I love exploring and sharing what I find with others. It’s perhaps the single biggest motivation behind everything I do. Whether it’s white-water rafting, mapping the best gravel trails for cycling, geocaching, or bushwhacking my way through deeply overgrown technologies, I’m always finding new pathways, mapping them, and guiding others through them. It’s in my DNA. Makes me wonder what kind of person I might have been in a former life. Most recently, I’ve discovered Garmin map maker, which is better than Strava even though Strava is best for distributing those maps.
My mom used to call me an explorer as well. She used to say whether it was outdoors or new ideas and philosophies I was always seeking new discoveries. She’d get a little worried sometimes because I was always venturing off our home street to see what was on the next block, or in that open field full of curiosities if you look close enough.
One of the discoveries I made was a very strange sort-of hideout made in the deep grass with a frame made of tied green branches near our elementary school where my friends and I discovered a bunch of pornographic magazines. I don’t even want to know who created that place or why. I had no idea at the time. I was 10 years old. My mom was right to be worried, but being gen x we pretty much wandered around outside most every day for hours at a time. There was no WoW or Skyrim or Zwift to calm our need to explore. I would build bike racing tracks around the house and in and around the new houses being constructed.
It’s no wonder I became to obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons, which is pretty much just a game of adventure stories linked one to another. After learning it, I became a Dungeon Master so that I could create and guide others through original adventures. One map I made on tiny graph paper filled a small table top entirely by itself. I was confident one day TSR would accept it as my submission so I could work there (which I’m glad I never did, that place was horrendeous to work apparently). To this day I’m still still obsessed with creating maps, routes, and segments.
Recently I bought a Garmin 830 cycling computer. I got it mostly for the radar sensor you can get with it that displays objects behind you approaching and how fast. But when I opened up the map maker with the heat maps of my own and those of others I was in heaven. After a four hour metric century yesterday (and a couple hours of recover sleep) I spend a good three hours tweaking the route I had put in earlier to perfection. “100k MDH Gravel Tour” I named it because it showcases the best gravel trails I’ve found in Mooresville, Davidson, and Huntersville. The map maker is so amazing because you can have it follow roads or not. This saves so much time and is far faster than just using Google Maps as I used to use. I haven’t made my MDH map public yet, but I’m actually really excited to do so. You can embellish it with points of interest that translate into notifications on the Garmin bike computer when you near them. And, of course, it warns you if you get off course. This removes so much time-wasting and worry from just using a phone alone so you can focus on the ride and staying safe.
Speaking of staying safe, I was still nearly killed yesterday by a pickup truck driver squealing his wheels at a stop sign at a 4-way stop sign on a turn that he misjudged crossing the entire lane and going off the edge of the oncoming lane that I was in at the time. If I hadn’t had lighting reflexes to dodge the bumper I’d be dead. Yep, even a stupid, quiet 4-way stop sign is dangerous in the land of mother-fucking morons (aka NASCAR USA). God, I’ll be so glad when we are out of here.
The truck-driver incident reminded me that a lot of my bike-handling and motorcycle intuition are still burned into my brain, thank god. I’m still quite sure that my death will be while on a bicycle as macabre and jarring as that thought is. No matter how good I get, I still find myself doing stupid things. I got my gears messed up going into a climb and caused me to swerve into the lane more than I normally would and almost got pancaked by an car doing 60 mph up a hill (in a 45 mph zone) on a road where the only shoulder was one centimeter off the line and had a seven centimeter rut in it from all the vehicles (including semi-trucks) cutting corners too tightly and bottoming out. Any time I see a shoulder with pot holes and ruts like that which could catch the edge of my tire dumping me into the road, and because these pot holes indicate that morons regularly drive there, I note them and avoid them forever. Somehow, however, I end up finding these horrible shoulders more often than I would like and it is too late at that point. This is the single best reason to get a gravel bike. I just ride in the grass (or whatever) two meters off the road to stay safe, when possible. Try that on your Canyon Aero with 20mm tires.
I’ve always been really pleased with Garmin products in general. In 2003, I bought one of their second generation GPS hand-held units (well before GPS was on any phone or device, think “phones like in Breaking Bad). My boys and I started geocaching and even creating our own geocaches for others to find. I was one of my best memories of them as kids. At the time Tucson was ripe for exploration and I would take water and just run for miles and miles out in the desert with nothing but cattle, jack rabbits, scorpions, and snakes for company. Yet another fond memory of being outdoors discovering the unknown practically in my own backyard. I don’t think people fully appreciate what they have within five miles of their home. I bet 70% of Americans don’t even know their suburb has a “nature path” at all.
Playing computer games has quickly been overtaken by Garmin/Strava route, map, and segment building. It gamifies getting outdoors as much or more than geocaching did, but for endurance activities. Few things are more satisfying than discovering that my “I wonder if this goes through” exploration turns up a previously, unknown, amazing connecting route that keeps me off the main roads by connecting farms and new suburbs — especially if Google Maps hasn’t even got it yet. I look forward to perfecting and sharing all my new routes even if I’m the only one in the region who uses them. I was one of the first 12 people in Lake Norman area to even know what “stand-up paddle boarding” was back in 2010 when I started working for My Aloha. I feel called to do the same thing for gravel cycling now in this same region. People aren’t doing it because they fear traffic. But if I can show them that it can be done safely, they might try it. Maybe I need to start another Facebook group and meetup.