Please Don't Let Them Buy a Boat!

[Rhoel_Asia]

From BBC:
Swedes miss Capri after GPS gaffe


"A Swedish couple in search of the isle of Capri drove to Carpi, an industrial town in northern Italy, because they misspelt the name in their car's GPS..."

Rhoel

[TaoJones]

At least they were headed in the right direction - they just stopped a little bit short. What's another 400 miles when you've already driven so far? Best of all, now they have a funny story to tell about the time they drove to "The Isle of Carpi," the only one's to ever accomplish that.

TaoJones

[anjou]

They wouldnt be able to drive to the isle of capri even if they had spelled it correctly, so something was amiss before their spelling gaff

[slomotion]

In T&C I once programmed an autopilot for Luperon, DR ....... er, I mean I heard about a guy who programmed an autopilot for Luperon. Anyway through some strange dyslexic transposition, uh, this guy wound up plugging in coordinates for a little north and west of Iceland.

[TaoJones]

Originally Posted by slomotion

In T&C I once programmed an autopilot for Luperon, DR ....... er, I mean I heard about a guy who programmed an autopilot for Luperon. Anyway through some strange dyslexic transposition, uh, this guy wound up plugging in coordinates for a little north and west of Iceland.

Now that's an error worthy of press attention! Did you - I mean, did "this guy" discover the error before passsing Bermuda?

TaoJones

[slomotion]

Yeah, when the boat kept trying to turn around even he knew that something was wrong.

[rtbates]

I guess they're not familiar with the concept of a sanity check.

They'd be dangerous boaters....

[Cheechako]

Yes, the next step up from boaters who get in, turn the key and "drive" at 30 -70 mph are the ones who bought a gps/plotter and rely solely on it!

[George Wade]

Originally Posted by anjou

They wouldn't be able to drive to the isle of capri even if they had spelled it correctly.....

There's a Ukrainian inflatable catamaran that could probably be jury rigged to take the car and 'Drive to the island'. Why not?

[bobsadler]

Tourists miss island after GPS blunder - oddstuff | Stuff.co.nz

[john540]

Oh well, Carpi Diem!

[neelie]

Funnier yet, are the numerous airliners which have landed at the wrong airports. My favorite is the flight from Detroit to Frankfurt which landed in Brussels. Not just wrong city, but wrong country to boot. This was all the more hilarious by the fact that all 240+ passengers were watching the progress of the flight on the TV screens while the flight deck remained blissfully unaware of the embarrassment that was about to unfold.

For your further amusement : Wrong Way Landings By Commercial Airliners

[Wrenna]

Their xte wasn't that bad after all, when you think they had driven all the way from Sweden.
Cf :
T'as voulu voir Capri et on a vu Carpi - Yahoo! Actualités
Does anyone understand the joke in the headline ?

[Zoef]

40 years ago I took my first job abroad and my removal goods ended up in Genoa instead of Geneva. What's new?

[Starbuck]

It's not hard to understand, really.

Imagine yourself a tourist flying in to Heathrow, and planning a car trip up the coast: you'd like to see the Isle of Man. You misspell, and the device dutifully directs you to the little village of Mann just outside, say, Leeds. Hey, you're a tourist, you've never been to this country before, maybe the language is a bit challenging, you're going generally north, and this GPS thing is much easier than trying to interpret a map. So you follow the purple line it confidently lays before you.

Of course, maybe you should have taken a look at the map first, or had enough sense to ask where the ferry crosses to the IoM (maybe Whitehaven or Barrow-in-Furness?), and told the GPS to get you there, instead.

Capri is the same: we took a ferry across after arriving in the coastal town of Sorrento. We'd have had to have some very tight window seals to have made it by car.

Gadgets like GPS make useful slaves, but horrible masters. A couple of days ago, mine gave me a rhumb line that cut through a peninsula. I decided not to try the direct route, and entered a couple of watery waypoints to skirt it.