On a trip back from a friend's house last week, I found myself in a predicament. I was driving home from a distant suburb, missed an important turn, and got lost. To be fair, my friend's directions were fine, I'm just not that good. What made matters worse, it happened to be the one rare day that I left my cell phone at home and had no way to reach my friend for help while driving.

Now, I've heard that back in the old days, when people got lost, they were known to have stopped their vehicles at the closest place of business and ask the local residents for directions. I could see how that might be effective -- but where's the fun in that? I was quite confident I would make it home eventually, and decided this would be an excellent opportunity to test how sharp my homing instincts actually were.

So an hour and a half later, I finally pulled into my driveway confirming that my instincts had gotten a bit rusty, and was convinced that I would never again repeat that scenario. I realized at the same time that I had become quite addicted to Stacy, the name we gave the voice of the woman who politely offers directions from my wife's GPS-enabled vehicle. It turns out that Stacy had rescued us many times, not just after missing an important turn, but from engaging in that embarrassing custom of asking for directions. We now cherish Stacy who has become another member of the family. And, I will openly admit that she knows much more about navigating the streets and highways than I ever will.

The only problem was Stacy was a permanent resident in my wife's vehicle and could never join me on my own travels. I realized that the only solution was to effectively clone Stacy and have her likeness be a permanent companion in my car. I already own an early Garmin portable GPS but quickly dismissed this as an alternative. The screen is black and white (old school) and tiny - good for walking around in the woods but too hard to read in the car. Also, it's battery-powered, which just seemed silly in a vehicle with plenty of power options. But most of all, it does not have a voice. How could I ever give it a name, or better, carry on a (mostly one-way) conversation with a device like that?

I also thought about replacing the head unit in the car with an in-dash GPS-enabled radio system, but that seemed like overkill for my aging car. No, I needed something better. Lucky for me, I had been an early-adopting gadget-guy for years. I knew I could rig something up, and set to work finding a way to put to use some of the spare devices I had lying around.

I ended up getting a GPS accessory

for an older model iPaq PDA. The PDA had long been replaced and was otherwise idle; still, I had no problem finding a third-party GPS package from Pharos that was designed to function in the car.

The procedure was simple:

• After ensuring that the PDA was successfully pairing with a host computer, I loaded the Pharos software from the supplied CD onto the iPaq.
  
• The next step was to select from hundreds of maps available on a second CD to be loaded alongside the application on the PDA. I picked a few maps that would more than cover my local commuting territory.
  
• With those applications loaded, I loaded up the PDA, the GPS receiver, and the power cord and headed to the car. The power cord plugged into the lighter providing power to the PDA and the receiver.
  
• The receiver found a home on the dash and, being about the side of a Ritz cracker, was hardly an obstruction.
  
• Powering on the PDA and starting the application was easy, but it took several minutes for the receiver to lock into the three satellites it requires to triangulate my position.

Before long, I had a bright red arrow representing my car pointed North on a local map right there on my PDA. I suddenly felt the need to take a trip around the block and watched in amazement as the arrow correctly tracked my position through the neighborhood - even though that is exactly what drove me to spend several hundred dollars on this solution (no pun intended).

So, instead of boring you with the rest of that delightful "test drive", I will leave you with some additional notes from this experiment in case you decide to follow in my digital footsteps.

• There are a number of PDA-based GPS solutions from Pharos and other vendors which typically sell between $150 and $250 - not including the PDA itself.
  
• While my model required two separate wires dangling all over my console in the car, there are some that attempt to forgo the wires and communicate over Bluetooth - you can expect to pay more for those.
  
• Every package has its own interface for finding destinations (or waypoints) and planning routes, and you can expect the amount of detail in the maps to vary from product to product.
  
• Almost forgot to mention it, this package, like many others, provides voice-guided directions which I think is a must-have feature and which works quite well with PDAs.

Overall the combination of a pared-down GPS receiver with a cigarette-powered charger that also runs the PDA is a terrific option for after market navigation needs in your car. Also, I don't have a name picked out for my makeshift clone but I'm leaning toward "iPaq-Shakur" or "Stacy's Mom".