Cool ride in Caifornia

Parts of today's ride were uphill. 39 miles 4K climbing.

A photo posted by curtis corlew (@cccorlew) on Jun 12, 2016 at 2:31pm PDT

Holy smokes, that was a lot of climbing. And the climbing was steep too. One section had miles of  +10%. Even the short climbs were mostly double digits. Usually a "climbing ride" is 100 feet of climbing per mile. We were slightly over that, but it seemed even harder. Tricia said at one point "You didn't tell me the 4000 feet of climbing was all in three miles." It wasn't, but it felt like it was.

We found the ride near Auburn on RideWithGPS right here. It starts in Cool, so how could it not be.... you know. I downloaded the TCX  file and dropped it in the Garmin. I grabbed and installed the Openstreetmaps tile for the area and we were good to go.

Except something went wrong, The route, showed, but not the turn by turn part. I was smart enough to have printed the cue sheet and map on paper, and with those we were OK, with only a few missed turns. I sure missed the turn notification. But the "off course" warnings still worked —I saw a few of those — and the map showed our path. With the paper it all worked out.

Lesson learned. Check the turn by turn before leaving. And always take paper backup. Just make sure not to sweat it to pieces.