Like many other Crutchfield employees, I’m a musician in a parallel life. Recently, I took a couple of days off to make a music-related sojourn to my north.  My musical partner and I were going to be working in two recording studios in two different cities and meeting a master instrument maker in a third.  Three major appointments, covering close to 1,000 miles – in 42 hours.

I love traveling by car, but – despite my role as an editor for mobile electronics here – have always avoided navigation systems. I enjoy reading maps, learning the lay of the land, and finding my own way.  I was afraid that GPS guided navigation would detract from the wonderful sense of adventure that hitting the road provides. But here was an opportunity for me to learn more about one of our hottest product categories, and I was going to take advantage of it.  It was to be an excellent test, because all three destinations were places we had never visited.

Our portable navigation writer, Dominic, was kind enough to lend me his Garmin Street Pilot. I found it sitting on my desk the morning before our departure  – the power adapter was there, but no manual. Dom assured me that I didn’t need it – that operating the unit is completely intuitive. Hmm. I was a little doubtful, but in serious trip prep mode and decided not print one out from our product database.

Dom’s claim turned out to be an understatement. Using this thing was so simple that I didn’t fully trust it. “It’s bound to steer us wrong,” I thought. But it never did; it turned out to be smarter than we were (more on that later). Affixing it to the inside of my windshield was literally a snap.  Press the rubber “suction cup” base against the glass and pull the sealing lever over and you’re done in 1.5 seconds. And it feels rock-solid secure. Another .5 second and the cigarette lighter adapter is in position. Power the unit up and wait for the satellite to find you – in just a few more seconds, you’re ready to input your travel itinerary.

I know I said we visited three cities, but really it was one major metropolis, a small town, and a tiny village. Our first destination was Brooklyn, N.Y., but since we didn’t want to cough up the lodging fees that would be required there or in Manhattan, I booked us a room at a budget motel way off the beaten trail in New Jersey (about a 40-minute drive from the city). Entered the hotel’s address from my driveway here in Charlottesville, Va., picked up my buddy and hit the road. We left in the early morning, timing rush-hour avoidance around D.C., Baltimore, and Philly but landed smack in it in Iselin, N.J., the location of our hotel. The 10-mile slog from the turnpike to our room was pretty brutal in stop-and-go traffic after a day’s drive, but the Street Pilot guided us effortlessly to our obscure location.

Due to a late-running recording session, we couldn’t meet with our Brooklyn drummer until late evening. He called about 9:30, interrupting a much-needed nap, “hey, I just got out of the session and I’m starving; can you meet me here before the restaurant closes?” We grabbed the Garmin and jumped in the car. I started driving while my band mate set up the navigator. Punched in the drum studio’s address and off we went. As we were crossing the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge at 10 on a Thursday night with no idea where were going (I’m good with Manhattan, but not very versed in Brooklyn), keeping a hungry major-label studio drummer waiting, it hit me. I have to invest total faith in this little box. If it steers me wrong, we won’t get a chance to finally meet the fantastic drummer we’ve been working with for two years now via the magic of computer-based home studio technology and the Internet. I must obey its commands. Goes against my grain, but there was no other choice.

One thing I love about a good navigator like the Street Pilot is the ongoing guidance – the periodic assurances that you’re on the right track, the always-well-timed tips to be on the right or the left in anticipation of a turn or of divided highway. Although the Garmin never told me explicitly to “stay in the middle lane(s),” it was pretty clear via context when such a course was advisable Throughout the trip, I found that the navigator ensured truly stress-free driving amidst potentially stressful traffic scenarios. Driving into unfamiliar Brooklyn late at night with no map, I felt relaxed and happy.

When we got within a few blocks of the studio, the drummer called, concerned that the restaurant was about to close the kitchen. Where were we? Reassured we were close, he gave us the restaurant’s address. We updated our destination info on the Garmin, and 10 minutes later we’re high-fiving in front of an inviting Italian bistro. (Yes, parking was that easy.) Five and a half hours, the best piece of fish I’ve ever eaten and an early morning studio session later, we reversed our course and headed back to the hotel. Exhausted and exhilarated, the drive back was effortless thanks to the GPS device.

Got the early morning wake-up call after a 3-hour power sleep and pointed the car southwest toward a little town northwest of Philadelphia.  We had an appointment with a highly regarded luthier whose basses are my partner’s instruments of choice. It was a long and winding trip through rainy rural Pennsylvania, featuring a surprising dearth of coffee vendors. By the time we found one of those donut shops with the famous coffee, we were almost there. Made it to the workshop with 5 minutes to spare, perfect for finishing off the comforting brew.

After an utterly fascinating tour of a workshop that produces some of the greatest electric basses in the world, my partner consulted with the luthier himself on a new instrument. What should have taken an hour or two morphed in to four hours of fascinating conversation and music making.

We had budgeted plenty of time to get our next stop, but the extended stay at the bass factory put us on track to get there on time as long as we didn’t stop anywhere for long.  We knew this thanks to the “estimated time of arrival” feature displayed in the lower left corner of the Street Pilot.  The feature seems to be accurate to within a minute or two, and we had come to rely on it.

The spring showers continued to fall as we carefully wended our way northwest through small towns and farmland to a little township where an absolutely killer electric guitarist was waiting for us. We couldn’t go very fast, but the GPS system took the conditions into account, delivering what turned out to be a dead-on accurate ETA.

The next five+ hours were all about recording electric guitar. For a recording musician, this is one of life’s great joys.  Warm tones, searing stabs of energy, delicate melodic passages, ringing bell tones bursting from vintage amps and speakers-- all captured by super-accurate microphones. Lap steel guitars, triple-necked table steels, hollow-bodied jazz guitars, and classic sold-bodied rock guitars – we got a little bit of everything.

Darkness had fallen, the rain was pounding, and I was determined to get back home that night in order to attend my daughter’s soccer game the next morning. Declining our host’s kind invitation to stay the night, we fired up the wagon and inputted our final destination. Contending with furious rainfall and a lot of turns in the foggy night, we ended up on an interstate highway comfortably cruising west. West? What was the GPS doing? We should have been heading east to I-95, followed by a southward journey through the urban corridor.  We were heading on Interstate 78 W to Interstate 81. Yikes, that won’t do. We’ll spend 5 hours traveling south on a dark, truck-laden interstate highway with no cities, no turns – nothing to keep us awake and focused. Not to mention going seriously out of our way. That extra 45 minutes wasn’t going to feel good at 3 AM.  But what could we do? Surely turning around and finding I-95 would take even longer – I wouldn’t even have known how to enlist the Street Pilot’s help, as I wouldn’t have known what destination town to enter. We had no paper maps. We had no choice but to follow the route plotted for us. I called my wife, ranting something about “following this ^%$#* GPS west out to route 81.” She questioned my intelligence and went back to bed.

Forty-five miles later, we turned south on I-81. Resigning myself to a long and uncomfortable trek, I glanced over at the Garmin to check the ETA. I noticed that we were being instructed to turn in 10 miles. Huh? Now the machine is really getting screwy. This particular interstate takes us back to Virginia; why is the machine now telling us to turn back into south-central PA?  I had lost faith. But as I would learn repeatedly during the trip, the Street Pilot was always right. There was a method to its madness in this case – we were being routed southeast on U.S. 74 to U.S. 15, which would bypass the urban corridor and spit us out in Culpeper Va., just 45 minutes north of Charlottesville on U.S. 29. A route I never would have considered that ended up saving us copious time. Given that we had strayed so far west from I-95 for the final two stops on our itinerary, it wasn’t practical to go back that way. I had assumed the navigator was taking us out on a wide westerly detour, but it wasn’t. It was guiding us to the shortest possible route south -- between the eastern extreme of I-95 and the westen extreme of I-81.  Brilliant. No traffic, clear sailing. We made it home in the same amount of time it took us to get to Iselin the previous day on a straight interstate shot.

This night I got a good 4 hours sleep. Up and ready for soccer.

Rained out.

A poetic ending to a challenging and memorable road trip in which I learned two important things: a good navigation system is an amazingly helpful tool, and it doesn’t take the adventure out of traveling.