Before getting married, I would've just hitch-hiked home (actually happened a couple times), but the wife frowns on that. I think I'm ugly enough to be safe from being assaulted.
The Garmin I'm trying to make work has LTE texting, so it'd work (albeit not as well as an Apple Watch). The issue I had with the Apple Watch was it's GPS smoothing. You can't force it to take 1-second fixes like most of the other watches on the market, so it is really slow to adjust to pace changes. I have a terrible internal pace feel, and I'll tell myself that I'm feeling great doing 5:00 pace at the beginning of a tempo run if my watch doesn't tell me I'm an idiot and to slow down. The Apple Watch takes like two minutes to settle into a pace change for me.