Extreme GPS

Friday, December 29

Both vans are using Garmin GPS systems for navigation. Kurt has his that he brought from home and I have one rented from Enterprise.  While the models are similar, they tend to pick very different routes at times.  Last night, Terry decided ours must be set on "extreme" for route picking.

Friday evening we decide to go to a restaurant in the nearby city of Wolf.  If you look at a map, our place was due east of Wolf about a kilometer, but the river makes a sweeping loop south and then north making a nearly 9 km run.

As we pulled out to head to the restaurant, my van was in the lead and pointed us north.  Kurt turned around and didn't see us and his GPS routed him south along the river.  One turn into my ride and we are directed to turn up hill.

Perhaps at this point I need to describe the geography of the Mosel valley.  This is a truly V-shaped valley with extremely step slopes and every open square inch is planted in grapes--even slopes so steep that mountain goats may shy away.

So up one of these valley sides we go. In the dark.  On a road so narrow there would not be able to deal with a car coming down the hill.  With no guard rails. Oh, and did I mention that it had snowed and while it didn't stick on the valley floor, the higher we climbed, the more was stuck to the road.  It was only a climb of a couple of kilometers, and then a decent just as steep down the other side.  At least on the descent, we were on the inside nearly scraping the rock walls that retained the vineyards.

Imagine driving down this hillside in the dark and snow...

Not much was said on the drive over, but we all breathed a sigh of relief when we arrived in Wolf.  We decided to take the river route back after dinner.