With a big road trip in front of us, especially to places we’ve never been, it made some sense to get a good turn-by-turn GPS for the trip. We landed on the Garmin nüvi 260W.

I’ve been a fan of Garmin devices for a long time, having owned at least three other Garmin GPS units over the years. I really wanted to stick with Garmin. Fortunately, Best Buy was willing to help with that, and had the nüvi 260W on sale.

I don’t know if there’s any specific thing that this GPS does better or different than anyone else. There are soooo many GPS units out there nowadays! However, I like the widescreen format of the 260W, and it claims it will do off-road routing. That’s a feature I hope to take advantage of during this trip!

The base map set is also one I trust — City Navigator NT 2009. I’ve had great results with the previous versions of this map set, and expect nothing less with this latest version. The accuracy’s been pretty good with previous versions, I’ve just never had the turn-by-turn functionality available in the past. It’ll be fun to play with that.

I’ll do some dry runs with the unit this week, but I expect nothing but good results. Stay tuned!