Brian Holden: GPS device lacking a moral compass

We're still in our villa in Dinan, Brittany, France.

Thankfully, we now have the extra rays of sunshine that we were hoping for and the temperature's crept up a few precious degrees.

Over the past few days we've trekked Dinan's warren of narrow streets where time appears to have stood still. The quaintest part is right in the centre where there are the best examples of the town's half-timbered houses.

Dinan has been designated a Ville d'Art et d'Histoire (Town of Art and History) and is filled with artists, sculptors, engravers, bookbinders, glassblowers and more.

Our medieval cottage with its tiny windows is one that passers-by peep into as they make their way up the steep street immediately outside. Often they are surprised to discover that the cottage is occupied by real people and not fictitious characters that appear in the movies.

Everything is old - centuries old and you would swear at any moment that a film crew would set up in the street to film a scene or two of David Copperfield or Les Miserables.

The place really does have that feel about it.

Often an overseas holiday involves a horror story.

We've had two.

Our first one involved a GPS with a nasty attitude. Having had our car GPS programmed before we left Paris, the trip from Paris to Brittany was intended to be a no-brainer - just follow the blue line and all would be sweet.

Well, it wasn't.

Within 30 minutes of leaving the hire depot, our feisty little Peugeot 206, with us in it was lured into what must have been the seediest suburb in Paris.

After being directed into ever decreasing circles, we were pin-balled into a pedestrian plaza from which every route out was via a no vehicle entry lane. After being forced to escape up one of these "turn around, go back" streets, we suspected that our GPS had contracted a tunnel vision syndrome.

The And Another Thing team was well and truly stumped.

The bold decision was made to ignore the GPS's demands and resort to our own intuition and weave our way to the nearest main route, forcing the nasty device to recalculate - which it eventually did. All that remained was to drive through the numerous toll gates, shelling out bucket loads of Euros as we made our way south.

Horror story numero deux:

When traveling abroad, be warned when taking your smart phone, which in our case turned out to be too smart for its own good.

Things can turn ugly.

After hearing about possible huge unintended data usage, we thought that we had taken every precaution before leaving, to ensure that our communications would go smoothly.

Well, they didn't.

Making calls or even sending texts was impossible because we had "exceeded our limit", despite not having used even a kilobyte of data since leaving home. Even trying to log into our account was impossible, requiring an extra $100 limit to be manually set by our provider.

Even then, we still continued to get continuous generic text messages informing us that we had maxed out with our data usage.

What? We hadn't even sent as much as one text.

Basically, our data credit was being milked at a phenomenal rate by a mysterious external source.

There's always the possibility too, that a bunch of keys in the same pocket pressing against the phone's touch screen can unintentionally activate a data hungry app.

But enough of that. The sun is shining so it's time to close the laptop, get out there and do some more exploring of this fascinating part of the world.