Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Henry Cowell

OH MY GOD FINALLY

I have been complaining to G about the increasingly shitty performance of my old-ass GPS for MONTHS now. I don't really want to buy a new GPS; they're expensive! I just want my ancient Forerunner 205 to keep ticking for a couple more years, thank you very much. But it's been getting harder and harder to sync it with the computer, or with the strava.com or connect.garmin.com sites - it just doesn't show up, or it throws an error message. So tonight we're patiently plugging and unplugging the damn thing, waiting to see if maybe the computer recognizes it, when all of a sudden G says "hey try a different USB cable" so I dig out a different USB cable and lo and behold it works.

So now I can finally tell you about LAST WEEK'S trip to Henry Cowell Redwoods park in Santa Cruz! I mean, I know I could've used my words and told you about it, but it's just not the same without the stupid GPS tracks.



Anyway. I went down there to meet with a maybe-newbie endurance rider. It's her "home turf" and I really enjoyed riding her forest and talking to her. Beautiful park, but very crowded - it was hard to get up a decent trot without popping up on a group of bikes or kids or dogs and having to slow to a walk.

It's about an hour away from Dixie's barn, so it's not too bad. Parking in the park itself is $10, which seems steep, so I might park at the fairgrounds next door the next time I go down. The redwoods are truly beautiful, and there's quite a few spots to wade through/across a lovely little creek. I will get pics next time!

Today I got out for the short loop in Arastradero, but Dixie did pretty good. She's pretty uninspired when we're alone.


4 comments:

  1. My Garmin 205 was never reliable in our iffy-overcast-Swampland weather. One time I covered more than 300 miles in a 2-hour training ride, which was impressive. Somehow it recorded a single waypoint in Saskatchewan....our average moving speed was pretty impressive that day!

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  2. Replies
    1. It's a Garmin Forerunner 205. I got it in 2009 at a REI garage sale, so it's had a long life. The battery still lasts about 11 hours, but it's iffy in canyons/trees - I don't know whether it's the GPS's fault or the fact that we're running out of actual GPS satellites for it to lock on to. My only complaint was that it was almost impossible to upload the data to my computer, and that appears to have been just the cable!

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