I went for my first spin with the new Colorado unit in the car this weekend. Unfortunately, since it was my first time with the unit coupled with an impatient wife due to a unhappy baby, it wasn't until I was driving home that I realised that the unit was not recording my track, so the new street I was driving around the Bloudan area were unfortunately not mapped.

I've spent quite a lot of time adding a good number of POIs to the Damascus map this weekend and will continue to do so as I have some good reference material built up from a number of years of expats living over here. I'm also driven by the fact that as yet mkgmap doesn't work with Garmin's address feature, so the best way of navigating (and in fact the way people here generally navigate anyway, since street names are a relatively new concept) is by making your way to the nearest landmark and working the rest out (or calling on your mobile) from there.

I've also been correcting the map and adding a fair number of new streets and street names (or English versions since a lot of streets only have their arabic names labelled). I wish the slippery map would allow you to filter the language! It would make my life so much easier making navigable Garmin maps, since at the moment I can only see on the Garmin unit whether the features have an English label added (since I filter for name:en with mkgmap).

I plan to soon roll out the map and the Garmin file to my colleagues at work... hopefully then some of the more technical minded ones will start contributing!