Today we are in Hillsboro, North Dakota where we have a day off to celebrate the Fourth of July. We send Independence Day Greetings to family and friends and say with honesty that we are missing you and missing the traditions of picnics, bike races, swimming, and fireworks in the park. Instead we are washing clothes, cleaning "house", and getting ready for another week of riding. None of that is unpleasant, it just isn't home.
Yesterday we rode 85 miles from Glenfield here to Hillsboro. The last 15 miles we ended up riding on a fairly rough gravel road that our ride selector gave us as a "short cut". It may have been shorter in distance, but it was not easier, I can assure you. But the point that I want to make today is that we are using, day after day, a wonderful new website called MAPMYRIDE.COM, that has enabled us to create a route across the nation. It is an incredible site that is free if you want to put up with constant pop-ups, or about 100 dollars per year if you want it to really work well for you. Of course, we are learning that we need to be careful of the "short cuts"!
The way it works is that we type in the name of the town that we are starting in and then simply click on the roads we want to go on until we find a place to stop that has a camping area. We can then print that out and it creates a map, a description of the elevations we will be experiencing and a ride sheet indicating where to turn left, right, etc. So each day we leave with a fresh map of where we are going for the day. We know how far up and how far down we will go, and where to turn so that we arrive at the right place that evening.
There is a company called Adventure Cycling out of Missoula, MT that has created maps to help cyclists travel across the U.S. Cindy and used their maps in 2001 and were deeply grateful for the hard work they had done to help us make our trek. But now with these newer technology tools, those maps are almost not needed. If you have a laptop computer, a printer, and wi-fi service, you can pretty much figure out your own route across the country.
The picture that I've included today shows us lined up in a rest stop in Yellowstone National Park (The day that the road was closed due to snow and ice). We found a place we could get on line, so we all got out out computers to respond to e-mails, read the news, and yes...figure out our routes for the next few days. The new technology available to help people like us is simply incredible...and we can stay pretty connected to all of you through new fangled blogs, I-phones, Black Berries, Droids, and the rest. We are glad. We like being connected to you...especially on the Fourth of July!
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