Merle’s Miles for MS

I rode a 2005 Catrike recumbent tricycle, Speed model, manufactured in Winter Garden, Florida. Mine is serial number 451. As one can assume from the model name this was probably not the best trike for cross-country riding. Catrike has other models better suited to touring. But this is the one that I have and I love it. It fits me well and I am comfortable on it. I made it do. I do wish that it had more ground clearance, however. Speed bumps and chuck holes could be real issues at times. And the high pressure tires with no suspension punished me quite a lot on the rough roads that I encountered throughout the trip.

I made some modifications to my Catrike to better suit it to riding over the Rocky Mountains. I added a SRAM Dual Drive 3 speed rear hub, giving my trike a total of 81 gears. Why on earth would anyone need 81 gears, you may ask. OK, you didn't ask. Well, I’ll tell you anyway. Many of the gears are so close together that they provide no meaningful difference. But the high and the low ranges that this number of gears gives allowed me to pedal up all of the hills that I encountered and allowed me to pedal even downhill to maintain a higher average speed. I am not an athlete so I needed all the help that I could get. You would think from the model name of my trike (Speed) that I am into racing, but this is not the case. I was 68 years old at the time of the trip and all the trophies had already been given out.

My son made a headlight/GPS mount for me to which I added a Cateye EL-500 headlight and a Garmin 76CX GPS unit. This combination worked admirably during my Columbia, TN trip and worked reasonably well during my big trip except for occasional failures due to vibration. I transferred all of my maps to the Garmin unit and was dependant upon it for directions on my journey. I did, however, take all of my paper maps for backup and used them sometimes, mostly for reassurance. Ultimately the magnetic switch on the Cateye failed and I needed to remove the batteries to turn it off. Three different Garmin GPS mounts broke, I presume from vibration, throwing my GPS onto the highway once and threatening to on a number of other occasions. I replaced the last one with a RAM mount as shown in the following picture when I got back home. It appears to be a better mount than the Garmin unit, but only time will tell. I will be using it on the 2008 Bike Ride Across Georgia in June.

GPS and headlight mount made by my son Mike
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Mirrors were a problem during the trip, I presume also from vibration. I had three breakages during the trip and one immediately before the trip during training. Of the four failures, there were two places that they tended to break, as you can see from the photos. >/p>

One of the broken mirrors temporarily fixed.
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Another of the broken mirrors.
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I added a rear fender and luggage rack for the trip. Flags were mounted by using cable ties. I also added a tail light/reflector/flag mount to the rear of the rack but vibration ultimately fatigued the aluminum and it broke off shortly after I got to the state of Washington. I did not put front fenders on the trike because I like to grab the front wheels to back up. I was not sorry for the omission, but then I only had about four half-days of rain.

Rear fender and luggage rack.
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I added the SRAM Dual Drive by having a local wheel shop splice it into a new rim. I used the SRAM derailleur that came with the Catrike but swapped out the right-hand twist grip for one designed to work both the rear derailleur and the new three speed hub. The new twist grip shifter worked well and was easy to use. The gear range is now wide enough that I can pull stumps in my spare time. I had no significant problems with any of the hills once I got out of the Ozarks. They were not too bad - just slow. If you count all the training rides and the MS 150 Savannah Challenge ridden before my long trip, I have ridden approximately 5000 miles with this Dual Drive installation with no problems whatsoever. I rode it over the Rockies and the Cascades so I know that it is good for pulling long hills. I turned north from Colorado and followed the Rocky Mountain Range into Montana, so I ended up crossing the continental divide nine times. That's a lot of hill climbing, so I know it works well for that.

SRAM Dual Drive.
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SRAM twist grip for Dual Drive.
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On the back of the chase vehicle I mounted a modified cargo rack that carried a generator and some spare parts, and could carry my trike too, whenever the need arose. My son welded a cargo rack, a Hitch Rider trike rack, and miscellaneous bits and pieces together to make this FrankenRack. It worked very well for the job at hand. In the photo you can see the spare wheels I took along and never needed.

FrankenRack made by my son.
(Click on picture for a larger image)

My grand conclusion is that the trike worked well, as modified, for the trip except that it was a harsh ride indeed. If I were to start from scratch I would probably choose a Catrike Road. The main reason for this is because all three wheels are the same size and are a more mainstream diameter. This means that tires and tubes could be found along the way and are available in more styles.
I started out the trip with Greenspeed Scorchers tires on the front, which worked fine but were used when the trip started and were cut up by the time I reached the Mississippi River. Since I was only carrying folding tires as spares, they were replaced by Schwalbe Stelvios before I reached Missouri. I could not tell much difference between the Scorchers and the Stelvios. But bear in mind that the really, really rough roads didn't start until I reached Missouri. Through Missouri, Colorado, and Wyoming I was pummeled by the bumps.

I have saved the performance of the Garmin GPS units until last because there is simply a lot to this part of the story.
By and large, I was dependant upon the GPS units, although I took paper maps along. I had spent many hours planning the trip on my home computer. I used paper maps transferred to Microsoft Streets and Trips software for the initial planning, then transferred the route into Garmin Mapsource software. I found that I needed to be very specific in plotting points on the map in order to get the Garmin software to follow the roads that I wanted it to follow. I ended up telling the software that I was driving a car rather than riding a bicycle because it was easier for me to stay on the roads that I wanted that way.
After the trip was planned, and broken into manageable sections, I downloaded it into the Garmin GPSmap 76Cx unit for the trike and the Zumo 550 unit for the RV. I then followed the route on the units themselves, scrolling all the way across the United States at my desk. What I found was amazing. The Garmin software on my computer and the Garmin software in the two GPS units all three wanted to calculate different routes! I had to go back to the computer software and add many more waypoints in order to more closely follow the chosen route. Hours and hours of itterations were required to finally get the three different algorithms to plot the same path across the country. Even then, there were a couple of places in the country that they still disagreed.
I am a retired computer systems analyst/programmer and have worked with computer software for over 40 years. Although I am not an expert in mapping software, one thing that I have learned over those years is that if you use three different algorithms you will get three different results. I would have been much happier if I could have just checked the route on the computer and been satisfied that the route would stay the same once it was loaded into the GPS units. But that's not the way Garmin did the programming. Still, once I got the path properly constructed, the GPS units did a pretty good job. To be sure, there were a couple of occasions where I was told to turn into a cow pasture, but I suspect that any brand of GPS would have a few problems like this.
On the trip home we let the GPS units do more of the route calculation, giving them just enough direction to keep up off the Interstate highways as much as possible. Of course there were a few places, like crossing the Mississippi River, where it would have required us to drive 200 miles out of the way to avoid the Interstate. The GPS unit tried to take us across the Columbia River where there was no bridge, and once tried to take us across 3 miles of open water without a ferry to get from one island to another, but we knew enough not to do it.
The bottom line here is: I would have been lost without the GPS units, but I could not always believe them without paper evidence.