To spend or not to spend, that is the question

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the temptation and frustration of window shopping
Or to blow the cash on a spending spree and worry not about the consequences

Well, the self evident fact is that since I'm at home posting this garbage, I didn't go down to the boat this weekend. Apart from having lots to do at home, I started adding up the cost/benefit of a short weekend trip at this stage of the year and can't help wondering whether its worth it.

With the shifts Jane is working this month, I can't travel down until Saturday morning and I've got to be back by early Sunday evening. Effectively I get a day to spend on maintenance tasks or a toddle up and down the river. What with travel costs, taxis to get Jane to and from Work Saturday night / Sunday morning, and so on the whole excercise will cost getting on for £100 and it'll maybe save half a day of sorting out at the start of our week long trip in a few weeks time.

Now £100 would go a long way towards buying a new GPS. The ancient Magellan Glen passed on to us does the job after a fashion but it's woefully slow, can't be connected to the PC to upload and download data and has a very limited number of waypoints and routes. Not only that, the text and symbols are ludicrously small making it all but impossible to read when steering the boat.

So, methinks, rather than blow a whole weekend and getting on for a ton on a relatively unproductive trip to the boat p'raps I'll spend the dosh, plus a bit, on a Garmin GPS72H instead. Good plan, in theory, but then I gets to thinking it'd be handy to have better charting than the basic base map and maybe the built in 3 axis compass would be very handy and ... well OK, so maybe what I'd really like is a Garmin GPSMAP 78s!

All right, I know, it's twice the price but hey ho. Oh, but, well ... it's nearly as expensive as a Standard Horizon CP180i chart plotter! There's only 25 quid difference, a mere drop in the ocean. And the CP180i is firmly on my long term shopping list too.

But then, if I buy the plotter, I really want the better UK charting for it and that's another £130 on top. So I started off planning to spend £141.59 and now I'm looking at £439.90 fer crissakes!

I think not!