My brother and I just returned Tuesday from a trip down the Mid-Atlantic Backcountry Discovery Route with a side-trip to Overland Expo East.
We had been talking about doing a Fall trip to West Virginia and somehow the subject of the MABDR came up about two weeks before departure. The route is designed by and for adventure-bike riders but I'd seen enough YouTube footage to see a good bit of it is on paved country roads and state and national forest gravel roads. We figured we'd do as much as we can in my Tundra/Hawk truck camper rig and if nothing else we'd get some GPS and map-reading experience routing around the sections we can't do. And we'd get some experience deciding when to avoid a section and when to turn back. And we'd probably get experience backing longer distances on narrow two-track and in making 12-point turns.
The route runs 1000-plus miles from near the North Carolina-Virginia state line at Damascus, Virginia to the Pennsylvania-New York state line at Lawrenceville, PA.
The route of the MABDR can be downloaded to import into a GPS. I learned I could also order a micro-SD card version and simply plug it into my GPS. That version is available from the Self-Guided Rides portion of gpsKevin Adventure Rides. I had a great experience with them. I learned of the micro-SD card version on a weekend and sent an email on Sunday saying I'd like to order but only if I can get it by the next weekend (they're in Escondido). I had a response within hours saying they were on the road but would be back late Tuesday and could ship via FedEx Wednesday. I had it Thursday morning.
My brother had just bought a Garmin Montana GPS for his adventure-bike so he brought it along after downloading the GPS file from ridebdr (and installing it via Basecamp). He was just curious about the route differences and wanted to get very familiar with his new GPS.
And there are indeed differences. The ridebdr version doesn't show at all until you go into Track Manager and select a numbered track and slide the Show On Map slider. The route displays as a small line overlaid on the map and it does not indicate direction of travel. Each section has to be turned on individually. Also, the sections are slightly different.
The gpsKevin version displayed the full route as soon as I powered up the GPS after installing the micro-SD card. The main route is shown as a series of blue arrowheads jammed next to each other. That version also shows a green-arrowheads route (typically a hard-road bypass of the blue route) and a red-arrowheads route indicating optional Expert sections of the route. It also has what I call 'bullseyes'-- orange circles around important points like gas-stops in the more remote areas and route-section changes.
On the other hand, the ridebdr route may be kept updated more often than the gpsKevin route. We were running both GPS units the whole time and we had two occurrences where the gpsKevin blue route ran into a closed road. The first was a prominent private-property sign, the second a closed forest-road gate. In a third case, we just noticed the routes were different and thought perhaps the gpsKevin one was giving a more direct route to a bulls-eyed gas stop.
We had four road, bridge, and railroad-crossing construction closures to route around. These were simply temporary closures due to bridge and crossing repairs and culvert installations. These route-arounds were good practice using the GPS and maps to figure out how to navigate to a point further along the route while not skipping too much of the route.
-- continued in another post below---
