Of Back Roads and Evil GPS Machines

I have a Garmin.  We purchased it for a trip to Kentucky and since it's been laying around virtually unused since then, I figured I would purchase the UK chip and use it in Scotland.  It was a brilliant stroke of genius, I thought.  No folding of maps or hastily written cryptic directions blowing around my back seat, no.  Technology is my friend.  Well, apparently not in Scotland.
The Garmin only works if it is plugged into the car.  If you take it inside any structure, it has lost it's ability to find you on satellite.  Hmmm...  It also took two days to find me on said satellite (two days of trying, not two solid days).  Anything I wanted to visit, the Garmin had never heard of.  But slowly, I was beginning to figure it out.  See, in America, I could put in to the Garmin: find the Creation Museum and magically the little red line would snake its way through the states and land on the Creation Museum.  Flag planted.  Trip planned.  But here in Scotland, the Garmin must have become suddenly unhelpful.  I would like to go see the Loch Ness Center and Exhibition.  The Garmin says, "What?  There can't be such a place."  So I put in: find Drumnadrochit.  Oh!  That it can find.  Now if you pull off the road half way to Drumnadrochit and put in: find the Loch Ness Center, it can find it...magically.  So a long road trip may be managed by breaking it up into bits and then stringing them all together.  I found that it can find towns much more easily than attractions.  Apparently, the places I visited were rare and wonderful finds since the Garmin could only locate them if we were within 20 miles of the place.  If at all.

Besides being unable to locate things, my Garmin has a strange sense of logic when it lays out a trip.  Case in point:  I wanted to go to Dunvegan Castle by way of Uig.  Now there are two roads in all of Skye.  On the map, one is red and one is green.  If you find yourself on any other road, you are lost.  I could not convince my Garmin to go the way I wanted to go, so I went my own way and forced it to recompute.  I enjoy that.  It's like teasing the voice that bosses me around and scares the crap out of me on long trips.  Payback.  Recompute!
As vengeance for forcing the thing to recompute on the way there, it decided instead of simply reversing course and taking me back to my B&B on the major road, it would send me down a back road only Satan in his glory could have laid. I kid you not!  Seven miles of the scariest road I have ever driven down.  Now in Satan's defense, the road was paved, and the paved part was smooth.  Unfortunately, it was only one car width wide and the shoulder of the road consisted of a one foot drop off into potholed death.  Which I had to venture into because I met a car head on and there were no passing places nearby.  At all.  The scenery, however, was breathtaking and wonderful, which is why Satan chose to put this road in.  To punish us for wanting to enjoy God's glory.
I did, in fact, make it out alive, no thanks to the road that in the last mile decided to lay a sharp switchback followed by a decent only a roller coaster would appreciate.  And a man on a bicycle in the switchback who looked like he was ready to die.

Evil Garmin.