The other DrC and I, accompanied by friend Ed, had a weird and fascinating experience yesterday with the navigation feature of an iPhone and Siri. We were in Idaho Falls and needed to get directions to the relatively new Camping World which we knew was generally in the west end of town, as were we.
The other DrC looked it up on, I believe Yelp and got a street address, she then sought directions. Siri blithely directed us to take this turn and that ending up on what amounted to an access road just east of I-15, where 'she' instructed us to park and walk from there.
Looking across I-15 we could plainly see Camping World on the west side of I-15, and there was no overpass so walking, while theoretically possible, was in fact insanely unsafe and would have required climbing fences and j-walking both sides of a divided Interstate.
We hooted, giggled, turned off the navigation feature, made a u-turn, and drove on till we found an overpass which we crossed and got to the store west of the freeway. And Camping World had the particular RV product we sought, as expected.
That's the second time we've had a navigation feature lead us badly astray. Another time one directed us, towing the RV, up a rural road which became a gravel road which turned into two ruts in the grass. Luckily we found a place we could negotiate a 3-point turn, backing into a ranch driveway, and got back out of there. Again, we turned off the nav. feature, got out the AAA maps, and navigated ourselves northward from West Yellowstone toward Helena.
Most of the time navigation features are a great thing, but it is possible to have bizarre experiences with them. We had one yesterday.
