After an initial flurry of activity to get something down on paper, I’ve since not touched the itinerary, although the trip has always been in the back of my mind. I’m hooked into various sources of information and Facebook groups and I see the occasional reference. I pay it fleeting consideration as to how it may influence my planning before getting on with whatever task I have currently occupying my thoughts. Now with 66 days left to go I’m considering getting back to the plan since the initial draft was inherited from a document sent to me on a GS forum. I modified it but to the extent that it now feels disjointed. Having said that I do want to keep it as guidance rather than a rigid set of instructions and directions to be executed to the letter. That in itself seems a contradiction to the GPS route planning that I’m going to refer to later in this post. Its like adventure with someone holding your hand.
There have been many suggestions over where we should go, what we should see, what to avoid and what road would be unmissable. At this stage the trip is now defined by a few simple factors, most notably accommodation. There will be four of us taking the trip and at each stop we will be needing four single beds in reasonable accommodation (typically two twin rooms). I’ve never camped and while I wouldn’t have a problem pitching a tent there are members of the party who would be horrified at the thought. So accommodation type, and more importantly availability, dictates the start and end of each day. From our meeting spot on the M6 services at Forton we will travel to Inverness, and then from here we will skirt the northern coast of Scotland hopping between B&B and hotel with the official NC500 route being our guide if not our mistress.
I needn’t go too much into the detail of the route. Before anyone reads this I’ll probably be posting the ride report which hopefully will be much more use to anyone hoping to embark upon a similar tour of the North of Scotland. What I wanted to cover in this post isn’t much of a product review, but a couple of products that I intend to use.
Wunderlich 3D Ergo screen deflector
Since moving to the GS I have enjoyed the benefits of comfort over longer touring distances. While the screen does its job in reducing wind and buffeting, I do feel that despite being able to adjust it to its highest setting there is a little more improvement to be had. On occasion I had dipped my head down a couple of inches and found that the wind noise dropped considerably. This was nothing that would bother me while hacking around on A and B roads but a benefit, I felt, would be desirable on longer motorway stretches. Since the dipped position wouldn’t be one I would want to ride in, not without neck strain at very least, I thought I’d try a screen deflector.
After looking at my options I settled on a Wunderlich model from Nippy Normans. The reviews were good and I didn’t want to change the whole screen since I don’t like the look of these tall aftermarket options. It also looked like something that I could easily take off and throw in the luggage if I didn’t need it.
The build and fit look fine. It clamps to the top of the existing screen without looking out of place and while I have yet to fully test it and find an optimal position, visually it looks like its going to do the job. The benefits will be felt on the run up to Glasgow and beyond.
MyRoute-app Online Route Planning Tool
Garmin BaseCamp is the default option for planning for the Motorrad Navigator and it has its lovers and haters. I can take it or leave it. It can be a bit unwieldy but it does a job. I mainly use it for publishing Garmin Adventures on my ride reports. I did use it extensively on planning my trip across the Alps. That’s not to say that I didn’t make a lot of mistakes with it and had to reprogram a lot of my routes on the hoof mainly from letting Basecamp remove a lot of my route shaping points which allowed the GPS to re-calculate on the fly rather than going where I had planned to go. The source of many of the routes in the Alps had been provided by a forum member who had sent them to me in TomTom format. They had suggested that I use the TyreToTravel application to convert them into a format I could use on BaseCamp and on the Garmin based Navigator V. It did a very good job but being a Windows based application it wasn’t a long term option on the Mac.
A couple of weeks back I saw a recommendation of an online route planning app that was compatible with TomTom and Garmin and the suggestion was that it was a good alternative to BaseCamp. The website for MyRoute-app seemed to be pushing all the right buttons and I noticed it was from the same people that did the TyreToTravel application.
While I am keen to give this a go I have been waiting to get a little closer to my NC500 departure to draw up the final GPS routes and I want to take advantage of the free trial but I have a sneaking suspicion that I will end up with a Gold subscription if it does indeed meet all expectations. I might even consider the one off lifetime membership. I think that it would be money well spent since I usually have one large annual trip and numerous planned weekend outings to make it an investment.
