Green Wedge Hills Audax

Garmin Edge 520 on my bike

Dummy route to test GPS, here is the link to the "blocky" ride with gps map 

The GPS wakes up and glows when it nears corners and then ....

reverts to an unlighted screen a bit later.

Some damage to the tailbox revealed ..........

after my training rides and before a planned new makeover.

Riding the Green Wedge Hills with the 

GPS succumbing to a bout of confusion.  After a long stretch of reading this crap you start imagining the thing is being very smug and saying "Of Course"..
 

Hi

I've been getting my trike out on the road a bit and purchased a GPS so I could have a crack at a few more Audax rides including navigation.  For me, buying a GPS is not like buying a book as using one started as a complete mystery.  It doesn't come with an instruction manual and you need to get one from the internet here or read it off the internet here.

To demystify the  GPS, I made a blocky GPS route using ride with GPS on my computer. Then I loaded the route into the GPS (only the Garmin-supplied cable seemed to work transferring data), took it outside and had a crack. And everything worked fine, it told me how many k or metres to the next turn, and I did the route a couple of times.

After that, I booked into the 100k Audax Green Wedge Hills ride and 2 days before the ride did about 70k of riding of hills on the Kew Boulevard without stopping. This was just what I needed, as the ride itself was quite hard. When I got back from the training, I'd intended to do another bike makeover and put some lurid orange cut up t-shirts on the side, but this plan was cut short as I discovered some breaks in the wood of the tailbox.  I'm not sure how this happened (as I was explaining to my wife's podiatrist today) however it might have been when I banged into a tree while carrying a bike frame, or while carrying beer or something else. Anyway, after thinking about it, I didn't immediately fix the tailbox but instead just swapped it over for the other one I have, adding Ventisit seat padding to the swapped over tailbox. Bit of a test ride to my Mum and Dad's place, and the front bottom bracket was coming loose.  Out come the BB tool, the big shifter and a length of pipe to tighten the BB.  By this time I am a bit cautious and end up taking the 1 kg shifter and the BB tool with me on the ride.

The night before the ride I tried downloading the latest ride map as recommended by Audax email but really didn't check enough that the new route was in the gps.

Up early the next day and I got to the Eltham ride start in time but the new ride route wouldn't load, so I ended up loading the old route.  Things went well (except for the enormous number of hills which I couldn't ride up because the front wheel drive was slipping and losing my Brevet card) until a long way into the ride when the GPS chucked a wobbly.  I couldn't navigate after that and went about 10 k too far on the road before stopping and asking a farmer for the way back to the nearest big town, Hurstbridge.  After asking a bike rider for directions a bit later, I headed off on the right road for "Hurstie" and got back on track.  Slightly slow going from Hurstbridge, (there were still some hills) and I didn't have much oompf left having hardly stopped for the whole 100 or so k but got in to Eltham near the cutoff time of 2pm.

I emailed the ride organiser when I got home and registered a Thank You and Did Not Finish due to the lost Brevet Card.

So a few lessons.

* Get familiar with what happens to your GPS when you wander off track.

* Delete redundant routes before attempting to load up new ones and check that new ones are properly loaded before leaving your mapping computer session.

* Carrying maps as backup is a good idea.  I didn't find any maps of suitable scale in my Melways or Vicroads books, so maybe screen dumps and a full set of ride directions from ridewithgps would help. 

* Training is good and 3 or 4 or 5 laps of the hilly Boulevarde track are all doable and worth it.

All for now, Regards

Steve Nurse