Thank You MLA!

Thanks again to all the staff at MLA for the Garmin 60csx GPS, a great going away present.  Once you figure out how to use it, it’s a wonderful little gadget.  I used it regularly in Palm Springs to accurately track distance when out walking, to check altitude when driving through the mountains and to find places by address.  I now have it loaded for the next leg of the “big trip,” which is Italy and then France.

And I learned something new as I prepared to enter the addresses of where we are staying.  Although I knew all the countries of western Europe were supposed to be on the disk, I simply could not find any addresses or countries outside of Italy on my GPS.  After hours of exasperation at not being able to solve this problem myself, I called Garmin, and they walked me through the problem in five minutes. 

While the disk has all the western European countries, you cannot load the entire disk to your GPS unless you have a monster memory chip in it.   Lacking a monster-sized chip, you need to be selective about what countries you load.  You can even break the map down into regions of a country and load only those specific regions.  With that knowledge in hand, I quickly pulled up the Garmin disk, selected the areas I expect to be in and downloaded those regions directly to my Garmin.  Viola!  Slick as “hog snot.”  (Don’t ask me a lot about “hog snot; I’m from the East Coast and have no personal experience with it.) 

So leg #2 begins tomorrow with an afternoon flight to Amsterdam and then Amsterdam to Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci Airport.  From there, we will take a short train ride to “Termini” station in the heart of Rome.  At that point, I will turn on my Garmin Csx, find satellites, get my position relative to our apartment, and call a taxi.  It’s not that I don’t trust the Garmin; we have luggage.

Great gift!  Thank you.