Oooh Garmin, I hate you

Friday I had a lovely ride with ~C and the critters. She came out to my place and picked us up, then we headed about 5 miles up the road into Antelope Valley and parked. We took the horses, of course, and the dogs.

The howling winds gentle breezes were still caressing the land, so I wasn't really sure how Dixie would act. She loaded well and even stood well to get her neck clipped. She started off a little giraffe-headed, but we walked for the first couple of miles and she settled into work very well. Diego was completely horrified about C's windbreaker, which was making some alarming crackling snapping sounds, but he eventually got his game face on too.

It's funny how our horses are so different. Dig is completely sweet, a little squirrely, and needs to be asked to slow down in order to calm down. He responds to the normal advice you get about horses - ask him to slow down, ask him to move his feet, get his brain back. Dixie is independent minded and distrustful, and she needs to go faster in order to slow down. If she spooks or starts off hot, I have to let her go forward. Trot or canter, it doesn't matter - she has to have the freedom to move for a few strides. Then I can ask her to slow down, and she will. If I try to boss her around without letting her have those few strides of freedom, we just get in a huge fight and get angry with each other.

Cersei is an old hat at endurance training. She stayed near us the whole time (and kept Diego on edge.) C's dog Molly is much younger and more excitable, so she covered WAY more miles darting off to chase rabbits (and popped back up to keep Dixie on edge.) I don't know how Molly is feeling, but Cersei has been an exceptionally snoozy dog today!

The area is where Rides of March is held, but we took a new trail. It's not really suitable to run a ride over, but it was super cool to train on. We found trees! They were junipers, so they're more like overgrown shrubs, but they're big enough to feel like you're in a very sparse forest. We followed a cow trail up a hill, then found a dirt bike trail, then eventually popped out on this absolutely lovely ridge. The path down was very narrow and dry, so we walked the horses down the hill again. It was SO pretty.

Friday's ride was pretty much my one-year Garmin anniversary. The stupid Garmin Connect site isn't working correctly for me right now, or I'd show you my pitiful stats. Instead, here's the post from a year ago. We really have come a long way, and I'm so proud of Dixie.

Here's Friday's ride. Almost 14 miles, tooling along at a calm steady pace.

Garmin Connect has "teamed up" with Microsoft to "improve" my "experience" by using Bing maps. I hate Bing maps. I like Google Maps, or even topo maps - the whole thing about Nevada riding is the hills! What good is it if I can't see the hills? And it's not like GC was ever very useful to play with aggregate data. The only interesting thing I can tell you is that in the last 365 days, Dixie and I have done 577.49 miles (with the GPS on.)

So I'm looking for a new GPS analysis program for the Mac. I am trialing rubiTrack, TrailRunner, and Ascent. Does anybody know of any other options? All three that I'm trying out seem to have pros and cons, but they use REAL maps and let you play with the data.