I always feel like I'm just being critical, but I do have one worry. I believe it's been stated a few times on the ironbutt forums that the reviewers of the ride use spotwalla to support the Dated Business Receipts, but they use booble maps or similar and select the 'shortest route' option to track between fuel stops as the primary means of verifying the distance.
It's an issue I've run into with my ride through San Antonio... Taking I-10 through town is, like, two miles longer than skirting around on 1604, but over multiple stops those sorts of things add up. Guess which way I took :/
The reason I bring it up is because it looks like there's several points where a shorter route exists that we are skirting around. Maybe we could seek pre-approval on the route? I don't think they do it much except for certain rides, and those are more because there are additional requirements like a flag being sent.
The rules are here:
https://www.ironbutt.com/themerides/ssseries/index.html
There are a LOT of ways to short circuit this route. However, the key is to document the route well... you do not have to go the most direct route between two points. We will need receipts at the 3 "corners" of the route, since it's kind of a triangle. With the way things lay out, Brownwood isn't a great stop from the fuel range standpoint, but we might decide we have to. I was thinking we could likely do De Leon, San Augustine, and Silsbee for the 3 corners. Should be reliable places to hopefully get a receipt, and close to the furthest extents of the "corners" of the route.
They recommend providing a Google Maps route to outline the route, and I have also used the "tracks" on my GPS to show where we actually went for further verification. The fuel receipts will correspond to those points on the route. In fact, they explicitly state that alternate routes are ok:
"IN ALL CASES,
mileage will be verified with either Microsoft Streets and Trips, Google Maps, or in some cases, paper maps or other sources as required.
We recommend you put your route in to
Google Maps, it works in most parts of the world and allows you to easily change your route by dragging it on
alternate roads. Additionally, it allows you to
save your route and send it to us."
This is really simple if you have a painfully simple route. Doesn't work for this one. I'll have to try and re-create it from scratch from within Google Maps. For some reason, you apparently can't get miles out "My Google Maps" and you can't pull a route in from My Google Maps to Google Maps...
If we document it properly and give them more than one way to verify, then we should be fine. I did this once in Alabama, and I didn't submit for the certificate. I had one for a prior ride. My compadre did submit, and he got his certificate. A couple of years later, he did another one... and got another certificate. I printed my tracks map out and marked up the stops for fuel, kept the logs, and it was no issue. I know that a lot of people get complacent and don't want to document their ride to the level they expect, and if IBA can't be presented with the information they need to confirm an alternate route, then they will likely have to assume the shortest route. Those people are probably the ones most likely to complain... on an uncontrolled forum on the internet.