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TAR 2010, April 15 - 18, 2010

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Anyone riding from NW Houston Thurday morning that would want some company?
 
Solorider, Jthompson, and I are poised to kick off the 2010 TAR tomorrow morning - we're going on a rather long recon and will arrive in Junction Thursday night

See you there....:sun:
 
I plan on heading out from Dallas at high noon, after a half work day.
Anyone else heading out that want's to hook up, let me know:rider:
 
Hauling from DFW, room to spare

ladybeemer said:
I plan on heading out from Dallas at high noon, after a half work day.
Anyone else heading out that want's to hook up, let me know:rider:
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Guessing you're riding? Lucky...:rider:

Hauling my KTM down from DFW, I'm free to leave either late Wed or early Thur if anybody needs something hauled or wants to hitch a ride. Crew cab truck, room for people too...:trust:
 
I should be hitting Junction in the middle of the afternoon on Thursday. Depending on how much time I have before firing up registration/sign in, I may wander a little.
 
Might have to drop out due to recent fire. But if I do go it will be Friday afternoon. Any camp sites still open?
 
FJR Bandit said:
Might have to drop out due to recent fire. But if I do go it will be Friday afternoon. Any camp sites still open?
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i have a tent site reserved at S. Llano River St park, I'm sure there will be room for at least one more tent. Look for the XR from my avatar.
John
 
**yawn**

**stretch**

**blink blink**

Ah, it seems like a fine day for a ride in the Texas Hill Country....and beyond....:sun:
 
For those that have downloaded the routes I just wanted to let you know that I've been doing some tweaking/cleanup/fixing of the ones that are on the website. I won't be able to get with Richard until Wednesday evening to see about getting them on the website, but don't worry. If you don't have a chance to redownload them to your gps before you head for Junction, I'll have a laptop with a garmin usb cable and mapsource. So we should be able to put them on most garmin units. I'll also have the routes on a cd if you use something else or bring your own laptop.

I should be at the Hills Hotel by 3pm on Thursday and once I get unloaded I can help anyone that needs it.
 
WoodButcher said:
For those that have downloaded the routes I just wanted to let you know that I've been doing some tweaking/cleanup/fixing of the ones that are on the website. I won't be able to get with Richard until Wednesday evening to see about getting them on the website, but don't worry. If you don't have a chance to redownload them to your gps before you head for Junction, I'll have a laptop with a garmin usb cable and mapsource. So we should be able to put them on most garmin units. I'll also have the routes on a cd if you use something else or bring your own laptop.

I should be at the Hills Hotel by 3pm on Thursday and once I get unloaded I can help anyone that needs it.
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I just finished loading them this morning! :lol2:
 
I also just loaded the routes today , seemed like it put the wrong numbers on the Route name but they did load and looked ok . Is that what was happening to anyone else ?
 
WoodButcher said:
For those that have downloaded the routes I just wanted to let you know that I've been doing some tweaking/cleanup/fixing of the ones that are on the website. I won't be able to get with Richard until Wednesday evening to see about getting them on the website, but don't worry. If you don't have a chance to redownload them to your gps before you head for Junction, I'll have a laptop with a garmin usb cable and mapsource. So we should be able to put them on most garmin units. I'll also have the routes on a cd if you use something else or bring your own laptop.

I should be at the Hills Hotel by 3pm on Thursday and once I get unloaded I can help anyone that needs it.
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Anyone here using a TomTom? All the conversion software I've found online for .gpx to .ov2 sucks
 
RICK M said:
I also just loaded the routes today , seemed like it put the wrong numbers on the Route name but they did load and looked ok . Is that what was happening to anyone else ?
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SAME HERE BUT THEY ARE LOADED. WORST THAT WILL HAPPEN IS I GET LOST FOR A DAY!! LOL LOOKS LIKE RAIN GEAR WILL BE NEEDED THIS WEEKEND:rider:
 
RICK M is BigAl coming with you. If so tell him I plan to just follow you and BigAl if you two going riding dirt.
 
don't worry, I didn't make major changes. I just noticed a couple of places where some gps routes didn't exactly match the guide descriptions routes. They were minor things where following the route would cut a corner. Things where a recalc in Mapsource causes a route to change. Also some of the routes are named Ride -xx and some said Route -xx so I got them consistent.

I'll have a poster with a couple of gotcha's on routes to watch for. Rides 10 and 15 are the only ones that really need to be changed because the gps seems to calc on some roads that aren't the planned ones and I'm not sure even go through in real life. Since each person's settings in their map software and gps may do the same thing I got, I added some points to force it on the Ride Guide route.

This is probably a good time to mention that the Ride Guide is the correct route. The gps and the mapping software have wonderful algorithms to plot routes between given points, but with different releases of the maps, software and gps firmware you get a slightly different route each time it gets calculated. We try to put enough points in to shape a route to match the Ride Guide and they look good to us, but all it takes is a quarterly map update and we look stupid. And I'm just focused on the Garmin units. Add in TomTom and Magellan and you can see how much fun it is. So the electronic routes are a good guide, but not exact.

Sorry for the long post, but I can give a prime example. Take a look at Ride 3, on highway 55 south of Rocksprings. If you have Garmin City Navigator NT 2009, it shows White Mountain Rd. south of the country club/airport and no road on the north side. In CN NT 2010.1 (first update for 2010) and CN NT 2010.4 there is a CR310 listed north of that area. That is correct, but the route still calcs to use White Mountain. The problem is when they put CR310 in a few years ago, that section of White Mountain was gated and turned private. If you had the 2009 product you would never know the way to get around it and might be tempted to go through a gate. Now it gets even more interesting because Garmin goofed when they added CR310. They didn't connect it to highway 55 so it won't allow you to add a route point and force it to follow CR310. Actually you can add the point, but it just takes you down White Mountain and back tracks to CR310. So in this situation you have to be smarter than the gps. Kind of a combination of roads changing and map creation errors.

So I highly recommend making copies of the Roads of Texas map pages that correspond to the routes you plan to take and refer to them and the Ride Guide whenever things don't seem right.
 
3 of us were in Junction this last weekend and had a great time but ran into something along the lines of what Randy is talking about. Ride 11 Kimble County East has you riding on CR 320 east to CR 322 south which is fine. Somehow we missed CR 322 south and were almost to hwy 385 when I realized we had missed the turn. We backtracked until the GPS showed CR 322 and headed south. We were doing fine until we ran into (not literally) a rancher with about 100 head of cattle in the road. We stopped and started chatting to him. He informed us we were on private property. I explained that the GPS said were on CR322 (not trying to tell him he was wrong, just explaining why we were where we were). He said that it was 'old data' and that it 'happened all the time'. He asked how many there were of us and I told him 3. He was nice enough and said that the county road was about 1/4 mile south. I politely asked if it was OK to continue to the county road and he said it was. I got the impression that if there had been a larger group he may not have been so accommodating.

Anyway, when I got back to the room, I pulled up City Navigator North America NT 2008 which where the maps on the GPS came from and sure enough there are 2 roads marked CR 322 paralleling each other going south of CR 320 that join about a mile south of CR 320. I've no idea if this is any different on later editions of the Garmin maps.
 
Yep, my CN NT 2010.4 shows two cr322's still. I just double checked to make sure the gpx file uses the right one and it does. Glad he was friendly. Most are if you start from a position of "I might be wrong, but I think I'm on the right road" and be willing to turn around if requested.

Thanks for pointing that out.
 
Looking at the weather forecast it looks like some scattered storms, nothing heavy though. They have had more rain out that way in the past few months than the Austin area so some of the water crossings that were low last year should had some water. Might mean less dust, but that soil does dry out fast on the top. We had a good overnight rain for the Labor day ride last fall and we were kicking up dust by 10am.

Flowers should be good, and the James River ought to be running nicely for those that want to teach their bikes to swim.

My big decision at this point is whether to just bring the DR650 or just pull the trailer with the Transalp too. That TA has such a nice seat...but I don't want to be picking it up out of a water crossing.
 
WoodButcher said:
...So in this situation you have to be smarter than the gps...I highly recommend making copies of the Roads of Texas map pages that correspond to the routes you plan to take and refer to them and the Ride Guide whenever things don't seem right.
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I fully agree with Rusty on this and can't emphasize the point enough. If you navigate only by GPS you will get off-route and will end up trespassing. The GPS map is going to be wrong at several points so you really need to supplement your GPS with a reliable paper maps to help you navigate. The new Roads of Texas is a really good map. It + a GPS + a navigator who actively navigates = less likely to trespass.
 
PSA :lol2:

I saw this sign on another thread. For Texas it should say stay on road to avoid Trespassing It is good info and will help with Rancher/Rider relations! :rider:

4207656963_c6ebcdec29_b.jpg
 
Since the weather predictions are looking pretty lousy, I'm going to save the vacation days for later. I hope the weather service is wrong.
Y'all have a great time!
John
 
Went by the shop yesterday... doesnt look like I'll have my bike back by tomorrow. :thumbd: This was supposed to be my last day of work for the week... ugh
 
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