Finnish Curve Cowboys

Our Thursday route on yellow.

Because of writing late on the blog previous night we slept late and got up only at 8:30. So we got moving pretty late and our target was Oklahoma City where we had agreed upon a meeting with John Spencer (aka “jspen” on the LT-forum).
We totally missed the "cooler weather" morning as it was already +26 C when we started.

Our GSM cell phones were dead most of Texas but they came alive when we got to Oklahoma so we agreed with John that we will stay overnight at a new Best Western in Yukon (a suburb of Oklahoma City).

After few miles from Dalhart Texas my (or actually Roy’s) Garmin ran out of detail maps. Obviously these Southern states were left out when the SD-card was downloaded but we were allright with the basemap only as we did not need to do any street search in cities. I was hoping that the unit had already Oklahoma City but that also was on the base map only.
So, I got a very good excuse to download my US maps to my European BMW Navi II and see how that would manage on the new continent. I had not used that unit since Farnkfurt, Germany as Roy’s unit worked so well. Now I installed my unit on the bike and fired it up. The GPS starting procedures took quite a while but as soon as the unit got figured out where it was it worked perfectly! Or let’s say almost perfectly…As the unit has no American base map it just shows a pink line on a plain yellow base every time it starts a new route. But as soon as I hit the “IN” button of the BMW cradle the unit switches to detail map mode and everything is clear as a bell.
BUT, (and this I learned later…) as the unit has no American base map I can not choose the routing options between “shortest” and “fastest”. The unit wants always do the shortest. As long as the shortest and fastest are pretty much the same it is not a problem, but sometimes the routing can be very confusing. The unit speaks to me in Finnish but I set it to show miles so I can keep some track of the speed we are doing. So now it was proven that my concern of my Euro GPS not working in the US was unnecessary.
So after all it was good that Roy’s unit ran out of detail maps. This way I got to test my own unit and now I know it works.

Getting started from Dalhart TX and
Long Texas straights...
Finally hit the magic +40 C mark, waaaaay to hot for us Finns....
Meeting John Spencer in Yukon OK.
He and hs girlfriend took us to a nice bike shop -resturant on the famous Route 66 which we would have missed otherwise. We had the false impression that riding on Interstate 40 was the same as doing Route 66...We realised it only few miles before arriving to Oklahoma City.








Thanks to John and Lindy we made it to Route 66 and here is the proof.






















In the bike shop there were some very nice "Kit Bikes" for sale.












Jouko was about to trade his LT for this one but then he realized that the speedometer was only reading miles (or maybe it was missing totally, I don't remember...) . Now that is a real inconvenience on the European side of the pond so he decided to leave it for now.