There Must Be A Better Way ...

Prior to getting bogged down with Senior Final Exams and their grades, I was waylayed putting drop boxes together. That forced me to recalculate my itinerary. However, not that long ago I was lamenting about how difficult it was to delete Waypoints on the Garmin eTrex Vista HCx.

Which takes me back to the navigational challenges on the GDMBR with a GPS. Remember, we are traveling in the opposite direction from the instructions on the ACA maps and Michael McCoy's book. Fortunately Scott Morris of TopoFusion and of Paula and Scott's 2004, northbound (nobo) GDMBR GPS mapping trip has a wealth of GDMBR Tracking data available. I have been a loyal TopoFusion licensee since I discovered Scott's information over a year ago.

He has developed some exquisite GDMBR GPS data, but unfortunately I have been unable to download some of it. My computer would automatically convert his robust gpx files to weaker (worthless) xml files. I did not realize what was happening until last night when I discovered that only some people had this issue. Others could download to their desktops and the Garmin and TopoFusion software would merrily accept Scott's gpx files. My computer insisted on converting them to the useless xml version.

Once I finally realized that it was my computer and not the data I went to work to find out how to remedy the problem. I searched some forums for xml to gpx conversion issues, and in the process I learned of some freeware that could remedy the situation. I crossed my fingers, grit my teeth, smiled, and downloaded "Perl." After I ran it, my machine started accepting Scott's valuable data without further ado.

Scott has adjusted the Tracks so that the whole USA portion of the GDMBR fits into the Garmin GPS. Hooray! The 2319 Waypoints from ACA are still too much for the memory, but now I have a series of Tracks to use for navigation purposes. Thank you Scott. If you have not checked out TopoFusion, then you are missing out. Although you cannot load TopoFusion maps into the Garmin GPS, TopoFusion has a much larger variety of maps available. I have found them very helpful for planning purposes. The Garmin MapSource Topos pale in comparison with the TopoFusion maps.

One of my GDMBR riding partners, Dave, emailed me last night about my issues with the Waypoint deletion process. I could not find a way to delete them either as a group, or en mass. I spent several hours a couple of weekends ago deleting a thousand Waypoints with a six step per Waypoint process. Dave told me that "after many hours" (and calling Garmin twice) he found a way to delete them more efficiently. I confessed to him that I had even gone against the basic male genetic code by actually reading the Garmin GPS manual. I seldom even consider going to such extremes, but I was desperate. Sorry guys!!

Not to worry though, because the Garmin GPS manual is sorely lacking in useful information - like how to delete Waypoints en mass. So, I probably will not be tempted to do something as foolish as reading the instructions again for a long while. Of course the whole GPS thing is so that I will not have to ask for directions - just kidding. I love talking to people.

We are still trying to figure out how to upload new Waypoints as we dump the old ones during our trip. Hopefully, we will find someone with a computer who will let us do the data swapping. The worst case scenario is that we do it manually, one button push at a time. However, that definitely does not sound like fun.

Two weeks from Thursday and we are on the way to the border! I had better get my first drop box mailed soon.