for more than a few seconds..

Completely agree on your point about stopping to take a look at the map. If there's no time to take a look at the map, then the dead-tree version of maps is practically useless.

Finally, over my years in Japan I've gathered 5~6 maps from the 街の達人(まちのたつじん)series, and the attention to detail is just... stunning. With such quality, it suddenly becomes far easier to find your current location on the map!

^Good post!
I second that!
 
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