The age of family car trips across the country has been changing at an almost unbelievably rapid pace over the past few years. I can remember when I was a little kid and I used to think about the glove compartment and wonder why it was called that. I know that my mother and father never once kept a glove in it, so why the name?

When I pack my family in the car now for a trip, I imagine that my children must be wondering the same thing about the socket for the cigarette lighter. I mean, it is rarely ever used for a cigarette light anymore and is almost always used for an outlet to plug electronics into it. In fact, most cars today do not even come equipped with the cigarette lighter anymore, they just have the socket.

The current world of electronics is changing and impacting so many other things that I can hardly get a hold on all of it. The things that my children want and have today is absolutely unbelievable; sometimes I do not even understand how they know so much about all of these things as soon as they launch onto the market. Now they have the Apple Ipod, DVD players for the car, cell phones, digital cameras, laptops, and my personal favorite, the handheld GPS system. While my children get great pleasure out of all their electronic toys, the handheld GPS system is my baby, the gadget that is all mine.

The introduction of the handheld GPS system was quite honestly, something that changed my life. My family and I take a lot of road trips because we enjoy spending the time together, but there are times that it can get very stressful. These times usually involve us getting lost in a town or city that we have never been to before and picking fights with one another over whose fault it is that we are lost. The handheld GPS system has completely eliminated this problem from ever happening again because now we always know where we are.

Aside from knowing our current location, it allows us to receive directions with a beautifully colored map to follow, and traffic and weather updates should we need them. The thing that makes the handheld GPS system so unique is that we can take it anywhere with us. We use it in and out of the car and at this point, I cannot imagine our lives without it.