The other day I did the Tour de Chelmsford. It was meant to be the Fresh Ayer ride but it didn't turn out that way.
It all started when my friend Pamela alleged there was no way I could find my way alone on a ride without arrows, and not very well even with them. So I set out to prove her wrong.
I had wanted to do one of Pamela's old rides, named "Fresh Ayer and Temptations" after an eatery in Ayer, the arrows for which had long since ceased to exist. I thought this would be a good test of my navigational skills. I decided to do the short ride, 27 miles, plus about 20 miles to and from the start in Chelmsford, so that even if, God forbid, I got lost, it would still be somewhere in the metric century range.
I could of course have printed the cue sheet and tried to follow that, but I chose instead to use my trusty GPS. Trusty is a bit of an exaggeration, since in all the time I've owned it, it has never successfully gotten me to any place I wanted to go. But hope springs eternal, and I downloaded the route from the web site to the GPS. The route on the computer looked like it has tons of waypoints, so how could I go wrong? I also decided to do the route in reverse, since that way the end was suspiciously like my Apple Pi Ride route, so if the batteries in the GPS crapped out, or another mishap struck, I could just fall back on that.
One thing about my GPS I discovered by bitter experience is that it balks at routes with more than 50 waypoints. Also, even on the routes with less than 50, if I tell it to navigate the route, it likes to be creative and take me on any superhighways that happen to be nearby. So, I figured, all I needed to do was connect the dots, go from one waypoint to another. Good in theory.
On the road, it was a different matter. I decided not to turn it on until I got to the Byam School in Chelmsford. When I did, it seemed to have a real hard time finding satellites. Now a GPS isn't really much good unless it can find satellites to tell you where you are, sort of the raison d'etre of a GPS. After searching the sky for a while, it seemed to have found two, but it wasn't happy, and finally gave up and presented me with a menu, one of the choices was "Use with GPS off." Again, I had to ask myself what useful functions could it perform with the GPS off. It could maybe tell time, thus being a rather expensive substitute for a wrist watch. But after poking it judiciously, it magically sprang to life with a little black triangle indicating where I was.
And there were the waypoints. Unfortunately, there were far less of them than there were on my computer, and very difficult to see on the tiny screen. I have a pair of bifocals, which might have made this easier, and I have a pair of sunglasses, but I don't have bifocal sunglasses. So, whenever I tried to see where the next waypoint was going to be I had to peer over my sunglasses, and even then they were hard to see in motion. What was more alarming is that there seemed to be waypoints in disparate directions. It appeared I couldn't tell if I was coming or going. I followed what I thought was the right direction for waypoints for a while, but the problem with the tiny GPS screen is you really don't get the big picture, and even when you zoom way out, it's pretty much indecipherable.
After a while, I came to somewhere that proudly proclaimed itself to be "Chelmsford" something. By this point I expected to be in Westford, maybe Groton. Looking at my location, it appeared that I had short circuited the route and was heading back.
Then I came to a street named "Westford Street." Now, from experience, the New England naming convention goes something like this. If there is a road connecting town A and town B, the road is named B street when you're in town A and A street when you're in town B. So, I reasoned, Westford Street must go to Westford. I was actually looking forward to the great honking climb you have to do when you approach Westford from any direction, since I knew once I got there, I could just follow the 200K arrows back to Bedford (the spirit of adventure had long since evaporated). Alas, I promptly came upon a town center with no climbing involved at all. Turns out the town was Chelmsford, not Westford. So much for truth in advertising.
Then I saw the Bruce Freeman Rail Trail, which I knew went back to the ride start, and got on that. Then it occurred to me that I wasn't actually sure I was heading the right way, but I knew the trail was only six miles long, so it really didn't matter. For an instant, I almost lost my head and asked a runner which direction I was going, but that would have broken The Code. The Code, of course, is that real men never ask directions. They must instead rely on their jungle cunning (and a healthy dose of luck). Turns out, I was in fact going the wrong way, which I deduced when I came upon a clue, a large sign saying "End of Bike Path." No worries, I'd just turn around and retrace my steps.
Seemed like a sure thing until I was spit out into Chelmsford Center again. There was a large bike path sign pointing vaguely at a five way intersection, with no confirming arrow or any evidence of a bike path. For a second, I thought of taking the coward's way out and just follow a sign for Bedford via Route 4. But no, I stumbled around a bit and after a few dead ends, found the bike path again. It occurred to me that this could be the same path I just came off, but soldiered on, and it was indeed the correct direction and I was back on track.
My dear Susan has somewhat cruelly invented a slogan for me: "Got map, got cue sheet, got GPS, got lost."
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