Ground Navigation using Aviation Handheld GPS

I was taking my lady-friend to the Boston airport. I was driving because the weather was not very friendly, and I took my GPSmap 296 because the streets in Boston are not very friendly.

Rather than do my research, I just changed the GPS from aviation mode to automotive mode and told it to find a route to KBOS. It does it's thing and starts me off with a little route line pointing towards Beantown. I've used this trick to find airstrips in rural area before, and it works like a charm.

I was expecting to end up at Logan Airport; something like this:

Instead, I got a route to here:

Why? Because it was the closest street to the end of the first runway listed. Just not exactly useful for boarding a jet as a passenger. It was a fantastic view of aircraft taking off and landing -- if we weren't running late by then, I would have stopped a while to watch.

I briefly toyed with the idea of asking her if she wanted to do a little swimming, but I wanted to keep her as my lady-friend.

The solution was to scroll over the cursor, find a street nearest the terminal and then press Enter and select "Go to" to get directions to that street. Once we got within a couple miles, there were plenty of signs pointing towards the airport.