gotcha. Its funny, but as someone who uses the internet all the time, I still really like having a paper map in front of me.

I had to laugh, about 4 years ago I went back to a Central American country that I had lived in about 25-30 years ago to visit friends and took my bike on this trip to visit my friends. I visited one of my friends who is my age, and has teenage and young adult kids, and when I biked up to where she lives on a mountain side, her oldest son helped me plan a route to get to the next family I was visiting. He opened up Google Earth, or google maps, bing bang boom, shows me his suggested route, shows it to me from the side to give me an idea of the elevation changes, and all that. I didnt know how to do this, but it was great having his suggested route and to have an idea of the topography--so the old gringo seemed pretty old school compared to him. We jotted down the names of the villages I'd be going through during the day, and rough distances involved, and I still got to have some surprises and unexpected stuff, plus had fun asking people for directions and stuff, so for me it was a nice mix of using technology, but not too much. It was a pretty up and down day, so tiring, but I guess its because I dont shy from lots of climbing, it was fine being somewhat in the dark about how much up and down was involved.

that said, it is pretty darn cool to be able to plot a route in programs and get a fairly good idea of how many metres of climbing and descending. I've just done so little of this, so am not that confident of how to use the programs properly.