I will do my best to learn how to operate the digital camera I got for my stepdaughter – she was supposed to be the designated “family photo taker” but is now absorbed by her iPod Touch instead…and her Nintendo DSi Lite – so I’m once again the designated “family photo taker”. It can’t be THAT hard to learn how to operate a digicam, right? Then I can finally take some pix of my Thailand packing strategies for you.

And THAT’s the difference between you and me. I am content to be on the trailing edge of technology (although maybe at this point not knowing how to find my way around a digicam is way worse than “trailing edge”) and you are more willing to dive into the new stuff (GPS?) and invest the time in learning how to make it work for you. Our interests seem to overlap in travel and generic high end bargain hunting.

That having been said, I think the whole GPS “incident” last Wednesday night would have made a hilarious “Seinfeld” episode and, since you’ve broached it, I’m willing to fill in a few details for your curious readers.

The “episode” went like this:

Pull up to tiny bar counter in the Marriott. Order drinks. Ask bar tender/waitress to recommend a restaurant. She recommends a nearby Italian restaurant with a fairly uncommon name (Zia Spedo’s?). In the marina. Very kindly pulls out a folder with restaurant menus and directions. Kevin says, that’s ok, I don’t need the directions, I heard about that one early today at the conference and already put it in my GPS.

Follows about 3 minutes of wrestling back and forth, with me grabbing for the directions and Kevin shoving them away.

Retire to nearby table to enjoy beverages. Michael stubbornly grabbed the directions and is now reading them, getting as far as “turn left out the parking lot…blah blah blah.” Shows them to Kevin, being dubious of cutting edge technology like GPS, although he relied on Google Maps to find his way to the midwest (errh, Vallejo) to meet Kevin.

Kevin, in the interests of not appearing dismissive, briefly glances at the printed directions, then proceeds to fold them down into a tiny origami-like strip of paper and sets them under his drink. “I’ve got the GPS.”

As they depart for the car, Michael retrieves the now soggy, carefully folded-up origami directions so he will have something to read on the short drive.

In the car, the GPS gets pulled out of Kevin’s bag, and stuck on the windshield. It comes to life. The display and voice directions are very cool, and Michael has to admit this is much better than the factory nav unit in his old friend’s five year old Accura, which ran on CDs and drove both driver and passenger nuts.

Michael is nonplussed when the GPS tells Kevin to turn RIGHT when they leave the parking lot. Ever quick to draw conclusions, he assumes the hotel’s directions are designed to be simple at the expense of quickness – aimed at the LCD (lowest common denominator) hotel guest. The GPS obviously sensed the nearby freeway onramp just to the right, which puts you on a different freeway, but quickly directs you to the ramp taking you to the right freeway.

Indeed, Michael is correct! The car is quickly directed to get onto the right freeway. Michael’s sense of technological mistrust is mollified and he turns off his brain….

Even as the GPS directs our hapless tourons (tourist + moron, an old San Francisco abbreviation) to go, counterintuitively, on another freeway to the south, not to the north, where the water is. Well at least the closest water, but Michael doesn’t get out to this part of the midwest very often and just knows Vallejo is the gateway to Napa and basically has water nearby.

Our two hapless Seinfeld refugees merrily discuss the pros and cons of the best single carry-on bags and recent developments in netbook technology as they drive increasingly inland.

Growing suspicious, Michael is about to check the written directions when he notices they are crossing SOME water (the Benicia inlet, with marshes) and assumes THIS must be the marina the waitress meant, assumes they will be getting off the freeway in a minute, and wonders how the hotel’s waitress could possibly have volunteered to shuttle us to the restaurant when it was so far away (it’s been 10 minutes at this point).

Kevin, meanwhile, wonders aloud why every time the GPS says there are only 3, or 5, or 8, miles to go, it turns out that was just an interim leg and there is another 3, or 5, or 8 mile segment to follow.

Finally, Michael pulls out the almost abandoned printed directions (which now he is sure Kevin meant to actively hide, not merely abandon, on the table top, to prove the superiority of GPS) and calls the restaurant. Is it possible there might be another Zia Spedos? Oh yes, the one in Pleasanton. PLEASANTON! 20 miles from the hotel, not 3! (Perhaps I exaggerate, but not by much). But they are both the good, right? Sure! Well that’s a relief, no need to backtrack now we have invested this much time in getting to the new location. Besides, Michael is finally figuring out what those freeways are, the ones he keeps hearing mentioned on the commuter hour traffic jam reports.

So Seinfeld and George finally (30 minutes later) pull up to a suburban, bland building in the middle of shopping center nowhere. The actual dining room is small, although there are maybe 5 large banquet rooms off to the side. The clientele looks very New Jersey-ish and quite geriatric. Almost all pasta dishes, it turns out, are made with butter, cream, a combination of the two, or more butter and cream. A cream sauce linguine with clams is, by request, specially prepared with red sauce instead, but when it arrives tastes suspiciously of cream…and butter. (Quite good, but probably a lot of cals.)

The waitress, a very nice – cough elderly cough – lady, says at the end of dinner: I’m so glad you came here. That other location in the marina tends to get filled with noisy young people, and they offer these very untraditional Italian dishes, I don’t think you would have liked it. We are much more traditional! See you next time!

So where did our hapless travelers go wrong? How did they miss the trendy waterside locale of this top rated restaurant? How did they end up in New Jersey? Simply by assuming non-chain, well regarded Italian restaurant with a pretty unique name would have only one location…and assuming the GPS would send you to the one 3 miles away and not 30 miles away.

And Kevin, I’m not BEMUSED, I am, as we said in the early days of computing when ASCII characters were too expensive to waste, ROTFLMAO.