The Night before: Last min tech troubles
During a goodbye takeaway dinner with Family last night, someone asked how I was bringing the bike.
“As checked in luggage” I reply.
“Cool, so you have told them you are bringing a bike”?
I stare blankly. Am I supposed to tell the airline this? This was news to me. How did I miss this?
I rang up Aer Lingus 20 minutes before their phone lines closed. The nice man said “We have limits on the number of bikes, let me just check if we have room”. Then silence… And more silence. I must have waited 3 minutes, convinced that my trip would be over before I walked out my front door. The nice man eventually responded, “ok, that is booked for you. That will be 65 euro”.
Then tonight (the night before I fly), I decide it is a good idea to try to use some of the apps/technology that I will be totally dependent on and which I have never used before. I now realize how stupid this sounds. And of course I run into problems. Sign in, reset passwords, connect RideWithGPS with the Garmin connect app but can only do this on the laptop. Not such a big problem but not sure how I would have done this without my laptop which I am stubbornly refusing to bring.
Eventually I managed to use the RideWithGPS app to draw a route from the airport in Seattle a whole 0.6 kms to a motel across the road. I saved it as “Airport to Motel route” and was pretty content with myself. I then spend the next 30 mins trying to figure out how to put this route onto the Garmin device itself. So apparently you need to “pin” a route in the RideWithGPS app for it to sync with the Garmin device. Can we start some petition to make this clearer?
I could then see my route in the Garmin device. But it was just a line on a blank screen. No actual road or map info. It then dawned on me that my garmin device came preloaded with EU maps. But surely that is an easy problem to solve. However, it seems you can only load Garmin official maps to the device using the “Garmin Express” app. Which of course doesn’t work with Linux or Android. After much banging of the head, I consulted with ChatGPT and decided to go with OpenStreetMaps for maps. I end up finding bbbike.org and drawing a polygon over the USA pacific coast and baja california and extracting an “Openfietsmap” map data of the region I need for the next few months. I could then just move it manually over to my Garmin via USB.
So much for a relaxing night before my flight. On the bright side the packing of the bike into the box and gear into my bag went well. Or at least I think it did, but we will know for sure after the flight tomorrow.
No other real updates. My bike maintenance course went well and am now reasonably confident I can change a tire. I have finished up with work for now. Have said all the good byes.
For now, I’m going to put the last of the electronics on to charge and go to bed before I mess up anything else. Hopefully tomorrow I can give a real “day 1” update “from the road”.