Ireland

 

My wife and I were recently in Ireland for a week and got to try out our Garmin 260W with the latest Europe maps. I bought the SCDB prior to leaving so that we'd have all the speed and traffic enforcement cameras installed, but in the end I don't think it was particularly useful. The reason I say this is that we only ever encountered one camera, and that was essentially a false alarm as the camera the SCDB alerted us to was on a different road. We were driving on a 100 KPH motorway (the M8 IIRC), when the SCDB alerted us to a 60 KPH traffic enforcement camera on a surface street that crossed the M8 on an overpass above us. So apparently the parts of Ireland we were diving in were blissfully free of traffic enforcement cameras.

As for the performance of the Europe maps, and the Garmin itself, those were pretty uniformly excellent; and having the Garmin along quickly proved to be invaluable! Many of the sites we chose to visit were already in the Europe maps and so we were often able to find our destination using just what the built-in POIs and off we went. For some of the places we were planing to go we needed to do our homework in advance and program in some custom POIs. For the most part that went well, but there were a few notable exceptions.

There is a famous lighthouse called The Mizzen, which has a good sized museum attached to it and provides an amazing scenic view point, but strangely this was absent from the built in POIs for the Europe Maps. None the less, the existing road signs enabled us to find it. another odd one was the location for New Grange. New Grange is a famous ancient site even older than Stone Henge, and it's got a huge and elaborate museum too. For some reason the built in POP from the Europe maps will lead you way out of your way to the site itself, and not to the actual visitor's center from which you can get a ticket and actually gain entrance to the site. That probably sounds a bit strange, but due to the nature of the local land, being guided to the site itself will put you about an hour away from being able to actually enter the site and see anything. The Garmin Europe map POI needs to be updated to guide people to the visitor's center and that's where they're really going to want to be.

Also, one of the custom POIs we put in turned out to be several Km off from the actual location. For that one I had researched the site using Google Earth, and pulled out the Lat/Lon for it. we did eventually find it, but the Lat/Lon from Google Earth proved to be pretty conspicuously wrong. Not sure how to go about telling those guys their data is wrong.

For all of the other things we wanted to find, the maps and the Garmin worked wonderfully. Sometimes the route selected by the Garmin would take you down what amounted to one lane streets. By this I mean, it's a two way street permitting traffic in either direction, but the total width of the street is less than one American lane. If you happen to meet an oncoming car on a street like this, either you or the other guy will have to back up until you get to a wide spot where the two cars can pass! It would have been nice if there was a choice in the Garmin controls to make it prefer larger streets over those super narrow short cuts, but OTOH, it did kind of make it more of an adventure and we'd have been lost for sure without the Garmin!

Cheers,
Steve