tour of the white mountains

We are gathered here today to celebrate the passing of a good friend – my Garmin Foretrex 201 global positioning system receiver.
It’s career was long for a modern piece of electronics – more than six years. It’s been soaked by foul-smelling, Phoenix-in-the-summer dude sweat. By rain. Possibly by trace amounts of urine.
Through that all, it kept doing it’s duty, starting faithfully whenever it had the battery power – and always with an amusingly ambiguous graphic that looked like the silhouette of a man with a woody nearly half the size of his body, but was really just a man whose arm was stretched out holding a GPS.
Yes, it often bedeviled me, with its rechargeable battery that needed nearly eight hours of charging. And especially that pain-in-the-ass charging/computer cradle I often lost. And the serial connection rather than USB connection. Then there was the time I rode in my second Tour of the White Mountain – I was hoping to NOT get lost this year, and to make a map of the epic 66-mile mountain bike route. Well, that damn charging thing didn’t work … I had only enough power for about 20 miles. And yes, I got lost again. But I at least finished in once piece.
But not everything devolved into fiasco. In fact, those times were few. I celebrate its steady delivery of trackpoints, the many maps it helped me create and the fact it always seemed to be able to get signal. Hiking, biking, running. Australia to Tucson [...]