My Life with GPS

I’ve been living with a GPS receiver since 1999. It’s a Magellan GPS 300, which is a pretty basic unit as far as global positioning is concerned. It can tell you your coordinates (give or take a hundred meters or so), your altitude (give or take a hundred feet or so) and your direction (at least when you’re on the move). No, it doesn’t do temperatures. I had long harbored fantasies about living a completely free, untethered lifestyle, driving my 4x4 off into the uncharted wilderness on impulse and getting lost for the sake of getting lost, uncovering exotic civilizations and pitching tents in the middle of nowhere, eating from tins and sleeping under the stars. Armed with a winch and a GPS unit, I was supposed to be able to get back to civilization no matter where I end up getting lost in. That was five years ago, and I still haven’t gotten myself lost in any exotic wilderness. Heck, the closest I have come to uncovering exotic cultures is my mingling with carefree weed-smokers in Sagada. In other words, my GPS has not really seen any serious action at all, as my travels have basically been mostly along traditional tourist routes. The rest of the time, I am immersed in front of the TV set. A Device for Useless Information So what’s the point of having a GPS unit then for a serious couch potato like me? I’ll tell you what it’s good for: it’s a pretty good source of useless information. For instance, I am happy to know that Megamall is about 5.1 km. from my place, while Clark is 77.1 km. away. The mouth of Baguio is 202 km. away while Subic is 83.9 km. off. Sagada is far out at 273 km., but Dubai is farther at 6,903 km. Mind you, all of these are in straight lines, which is why you’ll wonder why the receiver says that Morong, Bataan is just 81.3 km. away and yet it takes you forever to get there. In the United States, GPS services have become an industry of sorts. Mate the receiver with an electronic map and you get a Dick Tracy’esque device that tells you exactly where you are on a road grid as displayed on an LCD screen. It can even recommend a good restaurant or two in the area to boot. But here in the Philippines, the market for such graphical telematics services would be a pretty small one. After all, few people even bother to use maps… The Way of the Waypoints Seriously, a GPS receiver is good for finding your way back home. If you, like me, are bad with directions, you can mark down waypoints every time you hit an intersection. This is the digital equivalent of dropping pebbles onto the ground. Need to get back home from some uncharted place? Just follow the pebbles home. Once the waypoints have been set, then you can easily go back and forth in the future. And if someone has already marked and published the waypoints for places of interest, then you already have the foundations for an electronic tourist map. Which is precisely what WaypointsDotPH has managed to do. This very useful site serves as a repository of waypoints as collected by helpful souls, featuring routes such as “Manila to Hundred Islands,