Meet Mr. Geepus!

My old

friend Steve would never ever say this out loud (probably not even under

hypnosis) but he's deathly afraid of being lost in the woods. This is curiously ironic because he's a

bearded, grizzled old outdoorsman who knows more about all of the animals that

roam the north woods of Minnesota

than most zoologists do. Still, whenever

we went hunting, he would rarely stray more than a mile from the cabin. He would sit in the woods for 12 hours at a

stretch, but he was always close. We

tried to teach him how to use a compass, but he would growl, "That fool

thing will point me every direction except where I want to go." "But Steve," I interrupted,

"that's sort of the point because you can eliminate avenues that you

don't…" "BAH!" he would

bellow, "Gimme something that points to the cabin and then, by God, you'll

have something."

Well, a few

years later I had a surprise for him. I

bought my first handheld GPS (GPS stands for "Global Positioning

System" but I call it "The Geepus" for short) and boy, was that

ever slick! It didn't have maps or a

color display, and it ran for about 30 minutes on 4 AA batteries (talking to

satellites took a lot of juice back in the day). Still, you could mark where you were, amble

through the woods for hours on end and when you were done, it would point back to the cabin when you wanted to go home! Hot diggity dog. I marked all of our deer stands, fishing

holes, etc. and then one morning when Steve was grousing about how one

particular stand he always wanted to hunt was "too far to walk to"

(ie, too far removed from his comfy chair and his coffee table so riddled with wet beer-can circles that it looked like it was mauled by a squid), I gave him the GPS and said, "here,

follow the arrow." To my surprise,

he took it and gave it a try. Later that

night he told me that the arrow didn't disappear until he rested his hand on

the first rung of the ladder that led to the stand. And (more obviously) he had no trouble

getting back to the cabin.

Modern

handheld GPS devices are nothing short of amazing. I'm on my third one. It lasts for weeks on two AA batteries and

has a beautiful color display AND it holds every street, numerical address,

restaurant, bathroom, rest area, gas station, Movie Theater, museum, and

shopping district in North America, Alaska,

and Hawaii. I prefer a handheld model vs. a car unit for

several reasons: I can take it with me

on the plane and track where I'm flying and watch the neighborhoods scroll

along underneath me. I can take walks

around the neighborhoods I travel to without fear of getting lost. I can track how far I've walked. I can ask it to take me to a specific address

or to the nearest Denny's (I'm a "Grand Slam" breakfast guy). I can take it into any car that I rent or any

bus that I ride. I can dump the data it collects into my laptop so if I ever go back to a place I've been before, I can reload routes or locations I have to visit again.

If I had to

travel with only 1 "personal electronic device," I honestly believe

that the GPS would hold its own and eventually defeat the iPod in a cage-match

to the death. I know how many miles I

walked through Central Park, or how to get to

that little bbq place everyone's been talking about, or where the nearest gas

station is to the airport so I can refuel the rental car. I know what time it will be when I arrive at

my destination (my wife and I used the ETA feature when driving to St. Louis to

see her family last Christmas, over 600 miles, it was off by less than 5

minutes). The iPod is entertaining, but

not anywhere nearly as informative.

A

fully loaded GPS with street sets, points of interest, tracking features and

the whole deal can be had these days for less than $300. If you've been thinking about getting one, it’s

a good time to buy because they've reached a level where the size is just right,

the resolution is fantastic, and they have expandable storage slots for memory

sticks so you can store the whole world if you want!