Sunday night my sister and one of her kids, and myself and two of my kids, went to the cricket along with 62,000 other people at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Car parking was on surrounding parkland. Knowing that finding the car at 11pm in the chaos could be a problem, I’d investigated those iPhone apps that allow you to mark where you parked to make it easy to locate later. However, none appealed - especially as most were paid for apps, thus no way to “try before you buy”. The one frebie I did try wasn’t overly impressive, to say the least.

Instead I decided to let the Maps app on the iPhone do it for me. So when we parked, I dropped a pin to mark where we’d parked. I’ve got to say, I wasn’t confident because, from the experience of Maps telling me I lived at least four doors away, I had found Maps to be out by about 50m at times. And seeing the mass of cars, knowing it would be dark, and having only about 300m to walk from the stadium, 50m becomes a large degree of error.

And anyway, I’m a bloke, I don’t need a map. So of course, when we came out afterwards I didn’t use Maps. I knew where the car was and am sure I woulda found it, but problem was, my sister also reckoned she knew where it was so we had two adults both wanting to go in different directions in the dark with three children.

Consequently I had to resort to using Maps. We then followed the blue dot to the purple dot, and to my surprise, it actually worked. We easily found the car. Mind you, If I had’ve had satellite view turned on in the first place, I would have trusted it because I would have seen that the pin was on the open grassy area I knew we parked on.

So there you have it. You probably don’t really need to spend money on an app to locate your parked car. Just drop a pin in Maps, and follow the blue dot back to your car. (That said, in a multi-level carpark, you will still need to find the right level first.)