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Old 01-23-09, 07:46 AM
  #24  
neilfein
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Join Date: May 2007
Location: Highland Park, NJ, USA
Posts: 3,798

Bikes: "Hildy", a Novara Randonee touring bike; a 16-speed Bike Friday Tikit; and a Specialized Stumpjumper frame-based built-up MTB, now serving as the kid-carrier, grocery-getter.

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Originally Posted by The Historian
I remember my first tour in October 2007. It was both delightful and miserable. I was riding with a friend who planned the tour. However, it soon came out he was incapable of reading either a cue sheet or a street map. At one point he led us into a salt marsh. Another he tried to lead us back to the hotel we had just left. My favorite moment was watching him read a street map upside down. Good times, good times.
That was me, and that's my cue. That tour was my first as well, and truly an experience in how not to tour.

Don't:
  • Assume that parks will have proper roads all the way through
  • Utility roads are not always well-kept or, indeed, proper roads at all
  • Depend on a cheap plastic compass

Do:
  • Get a flat in a hotel room, if you must get one - it's much easier to change it indoors
  • Have proper road maps
  • Reroute without a second thought when the road is impassable, stubbornness doesn't help anyone

Neil, wasn't that the tour where we ended up using a sidewalk for a few hundred feet to cross route 18 in East Brunswick?

I also learned to study the route ahead of time, but not to the point of obsession. I'm better with directions now, but not so much that I didn't pick up a GPS.
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