Now, for your reading pleasure, is another terrific post by N.C. rider Chuck Lathe. He takes great joy in getting lost on our chip & seal back roads. GPS devices threaten that kind of "bumble," he says.
The global positioning system is poised to become truly bicycle friendly -- well, maybe unfriendly depending on how you think about those things. From what I am reading, a lack of battery power will keep the little handlebar mounted GPS receivers from most brevets over 200 kilometers long this year, but the day is coming when even a bad cue on the cue sheet won’t allow us to become blissfully lost again.
And:
When you realize that you’ve gone down the wrong road and that you will have to backtrack to get back on course, it isn’t always immediately apparent that you’ve added something special to the ride, but later, the wrong turns are often the part of the brevet that remains most clearly in your memory. In fact, all randonneurs understand at some deeply internal level that getting lost is something special. We reveal that deep understanding by calling those extra miles ridden in wayward directions, bonus miles.
I'm reminded of the time when Capn John Ende led a team of N.C. riders astray on the Cascade 1200K. We wound up with 6 bonus miles on top of the very hilly first-day total of 230. Ouch! But Chuck's right. I now look with the great fondness on our little detour. It's one more notch in the belt of a Big Adventure.
BTW: I should make it clear that I don't use the Garmin Edge for navigation. I use it to show me where I've been, not where I'm going.
I don't like reading cue sheets while riding and prefer to leave that to others. When I ride solo on a route I don't know, I typically copy pages from the N.C. topo map book. That gives me the option of making up the route as I go.
The first time I rode the 175-mile route from Raleigh to the Swan Quarter ferry, I stuck the entire topo book in a Carradice seat bag. Besides being a handy reference guide, it also gave the bag a nice shape.
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