GPS Games on a Bike

 

N 33.76220 W 84.36044

When I first learned of geocaching (an outdoor treasure-hunt using GPS co-ordinates), it occurred to me this would be fun on a bike. The distances between caches (treasures) are often walking distance, but a bike is really the ideal vehicle for getting from cache to cache.

A game we like to play to celebrate birthdays is a treasure-hunt with hidden clues. Each clue leads you to the location of the next clue until you finally arrive at a birthday present.

For my wife's birthday, we combined the two. I laid out a bicycle-friendly 12-mile course near the house that passed through or near various landmarks, some obvious and some subtle. I used photographs (like the one shown here) to indicate the destination, and when it wasn't recognized, provided GPS co-ordinates to get us close.

This has been a great way to

• Spend time outdoors on the bike
  
• Engage people in a fun game
  
• With kids, provide practice navigating a bicycle safely
  
• Share good bike routes with others.
  

It takes a while to create the route and take pictures for the clues, but the time spent is well worth it.

Color-coded Elevation of Routes in Google Earth

One of the reasons I was considering a GPS was to get a better picture of the elevation I was gaining on my rides around town. I've learned that most GPS aren't accurate enough to be useful so I looked for alternatives.

Since all my riding is on-road, I can easily create a track of my route using bikely.com, but the elevation information had some problems. Sometimes it wasn't available at all and when it was available, it wasn't always accurate. In any case, I couldn't export the elevation information to make corrections or perform calculations.

I recently learned about an online tool called GPS Visualizer. This has a set of tools that allow working with the tracks created in bikely.com. The result is Google Earth file that shows color-coded elevations along the route set against a 3D view of the earth's surface in reasonably good detail. The file JacksNicakjack.kmz covers the route we rode this past Sunday. Red is the lowest elevation and purple the highest. The ridge along Pebblebrook stands out nicely even without lowering the eye-level so you can see the hills.

I'll post other routes and the steps for creating these files in a later post.

Up the Creek without a Pedal

The name of this century ride grabs your attention. Riding these roads will bring you back.

I had ridden a portion of this route (Pocket Road) during the 2006 BRAG, and was happy to be revisiting these roads.

Pat, Jack, Charles, Larry, David and I stayed together most of the route. We were joined at various times by others who kept -- and often raised -- our pace. Even though we were riding alongside low mountain ridges the whole day, we only had one climb that really got us breathing hard. The flatness and the number of strong riders gave us a fast pace: we averaged 20.0 MPH over the 100 miles, and were getting faster as the day wore on.

When we finished and were checking our bike computers, Pat had guesstimated that we had finished the ride in a little over 5 hours. My computer recorded 5:00:02 -- two seconds over 5 hours.

Got to play with the Nuvi 200 GPS some. It is able to record tracks if you use version 3.40 of the firmware. There were two drawbacks to the device: 1) it only has a 4 hour battery life and 2) the touchscreen is easy to accidentally turn off your recording. The first limitation is more serious than the second if you're careful where the unit is placed.

I've mapped the century route in bikely.com.

GPS Consideration

I'm not a big gadget person. I recognize that spending time with gadgets may not be furthering my other goals, and avoid the temptation.

My Treo is an example of something that walks the line. I needed a phone and I'd been carrying a Palm Pilot for contact and calendar, so it was nice to combine the two devices into a single hand-held. I'm also aware that it could make a pretty good GPS device with the addition of a Bluetooth GPS receiver.

Now, my odometer on the bike gives me most of what I need: distance and time. Routes I plan out using bikely.com. If I get lost, that just makes it more fun. So, having the maps in the device is not a big deal for me. Being able to track elevation would be nice. I can get a fairly good estimate from bikely.com routes, but I've also seen some inaccuracies. The GPS could give me a better picture of my climb and also would tie it to my speed on the various hills.

There's also the ability to track and then download to bikely.com so I wouldn't have to hand enter my routes.

So, the solution I was considering was the Visiontac VGPS-500 Bluetooth GPS for about $40, and a freeware app for the Treo called CotoGPS that captures tracks. There's also some analysis software that is available for the desktop.

I could substantially improve my data gathering capability for about the price of a bike computer.

Commute Summary

Round Trip Distance: 17.4
Number of Cyclists seen: 28
In-bound Route: Lullwater/PATH trail
Out-bound Route: Emory via Clifton
Weather: The best; cool in the morning and pleasantly warm in the afternoon.