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Castell Grind 2020


bestbike85
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9 minutes ago, mack_turtle said:

There's nothing that I can think of to stop us from having an impromptu gravel ride on most of those courses. Not as fun since there's no big party and prizes, but we could do it.

This is true. 
 

They did cap the waitlists for all distances pretty low, so I’m thinking they may just dump them into the pack in the coming weeks. It’s money just waiting to be made. We’ll see. 

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On 11/2/2019 at 6:40 AM, mack_turtle said:

Wait-list. I was in the middle of the SSUSA Barton Creek Greenbelt ride at noon. We finished around 1:00 and everything was already full.

What - you don't get cell service in the Green Belt? 

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On 11/2/2019 at 6:41 AM, mack_turtle said:

There's nothing that I can think of to stop us from having an impromptu gravel ride on most of those courses. Not as fun since there's no big party and prizes, but we could do it.

We've used this free resource for planning gravel road rides; a company called Texas Trails Maps makes county maps showing all public roads; most Chambers of Commerce/Visitor Centers stock them for free, at least in the Hill Country. 

The company is based out of Llano and if you contact the Chamber of Commerce in Llano or Mason, they will be happy to mail you a map for their respective county.   In fact, the Llano CoC mailed me maps of Mason and Llano Counties, IIRC. 

http://www.llanochamber.org/ 

Phone: 325-247-5354

We did two rides out of Castell  three or four years ago and used the maps to plan our route.  Each road or highway is named; you can sus out the gravel/dirt roads based on the narrower, lighter line marking the road.  We found them to be accurate.  Also, it's easy enough to check out google maps to confirm road surface.

These are big fold-out maps, so a bit cumbersome to carry; we  made copies of the route  on regular 8.5 x 11 sheets and and carried those with us as we rode.  You can also cut off all the superfluous ads and whatnot on the margins and have a more manageable size.  Either way -- quite handy.  

When we were in Mason this fall to ride on the James River Road, we stopped in at the Chamber of Commerce/Visitor Center on the square and stocked up on maps for San Saba, Kerr, Northern Burnet, Blanco, Hayes, Lampasas, Menard, Mason and Llano counties.  As noted above, these are fold out maps;   the full county map is on one side, and a map of the county seat on the other, plus a few other towns if there's room. 

Ya, ya, paper maps are quaint in this era of GPS, google maps, whatever, but there's nothing like it for an overview for figuring out where the **** you actually are. 

More germane to this thread, you can use them as you preview/review your route for the Grind. 
 

 

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On 12/22/2019 at 4:19 PM, June Bug said:

We've used this free resource for planning gravel road rides; a company called Texas Trails Maps makes county maps showing all public roads; most Chambers of Commerce/Visitor Centers stock them for free, at least in the Hill Country. 

The company is based out of Llano and if you contact the Chamber of Commerce in Llano or Mason, they will be happy to mail you a map for their respective county.   In fact, the Llano CoC mailed me maps of Mason and Llano Counties, IIRC. 

http://www.llanochamber.org/ 

I wish I had done this a long time ago. I just contacted them to get some of these maps. We went on a ride yesterday and relied on some Ride with GPS routes and Google maps. as it turns out, many of the roads you see on Google Maps are in fact private roads, but not marked as such. We took 114 south from Llano and ended up looping back to Hwy 16 so we could get back before sundown. we only hit a few miles of actual dirt and the slog back to the car sucked. I'll have to find some better routes for next time.

I also zoomed in on the satelite picture for several roads I know I rode during HHH, and it appears that a lot of those roads are paved now.

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On 12/30/2019 at 3:24 PM, mack_turtle said:

I wish I had done this a long time ago. I just contacted them to get some of these maps. We went on a ride yesterday and relied on some Ride with GPS routes and Google maps. as it turns out, many of the roads you see on Google Maps are in fact private roads, but not marked as such. We took 114 south from Llano and ended up looping back to Hwy 16 so we could get back before sundown. we only hit a few miles of actual dirt and the slog back to the car sucked. I'll have to find some better routes for next time.

I also zoomed in on the satelite picture for several roads I know I rode during HHH, and it appears that a lot of those roads are paved now.

Yeah, you have to be careful to really study when you're planning routes and use street view when possible.  There's quite a few times I've had to change routes because of that issue - looks like a county road on the map but has a big gate when viewed via street view.  Sucks, too, because sometimes it's really the only good way through without going many miles around or getting on unsafe roads.

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