i have a garmin nuvi 200 (i believe), it is very basic but works great. it is small enough to travel with and it even has a bike mount for the reaaaaaally long rides (kidding, i dont want to break my toy while riding). i think it is in your price range (it was a gift so i am not 100% sure).

I use a Magellan Maestro 4040.
That one may be a bit more than you want to spend, but look at Magellan. When I was shopping, I liked the Maestro interface more than any other brand and the Garmin equivalent to mine cost about $200 more for virtually the same thing. Magellan is also better than Garmin about letting you update maps and firmware for free (though it's not Mac compatible, last time I checked, which is a problem for me)

From a technical standpoint, one "shootout" I read indicated that Garmin was, in fact, the king of efficient routing algorithms, but the Magellan was close and most of the others were crap. I have used Garmin GPS units in rental cars and find that they actually take longer to recalculate the route if you make a wrong turn than my Magellan does, which I've heard is attributable to the Magellan trying to get you back onto the track you were on without calculating the whole thing, whereas the Garmin routine tries to recalculate the entire route before displaying it. The result is that the Garmin may actually be slightly more efficient (I have had experiences where I take a known shortcut with Magellan and it would rather have me backtrack than continue forward) but when you're in an unknown place and accidentally make a wrong turn, having a reasonable solution quickly is a great asset.

Other things I like about Magellan
-Great windshield mount. They do have a sit-on-the-dash adapter, but I personally don't like those and the windshield mount is extremely stable, unobtrusive, and easy to remove.
-Compact with no flip-out antennas or anything goofy like that. This is particularly nice when you want to use it out of the car for walking around or something. Mine, as a widescreen, is a bit big to carry around, but I have used it to navigate on foot.

Overall I love my GPS. I fire it up sometimes just to go 2 miles to the grocery store just because it's kind of fun. A lot of people talk about "aw, just learn to use maps, learn how to drive" and all this, but using a GPS really can change the way you drive. Last summer I moved from Annapolis, Maryland to Monterey, CA and did the road trip via Annapolis -> Louisville, KY -> Denver, CO -> Phoenix, AZ -> Los Angeles -> Monterey and didn't prepare a single map or anything ahead of time. Magellan never once let me down.

Fun experiment, too, is to sit in the window seat on a plane and fire it up mid-flight. It takes a while to pick up satellites, but you can pick them up and get an accurate fix on your position including speed.

-Grant-

I, personally, find the Magellan extremely easy to use and intuitive. I'm a Computer Science student with a lot of experience in "Human Computer Interaction" so good interfaces are very important to me.

One really nice features is that it predicts things like street and city names as you're typing them by graying out letters on the keyboard that can't come next. That is, if you type "MA" and the only street names in the current city which start with MA are Maple, Mayberry, and Macon, only the P,Y,C keys will be active. This makes it really easy to type fast and you can be a bit sloppy, which is nice if you have to type while driving.

My fiancee was able to use it effectively the first time she tried.

If you go to Best Buy or somewhere like that, they'll have several on display that you can play with. That was the most important factor for me in choosing the one that I liked the best. I suspect different people will "click" with different units and perhaps the best way to tell is to try them all.

-Grant-

GGehrke .. i went and tried some of the systems out today ... i really like the Magellan. the feature i like the most is as you explaied when you are typing a place it will grey out the letters that cannot be chosen which makes typing so easy. the unit would also pre drive the route whcih i thought was a cool feature as you could watch it.

i noticed there were some good menu options on the Magellan as where with the garmin it was very basic......i would have liked to see how the Garmin looked as it was driving a route but you can't as the unit is fixed in the store and does not have that feature.

Right now I am leaning toward that Magellan I thought its functionality just seemed better.

thanks for your help everyone.