The Things You Find On A Garmin

A ride this past weekend led me to finding this, hadn't really thought about it until seeing it but it's an interesting sort of documentary.

I decided to bring my Garmin along so I could find my way on roads that I'd never been on before. And it was a fun ride (thanks again Robin and Jouko!). It was about 2 1/2 hours of riding and it was a good test of my neck. I felt more comfortable than when Andrea and I were in Vermont, a little more flexible too. Progress, but still lots of room for improvement.

So... this morning I uploaded the ride to Garmin Connect along with all of the other rides it had stored on it. The most recent one before this weekend was from April 7th 2013 (I didn't bring the Garmin to Vermont which is the only other time I've ridden since April). Here's the map from that day...

A day in the life of...

The start is at the Turkeypen trail head parking lot, the end is at the motel where we finally settled in for the night. In between it shows:

• a few hours of riding, along the various trails we rode that day. It was an out-and-back route.
• then some slower walking, making my way back to the parking lot.
• a quick drive to the hospital in Brevard, where they put me in a temporary neck brace and did the  CT scan.
• then while I was whisked to the Asheville hospital in an ambulance, Andrea drove Babe to the campground and then on to Asheville (that's around 8 hours into this day that started around 11AM).
• Then the drive back to the campground. A short drive from the hospital to a drug store for pain killers, then back to the campground. But instead of spending the night in Babe we got a motel room at the corner where the BiLo is. That would make it around 13 hours later. That night wasn't very restful.

Obviously, with all of the things happening no-one thought about the Garmin or turning it off.

Seeing this certainly brought back a lot of memories. Some are in the blog entry I linked to above, some I hadn't included. This kind of tells the story that I skipped over between my crash and the drive back to Toronto, in a way I wouldn't have thought of. The very definition of a life-altering moment, captured via a GPS.

And for the Garmin / Strava geeks, here are the details of the ride.
Pisgah by pkraiker at Garmin Connect - Details