For many people, gone are the days of road trips with a folded map or an atlas opened wide on the passenger’s lap. Mark and I took many trips that way when we were first married. If we were being super fancy, we went to AAA and got their “TripTik” spiral map. That was always paired with a corresponding Tour Book. Our trip cross-country in 2004 had three TripTiks and four Tour Books.
Fast forward to now and it’s all about the GPS system. Most cars have it standard now, there are an endless number of navigation maps to choose from for your phone and a plethora of freestanding ones to choose from at the store. We had a perfectly good Garmin unit for our Class C that we carried into our new to us Phaeton. It worked just fine until it was time to update the maps and not many of those old Garmins had free map updates. The cost to update was close to just buying a new one.
If you haven’t checked out www.outsideourbubble.com yet, you really should. His videos are great with lots of great information on products, systems and troubleshooting. Mark saw his video on the Garmin 770 LMT-S and we knew that’s the one we needed to buy. We opted to buy it on Amazon because it was easy and it arrived in no time. It came with a dash mount that has held it securely in place since the day we put it there. Even through our hot summers, the thing does not move. It plugs in via the cigarette lighter adapter on the dash.
The best features are fully utilized once it has all of your coach information. I urge you to take the time to enter all of your RV information: length, height, weight, etc. Once you’ve entered your particulars, the system will choose a route that is best for your sized vehicle. No more looking at a really narrow bridge and wondering if it’s safe for you to cross. Not to mention those pesky low bridges taunting you to try, just try, to make it under. A bright red banner will post an alert across the top of the screen and give you an alternate route.
A huge plus for us is that it has a nice large screen; a 7-inch widescreen to be exact. It’s large enough to see it all with a quick glance which keeps the drivers’ eyes forward. It’s also big enough that I can see it easily from the passenger seat. The screen is nice and bright, yet it also auto-dims at night so you don’t have a giant light in your line of sight.
When you are approaching a freeway interchange, the screen will split and the right quarter of it will highlight which lane or lanes you need to be in. Beginning at 1 mile before, she will tell you which lane you should be in for the upcoming interchange.
It’s voice activated, although we haven’t used it much. I can see where asking for the next gas station would come in real handy. We’ve just haven’t tried that feature because I’m sitting in the passenger seat using the Gas Buddy app. But in a bad cell situation, voice activated questions to it would be nice.
This Garmin will sync with your phone via bluetooth, which is super handy for Mark. His staff is all over the country and he’ll get calls, texts and emails no matter the time of day. When an email comes in, the right quarter of the Garmin screen will show for a brief second who it’s from and the subject. A text will come through with a line or two. It’s another quick glance and he can tell if it’s something we need to stop for. When I say quick, I mean quick. Like checking your mirrors quick. We are not rolling down the road scrolling through our phones.
Adding a stop, like a gas station, is super easy as well. This is where the voice activation is handy. Instead, he has me. I’ll type it in with just a few key presses and viola, we have an alternate to our route without having to redo the whole thing. Since we are still “vacationers” and not full timing, we know where we’re going to stop for gas and many times will enter it in as a waypoint at the very beginning. Like when we drive to San Diego, we always stop at Fortuna Road in Yuma and top off our tank so we won’t need to pay the sky-high prices in California. We can make it back to Yuma on the way home with no problem. Someday maybe he’ll be more open to a stop because it looks interesting. For now our travel is mission oriented.
Also since we are still vacationers, we will pack a lot of driving into a day. My in-laws max out at three hours. It’s a 5.5 hour drive from her old house in California but it would take them two days. I know I know, someday that will be us. An eight-hour drive is nothing for us. A nice feature of this Garmin 770 is the “need a break” pop up. Every hour or so the right quarter of the screen will ask, “Need a break?” with suggestions. The suggestions are usually gas stations and fast foot places but we’ve also seen parks and other tourist type places pop up. “Need a break” also pops up a couple of miles before every rest stop. I really like this because sometimes we get too focused on getting from point A to point B and we’ll look at the rest stop screen and say to each other, “Yeah, we do need to stop and stretch our legs.”
You’ll get many appropriate alerts with this system. Sharp curves, steep inclines and downhills are the ones we see the most. The friendly beep tells you there is something important ahead and you can read the alert banner at the top of the screen with a quick glance. On our recent trip to Breckenridge and Moab we had two new alerts. It was windy as we drove north because a cold front was moving through. We were climbing out of the Phoenix valley where the road takes you up and over and in between different hills and mountains. Apparently it was windy enough for a lateral wind alert. Thankfully the winds didn’t affect us but that was a nice warning to prepare. There is a lot of road construction in Colorado and one stretch of I-70 has the westbound lanes closed with one lane of traffic each way on the eastbound side. Our smart little Lola (that’s what we call our GPS), alerted us for a few miles that we were going the WRONG WAY. The screen was framed in red, the banner at the top was red and she beeped at us every few seconds. We joked that she was trying to tell us, “You dummy! Get back on your side of the freeway before you kill someone!”
I know that everyone has their favorite GPS system and I am by no means telling you this one is better than another. It’s the one that works best for us. It’s one of those purchases you didn’t realize how awesome it was until you started using it. We’ll never be without an RV specific GPS again.
Happy travels!