We will be visiting Uk during May/June this year and will have a hire car for about 3 weeks. At this stage Budget car hire is the stand out best value option for a Ford "Focus" type car at GBP450. We will go with this unless anyone knows of a better deal without any problems.

I am unsure about the real value of a GPS. Budget will charge me GBP65 for one. This seems to be a very expensive road map. I can buy one in Australia and take it with me but I still have to buy the British map for it for about GBP40 which we will not use again.

We will be spending one week in the Cotswolds area and then driving west then down through Cornwall and back to Heathrow.

How detailed are the British book type road maps at about GBP20 and do you really really need a GPS. (you have to remove it from the car and take it with you each time you stop).

I suspect in-car GPS units will like all other electronic gadgets come down drastically in price but in Australia to buy a car with one fitted is very expensive at about US$2500 plus map updates at over US$200 per time. An expensive gadget unless you work out of your car.

Any ideas?

Hello Monty,

Well, my answer would be, yes, you do need one but I am a hopeless navigator. You can get excellent book maps but you do need an excellent map reader beside you for those but maybe you have got one?

Since you can buy a new GPS for the price that Budget are quoting then I would wait and buy one on your first day in England. Halfords branches are all over the country. They have loads in their sale at the moment (could you get it delivered to where you are staying I wonder?). Failing that, try Argos. As it will not be somebody else's you will not be so paranoid about it being stolen and could just hide it in the car rather than carrying it around, worrying about it being stolen from Budget.

When you get home to Australia, just put it on ebay and no doubt there will be someone like you who would be glad to have one for their trip. Or, look on Australian ebay now???

I have reread your post and just noticed that you are coming to the Cotswolds. If you are staying anywhere near me and I know that I am going to be here, I would be happy to be your address for ordering.

That seems a lot of money and almost as if the car hire company is trying to make money out of you.

Not being into modern technology, we have always used a road atlas. AA Road Atlas 2010 at a scale of 4 miles to one inch is our preferred choice. (It can probably be bought a lot cheaper through Amazon and is widely available throughout UK once you arrive for even less.) The maps are clear and easy to follow.

...and no, I'm not an excellent map reader - ask husband who regularly goes hairless when I muddle up my rights and lefts yet again. He knows we are in trouble when I start to turn the map upside down...

Road signing in Britain is also good.

I find a road atlas useful when planning routes as you can see where you want to go and get an idea of what there is to do and see on the way.

Son in law who loves modern gadgets has sat nav. Daughter reckons it is more trouble than it's worth for normal driving and refused to use it. However she does admit it is useful in strange cities as it tells you which lane you need to be in before a junction.

There are also horror stories (I don't know how many of these are apocryphal) of sat nav trying to take you down one way streets or down narrow farm roads in the country....

It may come down to confidence. You don't need sat nav. Vast numbers of people manage without it. A good road atlas is a lot cheaper. If you do get lost regard this as part of the holiday - you never know what you might find....

There is always the excuse to go into the country pub to ask for directions....

Eleanor

quote:

Road signing in Britain is also good.

Hmmm. Not always....around here anyway. Sometimes no sign at all or some joker has turned it round. I think it is always difficult to get used to different countries WAY of signing. I find France SO different to Britain that I tend to turn too early or at the wrong angle because of the way that they sign, how long ahead before the junction etc. and the UK may be different in this way to Australia.

But as I said, I am a hopeless navigator (upside down map, Eleanor? Mine goes sideways as well..) and we never seemed to end up in interesting places when we went wrong. Industrial estates and dead ends were my pre-GPS speciality. I couldn't live without it now.

As to helpful natives, we were once lost on Angelsey for an hour and when we went to a shop to ask, they wouldn't speak English to us, only Welsh )

I was initially sceptical about GPS but have become a great fan. I now often use it even on roads that I know fairly well, not least because with half an eye on the display I have a better idea of the sharpness of the bends and the general shape of the road ahead. And, although I still like to plan a route with the help of an atlas, I always use TomTom on unfamiliar roads because it removes so much of the uncertainty about what to do at each junction, and just makes navigation so much simpler. We find it especially useful when we are in Europe, where we have enough to think about already with unfamiliar place names, road-sign design and placement, etc. without having to worry about which road to take. This is particularly so in places where the road system is unusually convoluted and I imagine it would be particularly beneficial for a visitor to the Cotswolds!

If you have an up-to-date smartphone you can get a SatNav app (and judging by reviews these are pretty much as good as standalone SatNav units), so you could avoid having to buy a separate piece of equipment. On another thread several people have written enthusiastically about these. However, there's not much to be saved by following this route because the GPS suppliers seem to be charging little more than the cost of the software (program plus maps) these days for their standalone units.

For ages we used a finely detailed Phillips road map, which on the whole has served us well and it still lives in the car.

About 2-3 years ago we got GPS and it does in generla make it a lot easier. There are times when I still prefer to have a map as well - it's easier to get a spatial feel for the route and also interesting detours. In addition, the Phillips map has good detail on the more complex junctions, allowingthe navigator to advise on the best lane to be in (typically when coming off a junction, you'll then approach a roundabout. The GPS isn't good at advising the correct lane quickly enough).

For a cheap selection of maps, find any town or city centre and a discount book store. They'll typically have a good selection, often the last stock before this year's reprint, hence price can be very good.

Finally, internet utilities like Multimap (there are others) allow you to get a detailed route plan if you have access to a PC/printer where you're staying. Often a good B&B owner will be happy to do this for you.

regards

Ian

quote:

find any town or city centre and a discount book store

... or Amazon will sell you one fairly cheaply. For example, the "AA Big Road Atlas Britain" (which is good enough for most route planning) for £6.59 (post free in the UK).

One other benefit of a GPS that I love is the time to destination feature. It really helps to plan your day.

We've noticed, especially in Ireland, that destinations locals would tell us 'are too far away' only ended up an hour or two drive on the GPS. 2 hours in a car for us Californians is just a quick trip to the shop.

If you think about it, we all somehow survived for many years before the invention of the GPS . Sure, we got lost once in a while, but it rarely ruined the trip.

Seriously, if you can read a map you can get by easily with an AA road atlas. We managed quite nicely with one of these for over 3 years in England and Scotland. I think the prices charged for GPS by car hire firms are ridiculous.

Thanks Felicity for your offer. My daughter currently is living in Colliers Wood so I will ask her to check local GPS prices and also ebay Uk as I
had not thought of that. I think we will probably stay with a good map such as the AA Road Atlas 2010 suggested by Eleanor.

I was impressed by your website and actually used "holidaylettings.co.uk" to book a one bedroom garden flat at Cumnor Hill to use as a base to tour both East and West of Oxford.

I have also tried internet maps such as google and multimap and will make printouts for specific trips such as Bath to Dunster and even Heathrow to Oxford (but not up the main autoroute). However in the Cotswolds I have no idea at this stage of where we will go each day.

In Australia there have been reports of excessive charges by telephone companies for people using mobile/cell phones as GPS units because of the high per minute call fee. I would be very wary of this option.

What we want is a cheap disposable one !!! - suppose they will exist one day.

One final piece of advice - it's rare for a wrong turning here to take you off the edge of a cliff or into the crater of an active volcano

As such it's much better to accept missing the odd correct turning and adapt accordingly, rather than risk a dangerous maneuver (or an in-car argument, beloved of British families!). Often the sheer volume of traffic here (compared to Melbourne/Victoria) can add to the risk of a chancey late lane switch.

The trick about remaining on the inner (right hand side) of the roundabout is a good one if you find yourself not in the correct lane and hence missing your turning. My partner, who's lived & driven in Melbourne, Perth and NZ found the technique of getting into the correct lane whilst traversing a roundabout one of the hardest tricks to master over here, so it's reasonable to expect that this might present the odd issue. There are a number of pretty hideous, complex & busy roundabouts here, that even us locals struggle with.

regards

Ian