Can you give us a "nutshell" summary of the "no outside help" and minimum electronic tomfoolery for this years boni? I thought the rules for this year were changed to get more "back to basics".
In a nutshell.... absolutely, positively NO routing assistance at all by anyone except the individual rider him/herself. There is NO non-rider assistance allowed whatsoever, under penalty of disqualification. Period.
Riders may - if desired - work as a "team" together, but if they do, they must "declare" this teaming to the rallymaster prior to departure. Further, the team MUST ride together, and score every every bonus together. If the team arrives at the next checkpoint and the "team" members do not have identical bonii collected, it's MAJOR, MASSIVE penalty points. Bottom line: if you team with another rider, than you "never, ever leave your wingman".
The bonus listing no longer has directions to locate the bonuses. They are provided street addresses (if the location has an actual address), and GPS waypoints for it. That's it. Now, overall, the bonus listing takes two forms:
i) a USB Flash drive containing over 130 bonus waypoints, in several file formats for popular mapping software.
ii) a traditional bonus listing that describes the bonus requirements, the points associated with the bonii, any time constraints associated with the bonii, etc, etc.
We gave the jump drives to riders about 2 hours before the Riders Banquet, so they could load the waypoints into their mapping software and see all the pushpins. When they received their actual bonii listing, each bonus has a three digit code associated with a pushpin waypoint. Now it becomes a more traditional bonus plotting exercise: see where the 10 most highest valued bonus is actually located, and begin to plot your route from there.
