I tell ya…sometimes, these computery things!
Been trying to map out the LRLR to confirm climbing and provide a top-down view of the hilarity. Started using Bikely.com, as I’d used it before and had some routes already over there. The process got incredibly bogged down and slow - then to make matters worse, it “auto-followed” the “roads” and decided that the fire road which it had been merrily tracking was no longer a “road” and backtracked some ungoddessly amount of distance, looped through Hellengone, then found my next point on the map - all of 100 yards up the fire road - adding, and I’m not making this up kids, 28 miles to the route in one fell swoop. Took a goodly amount of time, too. Ok. Fine. I can deal with robo-routing. Except that Bikely lacks an undo function. Or, more precisely, it makes me “delete points” to work my way back to where the creativity began. Except in this case, there are more points to delete than I’ve drawn (y’know….1500 or so according to Bikely math). Baaaah! And I ain’t talking sheep, here. I end up redoing it as a new map. Then the elevation graph (which is, as you recall the real reason I wanted to engage in this connect-the-dots excercise) provides a flatline. Hmmmm. Patient’s dead. Ok - there’s a “Rebuild Graph” button. Goody. Hm. There’s a message window saying my request has been queued and that it should get fixed in 24 hours. That was Saturday. Request again. And then that was Sunday. Request. Then it was Monday. Y’know. Um, Tuesday. Take a guess …Wednesday. Zipp. Oh, Piffle!
So, I use a rusty key to access my untrammeled Routeslip.com account. It’s now Mapmyride.com (somehow, that name makes me want to say “map my ride dude! dot com”). Ok. I can deal with change. And it has a nice “full-screen” map function. It even lets me go through the hilarious exercise of importing the .gpx file which Bikely purports to export. The result was a 567 mile route providing an aestheometry design that would make a math nerd proud. Dunno who’s to blame on that. But, no harm-no foul. Routeslip has an “undo” function which prevents the delete-every-dot issue if it makes a bad guess when “road following”. But, then about 20 miles in, it begins to get all chewy, and it’s clear the script is bogging down. Then the messages start popping up onscreen, the tires get stuck in the boggy mud and the actions start following every other click, leading to some routing hilarity. But, the undo works well, and I glacially make it to the first logical stopping point. I save that effort where it ends at Pantoll Ranger station.
This fully sucks. I’d wanted to spend maybe a half hour on this and ended up somewhere around two - restarting browser, computer, poking around for easy answers to the issue and undoing and re-plotting points. Whaddawastatime! I suppose it’s probably much easier if I had a gps unit and juts uploaded stuff like the cool kids do. But, there are several other uses I can think of for the few hundred bucks that would take. The way I’m doing it, both the mapping sites start to bog down significantly as the route gets more complex.
The saving grace is the really slick little elevation profile which you can view at the bottom of the map on mapmyride.com. Well, it’s not really a “saving grace” as I’m just not sure that I have the time to mess around w a i t i n g f o r t h e n e x t p o i n t t o l o a d . . . . It’s been a few years since I needed to have something to read next to the computer while I waited for things to download. But, at least it seems to more easily provide the info.*
Ok. Thanks for listening to this little rant. I’ll try to smile more now. I’ll try taking smaller bites, maybe. I dunno. My computer definitely is not enjoying chewing on the scripts.
*And the info is a tad scary. Saturday’s ride had around 6,000 feet of climbing in the ~36 miles which Carlos logged “on route”. The first ~24, according to mmr.com is 3,800. Then there’s the mid-section (or more appropriately, the 2nd and 3rd quarter) which will include getting up to Rock Springs, climbing up from Alpine Dam to the Bolinas Ridge, coming back from Olema and getting to Corte Madera. We’re estimating 4-6,000 in that section. “LRLR” - indeed!
March 20th, 2008 at 3:22 pm I’ve mentioned these to Carlos — you can get a GPS *logger* unit for under $100. Toss it in your bag/pack and go ride, then USB-it to your computer and upload the data (as GPX, I think) to Google Earth or most web-based mapping applications. See http://tinyurl.com/2uxol2 for examples. Yes, I’m waiting for someone else to play the guinea-pig on this. ;) -Jim G
March 20th, 2008 at 5:09 pm I know what a pain it is to map any long route on fireroads using the online tools. They are cool and work ok when following regular roads but not so smooth for off road sections. I think the total elevation gain of LRLR is going to be somewhere between 13-14k feet. And know there is rumor we *may* add some more to that total with an extra loop… a little surprise for next time we ride. Thanks for putting the time and patience to do this map! I tried about a year ago and gave up after a week or so :)