Looking for antique furniture and saved by technology

Yesterday we decided to drive up North to an outlet that supplies old furniture to retailers called Havenloods23, in a place called Dronten. Once a month they open up to the public and on their website they appeared to have some interesting stuff.

So we set off late morning on the 1.5 hour drive; while we were leaving Den Haag we heard on the radio that the A4 motorway had been closed between Amsterdam and Den Haag for construction, so we were a bit worried about the drive back, but we continued on regardless.

We found the place with no problems; the Volvo's got a built in GPS navigation system and despite being a rather basic one, it does the job pretty good once you get used to it.

Unfortunately, we only stayed at the place for about 30 mins. It was smaller than we expected and although they had some interesting stuff, most of it needed a fair bit of restoration work; we got the idea that the stuff they had on show was generally stuff that they couldn't get rid of to the shops that they supply. So we ended up not getting anything... the search for a set of drawers to place the bathroom sink on therefore continues.


On the way back we were saved by the Volvo's navigation system. It tunes into the traffic signal that is broadcast over radio so it knows where all the traffic jams are. When you enter in your destination, it calculates the quickest route; if there's traffic on the route then it offers an alternative route than circum-navigates the traffic. So despite the motorway being closed, it only took us about an extra 10 mins to get home since we took a detour via Utrecht rather than going via Amsterdam. It worked really well... even Flo, who's always been a bit anti navigation systems was impressed! I like the way it tunes into the free radio signal; my TomTom that I use in the Ghibli has the option of traffic avoidance, but you have to subscribe to the service at about €40/year and it depends on being connected to a mobile phone (via Bluetooth) in order to get the traffic information, which again costs extra money. We were a bit reluctant at having the built in GPS when we bought the car, but I think that it's certainly something we'd consider if we bought a new car, although both Flo and I are still a bit reluctant to become such a slave to technology.