A funny thing happened on our way out last weekend.  Discovering that our street directory did not have a listing for Carruthers Street in Mt Pleasant, we decided to try the GPS in the Nokia 6220 Classic.

Setting out from the northern suburbs, we were a little suspicious when the lovely navigator’s voice told us to turn left, turn right  – straight towards the coast. We may live north but we know Mt Pleasant is near the river, and south of it at that.

Ignoring her resulted in the command “do a U turn, now” which we also ignored.

So I tried searching for the street again, bearing in mind the initial search had not asked us for a suburb, just sent us on our merry way.

The closest Carruthers Street we could find was about 18,000km away in the US. I wondered if the phone or GPS was not set up correctly but knew that not to be the case as our little red dot moved happily through the city and on to the Kwinana Freeway, complete with speedo readings.

To cut a long story short we were actually given the wrong street name; it was Curruthers, found with the help of directory assistance.

Never to be deterred we tried it again the next day while heading to visit relatives in Vic Park. We keyed in the nearest main street to our location, Berwick Street, and off we went. I was very suspicious when we got sent down Fitzgerald Street and told to turn at Newcastle.

My husband was determined we should persist, so we headed on to the freeway,  assuming the bossy GPS lady was sending us the long way via Canning Highway.

Lo and behold she told us we were at our destination in the middle of the freeway, near Riverside Drive. We had stopped at that spot the night before due to an accident, so for some reason, it must have remembered that and ignored my Berwick St search.

So it is back to the trusty Street Smart until I can figure out the GPS instructions, not to mention the charges.