GPS v. Sicily = WTF

We relied on our Michelin road atlas and it worked great most of the time. After dark, on narrow, twisty roads in Agrigento, we found a single parking spot & phoned our B&B for directions. Even the "main" streets in many towns (including Erice & Modica) were passageways that required folding in the side-view mirrors to avoid scraping things. Old-school maps, with a flashlight for when it gets dark early in December, may be less crazy than dealing with a Sicilian GPS?!?

I know exactly what you mean, RB. I wrote a detailed account of our adventures using a gps in Sicily in 2012, which may still be there in the section on cars in Europe. If you find it, you'll be laughing and nodding your head in agreement. Crazy! We discovered that we did best if we used a map to plot out the big parts of our journeys. Then, when we got close to our destination, we'd switch to the gps, to find the way to the exact street we needed. There are a couple of other defects of the gps, at least ours. It can lead you onto streets that are actually too narrow for you to negotiate. Backing up in such a situation is NOT fun. It doesn't have information for private roads, which we encountered more than once. And, it doesn't have up-to-the-minute information on road work.

Looks like GPS might not have improved much in the five years since I drove 2 1/2 weeks around Sicily using it! I remember the narrow street it insisted I take, that got narrower and narrower, until I had to tuck in both side mirrors...and then creep backward for blocks. And then there was the open stretch of highway with the beautiful blue ocean on our right when she suddenly demanded "Turn Right, Now!" with no road at all on the right to turn onto. It was like being in that scene in "The Office" with Dwight and Michael. GPS in Sicily does make for some good stories though!

What brand of GPS did you use? I remember a posting here that TomTom worked better than Garmin in Sicily but not sure if that's everywhere, maybe in just one instance. We are going in the Fall and I am contemplating buying a GPS but still love my maps.

Our Garmin is a Nuvi 2595 LTM with a new European maps sd card. The gps was less scrambled during our time in Italy, except when we went to San Marino. We did have a map and used it to plot our course before leaving for the day's activities and gps adventures, or misadventures.

Fortunately, we all brought our senses of humor and laughed about our routing.

Buon viaggio,

Thanks for the information

I'm the one who posted about Garmin vs. TomTom. We were just in Sicily April 28 through May 7, 2014. Among the places we stayed was an agriturismo in a rural area in the center of the island (my very positive review here: https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/italy-reviews/sicily-caltanisetta-central-sicily-agrigurismo). Our agriturismo hostess had warned that a TomTom worked to get to her house, but a Garmin would not. We had a Garmin, and even though we had the newest map updates, it simply did not know the roads around her house.

We ran into similar problems elsewhere; we never knew in advance whether it would know the roads or not (it knew all the roads in Ortigia, the old section of Syracusa, for example). For Taormina, the biggest problem was that it wanted to take us through a ZTL, and we had to stop and ask directions for the non-ZTL route to our hotel (which itself was outside the ZTL). Yes, at a few points we got the "linguine map" of Taormina too!

We didn't use a TomTom, so we have no basis for comparison. But my friend who owns the GPS had just used it a few months before in Greece (Athens, Napflio, and Kardamyli, among other places) and said it worked MUCH better there than in Sicily.