From Macon, I took highway 19 to Valdosta by [travelling until after] dark. South Georgia gets quite nice looking once you get out of Macon. It was 63 degrees with small rolling hills, a slight cross-breeze and a little town every fifteen miles. The motorcyclists dream. That means I ran the Honda 347 miles today, usually I don’t push it that far but it was such a perfect day for it.I saw no peach orchards but a lot of pecan farms. Also a lot of signs warning not to pick the pecans, indicating there must be a real local problem with that. All this did was create a craving for pecan pie right when my chances of finding something home-made is nil while on the road. As before, my regular appetite gets numbed by travel, I swear I’d lose weight if I could drive 24 hours a day.
Another novel part of the Macon-Valdosta leg is that it is my first conducted exclusively by the GPS. By trial and error, I activated the features I can use which amounted to travel time, arrival time, and speed. The POI (points of interest) setting is a POS. Part of the reason I drove to Valdosta is because it would not indicate any motels. I know where they are in Valdosta, so I suspect GPS caters only to paying customers. Since the age of 18, I never cease to be amazed by the miserably inadequate ways bad programmers do things.
Two important developments with the GPS are that it has now proved its worth and I have found an unintended use for that worth. I claim unintended because the GPS is most definitely not designed for motorcycle use. It has to be propped on the gas tank and the voice commands are ineffective above 10 mph.
So, what did I find that was so great? Navigating small towns a few notches below the posted speed limit. That’s where “motorbike GPS” came into its own. Even the finest printed maps can’t guide you through towns like Fitzgerald and Abbeville, places with unmarked jogs in the road. Once I figured out how to program waypoints to defeat the internal software tendency to direct me to the nearest freeway by default, and to allow around 10% more time to make decisions, I made excellent progress down these secondary roads. I even had time to snap photos like this one, to prove I was there.You know I avoid freeways and therefore I planned the entire trip last night, so it was not a rigorous and unbiased GPS test. But the evolution here was that for the first fifty miles I was constantly checking for errors, the next fifty I used it to confirm my plan, but by the last fifty, I trusted it enough to carry on after dusk, hardly bothering to read the road signs.
Now that it has earned that trust, tomorrow I will put it to the test. There are a series of small paved roads I found long ago on a satellite photo that snake down the Florida west coast. Did I mention I’m 48 hours ahead of schedule? Let’s take the GPS on a fly-by-wire excursion. What flying schools would probably call an “instrument solo”. If successful, the GPS will be permanently incorporated into future sidecar trips. Promoted to co-pilot, that is.
Later. Here are the details of the plan. Ever heard of Steinhatchee, Florida? Neither have most people. (Say STEEN-ha-chee.) Population 1,047. Formerly called Dead Man’s Bay by the Spanish, for reasons. Pollution killed the sponge industry leaving mainly tourism and the local answer to Niagara, Steinhatchee Falls and don’t forget Miss Beverlyn shucking oysters to the music of Bob Butts. If the GPS can, before this day is out, get me into Steinhatchee and return me safely to earth, it gets an A+.
