I hooked up with Michael and Jeremy from BRAN. Jeremy did the gravel route and was assisted by Michael We are some awesome breakfast burritos at the same church we had our evening meal at on Saturday. Leaving town I noted my GPS was giving me directions a bit off from the other two guys. Keep that in mind for later.
Gravel roads can vary a lot from place to place. This area is no different. Sand is dominant here, but there is a clayish base as well. It had rained recently around Valentine so this helped out the roads tremendously.
This area is beautiful. Especially around the Niobrara River, where today’s image is from. That bridge lead us to a spanker of a climb. Oh my! Long, steep, and really long. I had to walk the upper third of it.
Did I say the climb was long? All the climbs are long out here.
Okay, so that climb did something else too. I lost touch with Michael and Jeremy. I rolled out back on the highway and there was an outfitters store named Sparks which my GPS told me to turn North to find. Well, a mile down the road I stopped and went back to where I turned off. Then it showed Sparks was almost right in front of me down a short side road. And it was there. Okay….
Leaving Sparks the GPS literally had me riding circles around the store in a seemingly endless loop. I bailed and headed East on Highway 12 as this was the paved route.
Two miles down the road the GPS has me turn right on gravel. I knew there was a “part two” to the gravel route. Alright! Back on track..,,.
Nope! Two miles into a brutal headwind and the next turn came up going backwards to the general course direction. Back to Sparks Road and the store!
I was pissed. Back to Highway 12 and I was sticking to that road. Now the wind was 25-35mph and the road went South directly into that wind at a couple of miles at a crack at least twice. The crosswinds were hard to deal with going East. I had to pedal everything up AND down hill.
Brutal!
On to tomorrow…
3 comments:
You have more GPS routing issues than anyone I know.
Most units have auto-rerouting on by default, and most do a horrible job of executing that. I recommend disabling it, especially for the types of routes we do.
I'm not sure what GPS you are using, but if you're using a Wahoo, turning off the auto-reroute can be helpful when navigating a route. If it is on when you go off route, it'll reroute you back to the original route in sometimes wrong ways.
@Bryan - Thanks. I’ll do that. Now just gotta figure out how!
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