Touring using Wahoo ‘Take me to...’ feature

heavymental
heavymental Posts: 2,076
in Tour & expedition
Has anyone had any experience of touring using a wahoo GPS? I was considering the fact that these days I guess you could plot a whole world tour at your kitchen table and follow the route using your gps device. It then occurred to me that using my Wahoo with its ‘Take me to...’ feature, you could simply use this feature for all your route planning; trusting the data on the wahoo system to choose a nice route. I tried typing in a random place in France to navigate to as a tester but the fact there’s water in the way, I guess, meant it gave an error message.

Has anyone used a GPS like this?

Comments

  • roger_merriman
    roger_merriman Posts: 6,165
    heavymental said:

    Has anyone had any experience of touring using a wahoo GPS? I was considering the fact that these days I guess you could plot a whole world tour at your kitchen table and follow the route using your gps device. It then occurred to me that using my Wahoo with its ‘Take me to...’ feature, you could simply use this feature for all your route planning; trusting the data on the wahoo system to choose a nice route. I tried typing in a random place in France to navigate to as a tester but the fact there’s water in the way, I guess, meant it gave an error message.

    Has anyone used a GPS like this?

    I suspect you’d get better routes using your phone with Strava/Komoot to plot a route and then follow that, I have a old Garmin Touring which can route to address/points of interest ie train stations/pubs etc. It’s not bad considering it’s on the device and once in a blue moon useful.

    I’d not hold out much hope that modern GPS are much better in that regard to be honest!

  • heavymental
    heavymental Posts: 2,076
    Route plotting on a phone is a bit fiddly though isn’t it. That’s the only issue. If I was just going away for a few days I’d be happy to plot a route on the laptop and stick to it but for anything longer where you might want to change your mind it’s nice to have a quick way to load a route and I was thinking the ‘Take me to...’ would be a good solution.
  • fenix
    fenix Posts: 5,437
    Even plotting routes myself I usually include a road that doesn't exist every once in a while.
    I can't see that Wahoo would do better.
    Garmin does show you popular routing though so that helps - if bikes are going through then it should be passable.
  • davep1
    davep1 Posts: 836
    Was reading reviews of the Garmin 530, a Lezyne and a Wahoo yesterday. One of the units big plus points was it could allow you to reroute from a previously plotted route on the fly, I think it was the Lezyne. The other units meant plotting a new route from where you were and uploading it to the devide, wheras the Lezyne (if it was that one!) had a better way of the user doing it with just the device.
  • heavymental
    heavymental Posts: 2,076
    Just to update on this. I've just got back from 2 weeks in Brittany and we used the Wahoo 'Take me to...' quite a bit. 98% of the time it took us on good routes and only occasionally it let us down with a curveball e.g a mucky bridleway that was impassable at a certain point. It was quite funny in cities as it makes you feel like a local as it takes little paths through parks or tiny local cut throughs. On the other hand, when we were already on one of the main cycle paths (number 7 to Roscoff) it wanted to take us off on a different route but as I had the cycle route programmed in it wasn't a problem but does go to show that it might divert you away from a more obvious route due to a quirk of the data it's using. It was simple enough to whip your phone out and use the feature although that wouldn't be much use anywhere more remote (with no phone signal) of course. All good fun though, I quite enjoyed using it really.

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