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.