My Husband’s Newest Toy-Garmin Nuvi 660

For Christmas I gave my husband a Garmin . It was something he really wanted. In fact, he had wanted a GPS system for many years ever since we had a rental car that had one. He ordered it himself, since he wanted to select all the right features that he wanted. Initially, he had wanted to purchase the Tom-Tom. He had seen it advertised on TV a bunch. However, he ended up purchasing one of the Garmin systems. They have perhaps as many as 100 different GPS systems. He looked online at the Garmin website and after much pondering ordered the Nuvi-660. I was glad that he was getting the gift that he wanted, but I probably wasn’t paying to much attention to him when he was telling me about the different models and all of their features. I must confess, I’m sold on the product.

We tried it out the first time on our driving trip over Christmas. It is amazing. It gives you traffic updates, so that you can avoid traffic jams. We utilized that twice on our trip. Both times we were in areas that we didn’t know at all, and had we not had Garmin we would have stayed on the freeway fighting traffic with everyone else. Instead, we took a detour. It takes you around the traffic. Normally, we would never do that because when you are in unfamiliar places you do not know if you are going to hit a dead end or how to get back on the freeway easily.

One of the times we hit traffic was on I-80 going from Lake Tahoe to San Francisco. We took the detour and spend the next half an hour to an hour driving through quaint and cozy centers of small towns along the freeway. We never had to worry about where we were nor how to get back on the freeway. We were able to just enjoy looking at everything around us while we were avoiding rush-hour traffic.

Another wonderful feature is of course that you can type in any business you may be looking for (like Starbucks which I was looking for quite a bit) and Garmin will tell you where the nearest one is and take you there as an intermediary stop on your route to wherever you are going. It will show you hotels, gas-stations etc.

The only minus was that my husband at times spent more time looking at the Garmin screen than he did on the road while he was driving. Garmin also had a feature that allowed you to pick which voice it would speak to you in. We often had a woman speaking to us in a nice Australian accent. Garmin can also speak to us in several languages. We attempted my native language, but quickly had to change it back to English when my husband didn’t know whether to turn left or right. I also tried Italian, since I have taken Italian classes during the last year. We quickly changed it back to English when we realized that my Italian isn’t quite up to par on navigational vocabulary.

Please be advised that a few states (among them California) does not allow you to mount the GPS system to your windshield. We purchased a few other mounting devices that will allow you to mount in on your dashboard or elsewhere in your car depending on the name and model of your vehicle.