Last week I spent 3 days in San Diego for work. I am fairly familiar with the area but still needed directions to find the quickest way from the airport to my company's office. I loaded the directions onto my phone before leaving the rental car lot. I drove straight to the office and arrived 30 minutes before my first scheduled meeting. The system worked well.
There is one unfortunate drawback to using your phone to help navigate. We become lazy and overly reliant on our mobile phones to help us get around. Once I made it to my office, I tried not to use any smartphone directions for the remainder of the trip. That required that I try to remember other locations in the area. I had a rough idea of where my hotel should be. Instead of looking up turn-by-turn directions, I drove to where I thought it would be and found it without any difficulty. When it came time to go to restaurants in the area, I found excellent places close to the office or near my hotel. One night a group of us walked from our different hotels and met without the need to drive around.
When I first started renting cars long before smartphones existed, I would get a paper map from the rental car company and use that to get around. Now we have a much better solution but I wonder how many people rely on smartphone navigation when they should be able to trust their own sense of direction. If you are brave and feel you have good navigational skills, trust your instincts and see if you can't enjoy the scenery more.
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