I ordered my Garmin GPSMap 60cs on Friday. Hooray! I had planned to wait until my birthday, but I’m getting some unexpected money from some website design I’ve been doing, which will more than cover the cost, so I decided to be a good American and spend it.

Another thing that piqued my interest was that Amazon had them on sale. I wrote a small script using some perl to check the price of a few of mu current gadget lusts. Lo and behold, on Tuesday they cut the price by $80. Nice. With my referral credit and money back from my Amazon credit card, the price should come down to $350 or so. Of course I ordered City Select too so I can get turn-by-turn direction on the 60cs. Sweet.

Auto-routing should save me a lot of time getting from place to place. It might even save me some u-turns. I mentioned this idea in a recent cache log and how it would eventually pay for itself in saved fuel. The next morning a spreadsheet arrived in my email from another cacher who had already done the same calculations to justify his 60cs purchase to his wife. I found this to be hilarious. Four months by his calculations.

It seems that the gps is a little backordered on Amazon, but I’m in no hurry for the deal I got. Hopefully I will actually get the Amazon referral credit this time. Recently Amazon started deducting fees from ‘personal use’ of their associates program and I didn’t get any money back for my iPod purchase. Bummer. I’m not sure how they determine what’s personal or not, so this time I ordered it from Anne’s account. We’ll see.

As for the unit itself, I’m looking forward most to the big color screen, faster display time, more memory and better antenna. I tried out a 60cs next to mine on a hike a few weeks ago. It was getting 5 satellites while mine was only getting one.

My eTrex Vista has certainly gotten a lot of use though. It has quite a few dings and scratches. The rubber around the outsides is coming off. Sometimes the clickstick on the fron doesn’t work and I have to squeeze it for whatever inside to come in contact again.

I’m really excited about the new unit. Now I just need to figure out what to do with my current one. So far I haven’t been able to convince Anne that she needs her own. 🙂