A free day with sunshine and I decided to revisit an old haunt, the Adventure Bike Shop down in Suffolk near the classic English small town, Long Melford. I saw, a while back, that they have stopped selling clothing and have some discounts to clear their stock. Baselayers that I bought many years ago are in bad need of being thrown out and replaced by something with a bit of life (and stretch) in them so this was in my mind. Over the years I have spent thousands with the Adventure Bike Shop, on a helmet or two and Klim clothing.

The shop has a lot of Touratech stock, all kinds of items large and fiddly-small in little packets. And it still had what looked like a pretty full stock of Klim suits. I suppose they take a long time to sell, being a major investment for most riders. Luckily for me they had a good selection of base layers, Solstice (a name which brings out the hippy in me – more than their Aggressor range) shirt and leggings which I had never seen before and at half price. And everything fitted perfectly when I tried it on at home.

But I sat down to write about the next episode in my navigation indecisions. As a paid up subscriber to My Route App, it was time I used it – to plan a slightly more cross-country route from Cambridge to Acton (the one in Suffolk not west London) than blasting down the A14 which is very easy to do. Not so easy at all is transferring the route onto my Garmin Zumo. I ended up with one of those double routes that includes the route you want to travel along plus a dead straight line from start to finish. So I made this journey with the Zumo’s version of the 36 mile route in front of me as well as My Route App running on my Aoocci CarPlay device. The Zumo showed the correct route but also the straight line option constantly telling me that I was ‘off the route’ even when I was on it. MyRouteApp on the other hand behaved perfectly and even recalculated when I missed a turn – which the Zumo was in no state to do. On the way home though, the Aoocci did not seem to find a signal via my phone until well into the journey (so was of little use) while the Zumo was able to guide me home without a problem – the advantage of a true GPS. But once I did have CarPlay running, I was able to switch to Waze briefly to get information about an unexpected jam in one of the small towns I had to pass through.

My decision then is to ride with both when I need guidance. The phone did not use very much data to take me on this 70 mile round trip so it would be doable on a European trip, perhpas with a local SIM.