Tourists get car stuck after trying to follow GPS across a body of water

Whether your car has a built-in navigation system or you're trying to hold your phone and follow the directions on its screen, GPS devices are usually pretty good at leading you from Point A to Point B (my own Garmin has helped me cut down on wrong turns and profanity, which more than justifies the purchase price). But regardless of how sophisticated your sat-nav is, it's never a better option than common sense. Two American tourists have become the poster children for Being Dumb after they tried to drive their rental car to an island more than half a mile off the coast of Wales.

Read that sentence again: they tried to DRIVE to an ISLAND. And no, there was not a bridge.

The as-yet-unidentified Illinois natives apparently wanted to visit Caldey Island, the home of a Cisterian monastery and a handful of residents, none of who got there by driving across the Bristol Channel. Anyway, those brilliant tourists put the island's coordinates into their GPS and started following its directions, either ignoring the giant body of water in front of them or believing that their rented Vauxhall came with an underpublicized Amphibious Mode. Before they could ask "Hey, is that a beach?," they'd gotten themselves stuck in the sand at Tenby, Wales.

A group of well-meaning locals stopped laughing long enough to help the couple dig their vehicle out of the sand, a process that took more than three hours. The tourists were apparently shocked to learn that the island was only accessible by ferry — a ferry that doesn't even run during the winter.

The tourism chief of Tenby, Pete Prosser, said

The couple were surprised they couldn't drive to Caldey, and highly embarrassed when they got stuck. They won't be the first to have their vehicle rescued from the beach, but possibly the first to have set a sat-nav for Caldey.

We hope someone sat them down and explained that no, they wouldn't be able to drive from Wales to Illinois, despite what their GPS said.