GPS - Garmin nuvi 55

[wdwrich]

I have the Garmin nuvi 3597LMTHD and love it! I have been using it since 2013 because Google Maps on my
iPhone seems to be lagging.
Perhaps it's my carrier and the locations of the cellular towers? It sucked for me as
I'm passing my turn and Google Maps starts telling me to turn there! I travel between New York and Florida often so a dedicated does help.

There live traffic updates and lifetime maps. There's plenty of options that you can choose like shortest routes or fastest time to destination.

It's definitely worth the investment.

We have a Garmin that has all those features too, and we very much prefer it to the phone apps. Several times it has routed us around traffic problems and saved us tons of time.

 

[BillyBuff]

Sometimes phone apps are very limited. People keep telling what to use Waze, which is sometimes helpful but...it's crowd-sourced so if no one happens to be using Waze at the moment or no one reported any incidents then I wouldn't be notified ahead of time. At least my Garmin has live traffic up-to-the-minute updates.

 

[Tigger7570]

You should be able to add waypoints, but if not just make where ever you want to go your destination. It may have an avoid highways but not sure.

One think and I don't think you mean this but the GPS is not going to help you find pet friendly hotels. You need to do that on a real computer, tablet, phone etc. But once you do put that in as your destination.

I use Google Maps and add stops along the way were we want to sleep that night. I use that as my destination.

 

[Tigger7570]

Thank you. You were right, I didn't mean to use it to find the Hotels.

 

[joelkfla]

I don't know if this is a dumb question, but if we are taking a route other than the shortest route if we program that route will it try to redirect to a shorter route. We are actually doing a trial run by car in October to WDW because we are going to be going down the end of December and taking our dog and renting in Clermont for four months. We want to take a route where we can make rest stops for the dog and also we don't want straight highway and we need to check out pet friendly places to stay.

The 55.is in Garmin's "Essentials", or entry-level line, so it has limited options. I think you can only specify the destination and one intermediate stop. You can also tell it to avoid toll roads or all highways.

If you want more versatility, including multiple stops, look into the higher end models, which I think have model numbers starting with 27.