When “GPS” stands for Granny Positioning System

Oct 7, 2009 Posted by alan jones on Oct 7, 2009 in Uncategorized | 2 comments

When “GPS” stands for Granny Positioning System

I get my highly-developed sense of adventure from my parents. They can smell a new adventure a hundred miles away, like a shark can sense a wounded fish or a Cliff Swallow the way back to San Juan Capistrano.

My parents are nomads, grey ghosts, semi-retirees on the road. My dad works locum gigs for other chiropractors and he and my mum get to see a lot of the countryside, getting from town-to -town in a hard-working Subaru Forester with a camper-trailer on the back.

If it’s an East Coast gig, sometimes they’ll travel and live in their yacht, a well-known old ex-Sydney-to-Hobart racer ‘Bacardi‘, almost as old as I am, and now retrofitted with bookshelves, curtains, and framed photos of my brothers and I when we were kids.

I bought dad a GPS for his 70th and they do use it, usually as a third vote to break a tie. They tell me they find it very useful in an unfamiliar part of town or in a big highway interchange.

But mum, Navigator In Chief, is still an analog girl at heart, and keeps most of her important directional information stuck to the glovebox in note form. Unlike the TomTom GPS, my mother’s Granny Positioning System doesn’t require electrical power, isn’t affected by a loss of satellite signal, is easily readable in bright sunlight, is immune to extremes of temperature, most mild forms of impact and can even tolerate minor immersions.

Mum is generally in the passenger seat if both my parents are in the car. She has always had trouble telling right from left when she’s under pressure, and will often refer to a scar on her hand. Under pressure, sometimes she can’t remember which hand is scarred and will suddenly raise both hands. If she’s at the wheel, that can be scary.