Ok so I have 3 more benefit rides planned for this year. Each route is different. I am using a Garmin Nuvi somethin' somethin' model. Anywho, I was wondering if there is a way to take a route that I had custom made on google maps and transfer that route so it is usable into a Garmin or TomTom GPS? Past rides I have always "worried" that I would get to our destination to soon or to late and even worried about missing a turn even though I was 100% sure of where I was going to begin with. It would be pretty embarrassing to be the leader/host of a benefit ride and get lost and ask others for directions.

Thanks for the help

Michael

Don't know how to import into the Garmon. I do know that you can make a map in Google Maps and import it into your Andriod phone. Or go old school and prerun the course. Take a paint ball gun and blast the road with pink balls at right hand turns and blue one for left.

My Thunderbolt came with google navigation preloaded on it. And I think that RamMounts makes a mount for just about anything in the world that you would want to mount to your handle bars, if you wanted to go that route anyway. I know on my Garmin Nuvi its always a pain to get the exact route i want and not the one it wants...

Of course, you may already know this but I have found a much easier way to plan your own route. I was having trouble getting it to do what I WANTED and not what IT wanted. So if you don't know how, here's how.

1) Pick your start point
2) Right Click
3) Chose Directions from here
4) Somewhere in the direction in which you want to go chose Direction to here
5) After that (like at each turn) right click and chose "add destination"
6) Do that all the way to the end of your route. It will calculate the mileage
7) If you mess up and click the wrong place just go to the left side of the screen and delete that road or whatever. It should always be the last road listed.

I hope that wasn't too complicated for you. I just figured it out and is much easier now for me. I have too much downtime at the FD it seems.

Garmin provides route planning software also - it's called BaseCamp and can be found on their website. It's a free download on their website (garmin.com) if I remember correctly. As long as you put appropriate via points in, the route should be forced to follow where you want to go - not what the fastest or shortest route is. Then you should be able to transfer the route to your device.
Of course, this all depends on which Garmin device you have...

-R

Micheal, you should also be able to download Garmins program "mapsource".

bill

http://www8.garmin.com/support/download_details.jsp?id=4435

i use mapsource.