She'll never get lost again?

Those who know me also know that I tend to get lost. I only recently learned my left from my right and believe me, it took a lot of effort. For months I had little "L" and "R" post-its on my dash and in the cockpit until it finally sunk in. I won't say that it necessarily correlates, but I do also tend to get lost. But usually not more than once per destination. So for me, time spent planning a route and studying a map results in a significant reduction in aimless wandering when I do get off-couse.

The past few weeks I've been spending what seems to be an inordinate amount of time finding routes through the eastern seaboard states that are suitable for cycling. Back and forth between Google-Maps, road maps, and various cycling websites. Trying to stay within 50 miles per day. Trying to stay off the interstates and major state highways. Oh, and public transportation for those places that are just impossible for bikes like Newport, RI and the last 20 miles into or out of NYC and Boston. Bus schedules, train schedules, ferry schedules... Honestly, flightplanning is easier than bikeplanning.

Then last week my sweetie stepped in and handed me some new technology: a Garmin GPS bicycle computer. It tells you where you are and what direction you're heading, keeps track of where you've been, how fast, how high, and how many calories you've supposedly burnt in the effort. It's also got detailed road maps of all the cities in the US, plus all sorts of listings for hotels, restaurants, hospitals, and things you never knew you needed to know about while riding your bicycle.

The handiest function, and the reason he got it for me, is that you can enter in an address and the Garmin will plot a bicycle-friendly route for you to follow. Bicycle friendly. It's supposed to keep you off the highways and other roads and bridges that you're not allowed to be riding on. It gives you a map and provides turn-by-turn instructions to your destination. If you make a wrong turn or decide to check out a different road, no problem, it'll automatically recalculate your route for you. A friend of ours has one and by his account it's the best thing since duct tape.

Well, I didn't have a whole lot of time to test it out on my bike since I had to pack it up and ship it out. But I figured I could take it up snowboarding at Mt. Baker and maybe try to figure out how it worked. I started it up at the base of the lifts and started the timer as I headed up on the chair. I stopped it when I stopped for lunch and checked out what it had recorded. After fussing with the buttons I found: a pretty cool squiggly line on the map tracing my route up and down the mountain, a chart that tracked my elevation gains and losses, an average speed, and total distance. So far, so good for the note-taking.

At the end of the day I entered my address and asked it to plot a route home. I wanted to see what kind of roads it would drop me onto. First off, I was impressed that it recognized the little Forest Service road where I'd parked. It told me to turn right. So I did. I was going that way anyway. Here's what I learned about the Garmin bike computer on my way home:

Interesting point #1: since the only road to Mt. Baker is a state highway it tried to get me off of it whenever possible. This amounted to three very short side trips which could easily have been skipped. On the other hand they might have provided a nice break from traffic, if two of them didn't involve left-hand turns to get off and back on the main road.

Interesting point #2: to make a fuel stop, I deviated from the route blowing right past the turn the Garmin wanted me to make. It started to recalculate the route, I canceled the recalc. After filling up the tank I had to restart from scratch. Of course, that's because I'd stopped the recalc.

Interesting point #3: heading south along Rte 9, the Garmin plotted a side course on a parallel road and I blew right by the turn. The turn indications occur with plenty of time for cycling, but not quite enough for a car going 55 mph.

Interesting point #4: when the Garmin recalculated the route after that missed turn it created a new side route off Rte 9 and changed the rest of the course entirely. Whereas before the route roughly paralleled Rte 9 and rejoined it a few times for 50 miles, the new route took me west for 20 miles before taking an entirely different southbound course. Ultimately similar mileage, but entirely different course. Hmm.

Interesting point #5: it did at one point drop me onto a dead end road. The Google map function on my iPhone had properly identified it as a dead end, as did the road sign, but the Garmin did not. I checked. After going back to the beginning of the dead end and turning to continue in the previous direction, the Garmin did recalculate the route accordingly. Note to self - pay attention to road signs.

When I got home, I was able to upload the snowboarding route and the drive home to my computer with a minimum of fuss (after downloading and installing the appropriate drivers, software etc. which took rather more fuss). Anyway, the information I was able to see from the snowboarding was actually quite fascinating - especially the altitude/time and distance/time graphs. Really, I had no idea I was going that fast.

Generally speaking, I was pretty pleased with the performance of the Garmin GPS bike computer. It did a good job of keeping track of where I was and where I was going as well as a whole bunch of nifty data. While I think it won't entirely keep me from getting lost (that appears to be pretty deeply ingrained) it will certainly get me un-lost a heck of a lot quicker than if I'm left to my own devices.