So do I... but never on purpose!

You have to be crazy to drive in Guadalajara, but that's no problem, because you'll be crazy about twenty minutes in even if you were perfectly sane to begin with.

The only thing that makes it possible is that when (not if, but when I miss a turn, the Tom Tom quietly recalculates a new route for me. Someone who has spent years driving in Guadalajara can drive "seat of the pants", but I can't. Even with the Garmin that I had before getting the Tom Tom I couldn't.

For example, going into a Glorieta (known as a Roundabout in other parts of the world) the Garmin would tell me "Turn left on Calle Perez". Well, that Glorieta might have seven exits, NONE of them signed. Good luck with that. The Tom Tom, by contrast, puts up a full-screen diagram of the Glorieta on-screen, with an arrow-headed gold line showing the route through it, and an audible instruction along the lines of "Enter the traffic circle, take the third exit onto Perez street", and displays a triangle indicating where my car is positioned within the circle at that moment.

Before the Tom Tom, driving in Guadalajara involved screaming fights with SWMBO, who would be telling me "Get in the right lane" while I was explaining to her that the madman driving the bus overtaking us in the right lane had a different scenario in mind.

Both the Garmin and the Tom Tom sometimes tell us to make a left turn across a divided road, or to turn against traffic on a one-way street. I have learned to just relax and go with the flow, always allow an extra half hour to get to my destination, secure in the knowledge that if I just do what it tells me as best I can, I'll get there eventually.

I have actually worked out a contingency plan for getting out of the city should my GPS ever fail me in mid-drive, involving paying a taxi driver to let me follow him to the airport, from which I know how to get home.

I don't go into Guadalajara if I don't have to.

tanstaafl.