Mapping the Trip
The future is coming up on us fast. I am feeling it in several important ways. The first place this is happening is with our travel plans. Next week we will be heading off to Spain to suit up for a motorcycle ride through the Pyrenees and along the northern coast of Spain along the popularly significant Camino de Santiago. That ride will start in Barcelona, go up into Andorra, wind its way through the Pyrenees towards Pamplona where the bulls run and then hugs the northern coast from San Sebastián to Santiago de Compostella. From there we head south to Porto, Portugal and then finish by flying out of Lisbon. That is several thousand kilometers of riding through some pretty Spanish countryside and seeing on the more au courant and interesting passageways dedicated to St. James and his famous pilgrimage from France to the Atlantic coast.
While I will be taking one of two motorcycle GPS instruments with me that will fit smoothly on the rental bike I am riding (a similar BMW R1250 GS Adventure like the one I ride here at home), I always like to have a hard copy map on a special map case I have for just that purpose and that I affix to the handlebars of the bike. In it I put the best map I can find of the area I am traveling. It’s a protocol I have followed on all of my foreign motorcycle trips and it comes in handy in the most unusual of circumstances and places where the GPS might fail. It is my back-up system just in case. And I always make sure to buy the best Michelin map I can get for the region and fold it up carefully to fit into the weather-resistant map case. This time I have put the GPS route into both of my GPS machines (done by hand since the whole downloading thing always seems too hard to sort out) and I circled the stops on the map and will eventually use a highlighter to color in the anticipated route. That last thing has less value than not since we are always changing it up on the road and rarely follow the exact route planned wither because local conditions suggest a better alternative or someone hears of a particularly good road we just have to go try. None of the days are so ride-intensive that we can’t add a little sightseeing into the route whenever we want.
But this time, after looking at the map, I am wondering if the Michelin map was my best choice. It is basically a map of the Iberian Peninsula and as such has to be a large enough scale to accommodate the whole of a rather large land mass. I tend to think of Europe as being comprised of relatively smaller countries, but that is just not the case. Spain is as big as four western states combined or just shy of the area of Texas, so its actually quite big. While we are covering a lot of territory, putting a “cap” on the entire top of the peninsula and trekking through all of the Basque Country and then some, we are still largely restricted to the most northern 20% or so of the Iberian Peninsula. That means that 80% of that Michelin map is useless to us and I should probably cut up the map to save space in my map holder and make it all that much more efficient in the process.
I note that there are several towns where we are staying that barely make it onto the map in the smallest of lettering and are largely crowded out visually by the larger nearby towns. That’s a problem that one can avoid with a digital map because you can generally zoom in far enough to see every little burg along the way. As it is, I know for a fact that I will only be able to use this map for generalized directional guidance and would be lost if finding something as specific as our countryside hotels if I didn’t have my GPS. Now perhaps our tour guides will do their normal routine of publishing a handbook of detailed maps for our use during the trip, but I’m guessing they will mostly hand us a Michelin map like they usually do. This has now caused me to reconsider the download issue since I know I need the latest and most detailed map of Spain that I can possibly get on my GPS since the map is likely going to leave me three klicks short of a hotel bed.
I have now gone online to Garmin and to begin with, I dare you to try to download Garmin Express without being redirected several times by some slick navigational programming that is trying desperately to get me to sign up for every imaginable fee-bearing upgrade to everything from WinZip to Chrome Premium. It is very annoying to have to go through all this clickbait garbage, but finally I found my way to the real deal Garmin Express program, which is where one must go to get the free download updates for your GPS maps. The second pain in the ass is that you have to choose to download Windows or Mac, which might be an OK distinction except that I use an iPad for most of my work and there is no easy way to download to an iPad. Obviously I also keep a laptop and purposefully make it a Windows-based system for just this reason. My first problem is that my newest laptop will not take a regular USB, but only a USB-C, so Amazon next-day delivery wins another round and I order a converter and have to wait until tomorrow to figure out if I am adept enough to upgrade my GPS maps. Stay tuned.
Kim and I have also decided to go to Egypt and Jordan in February with Mike and Melisa. It has been an interesting process planning a trip with new traveling companions. Mike, like me, is a planner, but like any two people, we have different ways of approaching the process. I find Mike’s approach perfectly rational and very easy to accommodate and just say, “Good by me!” When I did call to comment (not complain) about the hotel in Rome (a territory I consider like my home turf), he had an immediate alternative that was perfectly positioned and as good or better than anything I might have found on my own. Where Mike has really excelled is in the flight booking game. He taught me a thing or two about booking using the multi-city protocol and I think made the process much easier and much cheaper. Interestingly enough, when I followed his path directly (same flights, but different booking service), I got a price about $700 cheaper. We are both using points/credits so we didn’t parse the issue too closely. Then I went to book my seats and British Airways did its usual fee for seats program and it cost me about $700 to book the seats I wanted. I had business class seats, but letting Kim and I float on whatever seat was left didn’t feel good and I chose to spend the money to get pre-reserved seats together. Mike didn’t have to pay extra for his seats, so I guess the market was perfect in equilibrating the two fares.
So far, we are in the hands of a reputable custom tour company so I don’t have to worry about mapping per se, but I may still choose to get a Michelin Map if they make them for Egypt and Jordan. Once a map guy, always a map guy.