'round, 'round, I get around . . .

. . . in circles, that is.

After a near-disastrous attempt to meet a fellow blogger for lunch in Houston today, I realized that my utter and incurable lack of directional sense may be something I should take steps to correct. My new car is Onstar-equipped, but after perusing the Onstar website, it appears they want to charge me $30-40 for a bunch of services I don't need or which are duplicative of what I can get with my cell phone and a membership in AAA. The only reason I really would want the service is for directions, and I am not interested in talking to real human beings to get them, mostly because getting lost is embarrassing.

What I really want is a totally sweet GPS system like some people have that will tell me how to go from A to B in a friendly but computerized voice. Buying one of these is about as expensive as 1.5-2 years of Onstar service, and I can use it in future cars and update the maps. This one was well rated by Slate, and it has a John Cleese voice available for download (alas, John Lithgow's voice is not available). The only Epinions review appears to be by a disgruntled Michigander who doesn't like its lack of cross-border functionality. Since I will not be frequently zipping into Canada, this sounds like a relatively unimportant problem.

Does anyone have any thoughts or experiences with this or some other direction-providing system?