Long Drive to Dallas

Drove to Dallas this weekend in our 10 year old Nissan Altima. 1100+ Miles each way. Wedding. Got a late start, made Odessa, Tx on the first day, slept at a roadside flophouse where we had ramen noodles for dinner, then finished the 6 hours to a very nice hotel in Lewisville north of Dallas.

Our various in-car electronics included our cell phone, 3 portable CD players (one each for wife and 2 daughters), handheld GPS and our new XM Radio. None of this stuff is built into the car, so integrating it into the trip was a juggling act. The XM plays through the 10 year old AM/FM Cassette player that I’ve been meaning to have replaced since we bought the car. Sometimes there was considerable static on the FM frequency we had set. We had to change frequencies several times as we drove through the various cities.

This was our first long trip with the XM and it’s a bit challenging having all those channels. You know something good must be playing, but on which of the 200+ channels? I heard today that Sirius and XM are merging and that somehow this will give consumers ‘unprecedented choice’. Not sure how that’s going to work, but 400 channels will only be worse than 200.

The small fonts used on our Samsung Nexus 25 XM radio/MP3 player is a problem. The car mounting kit included is genius, but the display is so small that both my wife and I must crane our necks to read it. The display is huge, but most of it is wasted. The letter size is so tiny I need reading glasses to read it. Especially the time and other small information around the edges of the screen. Why didn’t they include an option for large text size?.

I loved having the GPS running while driving, even though it’s only a handheld job with black & white screen. The thing doesn’t even talk to you. But it did tell me that my speedometer is about 2 miles per hour fast. The other feature I’d like is a backlight that stays on. Our Magellan can be set to turn off in 1 minute increments up to 10 minutes, but there is no permanent backlight on feature. It would wear out the batteries faster, but would be nice.

The roads in our country are simply amazing, as are the services along the interstates. We averaged over 65 miles per hour including bathroom and fuel stops.