PDR to TURFnSURF from RI 2011

[RhodeHazard]

Two of my firefighter friends approached me this summer and asked if I would be interested in joining them on a 4200 mile two week wilderness camping, trail ride into New Brunswick. Being recently retired and getting clearance from my family, I jumped on board with a setoff date of September 11, 2011.

They have done quite a bit of riding to Alaska and Labrador on their big BMW GeewizzeS, but I have not done much off road riding since I was a kid on a Honda 250. I recently graduated from beating up my Harley on dirt roads to a KLR650 and am just starting to get my feet wet on the big thumper so I am hoping that I do not slow them down or become a trail ornament.

I have done a bit off road with some Land Rovers I had modified for rock crawling a few years ago, so I have the no-pavement mindset, but where do I put my HiLift and the winch on the bike?

I have started by spending the money I am supposed to live off of on gear for these two weeks. Let me just say that I now have my own parking spot at REI and Twisted Throttle is considering relocating closer to my home.

The KilLeR has gotten a few tweaks for the trip. The crashing stuff from SWMotech and Barkbusters I had already bolted on as well as Pelican's look-like-an-international-spy-while-keeping-your-stuff-dry black cases. For this venture, I opted to keep my butt happy with a new Corbin topped with Barb's Alaskan Leather furry stuff; a Vario windscreen; and JT sprockets kicked down a notch up front for better low end to keep with my crawling heritage.

We have gone with the Scala G4 for comms. We have figure out how to set them up and use them for three way conversations. No, we didn't. Yes, we did. They should call them the Sybil G4. We get them to work, but we have no idea how each time. I am hoping after two weeks we learn to understand them. Perhaps I could even get some consulting work as a Scala therapist when we get back. I have to pay for this gear somehow.

GPS. I have a pretty good understanding of how the global positioning system works and of orienteering in general, but I not a clue what Garmin is thinking. I am praying that Garmin and Cardo never merge. I am using Mac so mapsource is not an option. I am using Basecamp to marry the Puppy Dog Route to Dockingpilots Turf and Surf Route. We have successfully broken down the TSR into transferrable files for our Nuvi's and set them against the US and CA topo maps as well as the Rails to Trails maps for the trails portion. We might be a winner. Irene's use of VT as a chew toy will have us rechecking the closed roads and bridges and adjusting our route accordingly.

We have gotten our Maine ATV registrations and are getting ready to set off.

T minus nine days and counting...

any advice or tips are welcome and encouraged.

Ernie




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I am here: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.865668,-71.653285

[RockyNH]

Ernie, I am signed up on this one... I was doing a chunk of this ride (starting with the PDR) in July but had some bike issues on the 2nd day and was forced to abort the trip...

Looking forward to following along on your ride...

Pat in NH

[Mercury264]

[Tail Gunner]

Looking forward to reading about your adventure. Have a safe trip.


Cheers
Drew

[RhodeHazard]

Rocky: how far did you get?


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I am here: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=41.865877,-71.653411

[RockyNH]

only got as far as woodstock when I had bike problems . Short trip for sure. I had limited time do to work so I had to abort .

Ben Slaven, "Dr Benny" was talking about doing the Puppy Dog this weekend

Pat in NH

[RhodeHazard]

Power has been restored here so I am back to prepping for the trip.

I hope to have the gps routes sorted out this weekend and ready for final evaluation against road closures friday before we leave. I am splitting them into nuvi-manageble segments and then again according to what map we will be using (topo or trail) or off road mode. Google earth is very helpful as I can export waypoints to add to routes with tricky sections.

Here is the KLR I will be bouncing around on...



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Nice_Rumble]

Looking forward to your RR as you will essentially be pre-riding the route for us as we leave on the 19th. Let us know if you have to make any re-routes due to storm damage. Good luck and fair weather.

[RhodeHazard]

Originally Posted by Nice_Rumble

Looking forward to your RR as you will essentially be pre-riding the route for us as we leave on the 19th. Let us know if you have to make any re-routes due to storm damage. Good luck and fair weather.

Thank you. Though it is hard to get good information on the secondary routes, from the information we have gathered so far it looks like the only major problem will be 12a in Northfield. We are hoping to be able to update the RR from the road so we might be able to keep you informed of road conditions. We are preparing to have to clear some roads and detour others.

Fuel may be an issue.

Any information about conditions in VT are welcome.

Ernie in RI

[Nice_Rumble]

We're actually going straight up thorough NH and pick up Franks route in Pittsburg, NH by-passing Vermont altogether due to all the breached roads.

[DockingPilot]

In, an there is email for you fellas.
And to stoke the fire a little. A secluded spot just beyon Serpintine Lodge in NB. Ask Alyear how to get here as my track doesnt show it.
Eat at the lodge, but camp here :

[RockyNH]

Originally Posted by DockingPilot

In, an there is email for you fellas.
And to stoke the fire a little. A secluded spot just beyon Serpintine Lodge in NB. Ask Alyear how to get here as my track doesnt show it.
Eat at the lodge, but camp here :

Beautiful spot Frank!

Pat in NH

[DockingPilot]

Its awseome Pat !

[RhodeHazard]

Frank: Thank you for all your help. We would not be able to do this without your groundwork and assistance. The spot looks incredible and we will be sure to find a way to get there.

Pat: We are rethinking the Vermont portion of the journey as well as the Puppy Dog Route. We have been receiving more information about VT that is the opposite of good. Godspeed to those who live up there as it seems recovery will be a long road. Pittsburg looks like a good place to pick up Turf and Surf, so we will probably start there as well. I am hoping to carve out some good scenic byways to Pittsburg on the gps this week.

My job on this trip has become that of techno-geek. Programming the GPS and sorting out the Scala G4's has become a full time job for me over these past few weeks and I have figured a few things out. I will share them here, but I am sure you folks are seasoned veterans at this and I will receive a flaming "duh!" for this thread.

Anyway, we three are running Nuvi's. Mine a 550, the other two a 660 and 880 I think. The Nuvi's have a waypoint limit to them, so importing a big file like Frank's T&S into these street warriors chokes them out. On paper they are limited to bite size 250 point routes but I have found mine to gag on even that small a morsel. Using Basecamp, I have successfully converted the large T&S route into several 180 point routes by duplicating the route, severing the extra routes, renaming it and repeating as necessary.

The process went something like this: I duplicated the T&S Route, deleted waypoints 181 to 1489 and renamed it "T&S RI 1"; next I duplicated T&S again, deleted waypoints 361-1489, deleted waypoints 1-179 (left point 180 cause that would be where we would be when switching routes) and renamed it T&S RI 2. A shortcut for counting to 180 is to set the window size of the open route to 20 waypoints and click next page 9 times.

So once I had the Nuvi acceptable Routes I had another problem, maps. Someone in Garmin decided that consumers would never want or need to put more than one map on a MicroSD card. I am running City North America on the Nuvi's hard memory. I also have US Topo, Canadian Topo and Rails to Trails Northeast on, thanks to Garmin ingenuity, three separate MicroSD cards. This means that a man that has trouble tapping a single letter on a keyboard and who often looses his coffee cup has to carefully perform micro-surgery on a sensitive electronic device in the middle of nowhere in whatever weather happens to be dropping on me with whatever light I have at the time. Bravo Garmin, bravo. This also meant that Routes had to be further broken down according to the respective maps needed. The Route crossing the US Border had to be broken into a US side and a Canadian side and the Routes using the Rails to Trails trail networks had to be broken down for each map switch. I also broke down a few routes to avoid crazy u-turns when the road stopped on the map, but continued in the real world allowing us to switch to straight line routing for these sections.

For sections without proper maps I am importing waypoints from google maps using satellite images of the roads as reference.

The US portion of the the routing is complete. I am hoping the Canadian portion will be easier and have more beer.

T-minus 6 days...

Ernie

[Nice_Rumble]

I'd be happy to lead you guys north through some nice sections on the 11th if you come up my way. If you are coming anywhere near Henniker, Warner, Webster, let me know.