Having a navigation unit in your car... Priceless

I used our navigation unit (Garmin c330) to use on the way to Florida. Here are the ways it helped me out:

• About one hour outside of Dallas and about an hour from Tyler, there was bumper-to-bumper traffic on I-20. I had no idea why but we were not going anywhere. Perhaps it was construction or perhaps it was an accident. Anyway, by using the navigation unit, I could see that Texas highway 80 was running parallel to I-2o for a while, so I was able to get off of I-20 and take highway 80 instead. There was hardly any other traffic on highway 80, so not many other people decided to take this alternate route. If traffic had been going smoothly on I-20, this detour on highway would only cost me about 10 extra minutes. However, considering we were not going anywhere on I-20, it could have saved me an hour or more.
• Since I was driving on a Monday, I did not expect hotels/motels to be all full, but to my surprise, they were. Perhaps they were people who were still displaced from Hurricane Katrina or perhaps they were the snowbirds heading south for the winter, but at any rate, the first motel I stopped at in Hattiesburg Mississippi was already full. By using the navigation unit, I could call all the other nearby motels and I was able to find out that they were all full, too. So I decided to keep going.
• By using the navigation unit, I could find that my best bet of getting a hotel along the route was to go all the way to Mobile Alabama. I found that the Hilton Garden Inn still had some vacancies (not many, only about 3 rooms left), so I asked them to hold a room for me.
• On the way to Mobile, there was some extremely heavy fog. By use of the navigation unit, I could tell that the road was not going to do something unexpected, like a sudden 90 degree turn. I could have even driven with my eyes closed! OK, maybe not.
• While in Mobile, with all the heavy fog, I probably would not have been able to find the hotel without the navigation unit. Even with the navigation unit, I made some wrong turns, but was easily able to determine I was heading in the wrong direction.
  
• While driving toward Pompano Beach, there was some construction going on I-95. They were even going to close I-95 at 10:30 pm. It was only 9:30 pm, but the traffic was backed up. By using the navigation unit, I was easily able to find my way to the Florida Turnpike (I had to backtrack a little bit) and bypass all the mess on I-95.

I really could not have imagined how my trip would have turned out without this unit. Yes, it is a little pricey, but I would say it almost paid for itself on this trip.