Well I've done it. After two months of farkling (thank you all for your advice and wealth of information), I finally completed my first rally.
Some products from the forum that made this happen:
From WYNN (thanks Dave): BigFoot, Ram Bone, Uber Ram Bone
From Garauld (thanks Gary): Refreshment system, light brackets, and custom GXM40 antenna bracket, painted mirror extenders
From Real Time Industries (thanks Alex): 3200 Lumen LED lights, Sena SMH10, and decals
On to the nuts and bolts:
So this was to be an efficiency rally. I like that for my first. I felt like i had a fighting chance rather than those that have demonstrated their ability to put on monster miles along with some critical thinking to win rallies. So here we go with route planning. I used MapSource exclusively. I also have Streets and Trips (the crowd favorite?) but found MapSource with 2013 maps newly downloaded did everything I asked of it. I went with a numbe of strategies to try to maximize points per mile. Won't go into all the details here but after 3 days of planning had an epiphany changed the route to include more medium small bonuses (but lots of them) in Pennsylvania in addition to my goal of getting the 777 points for Pickens, WV. Only requirements to be a finisher were to ride 900 corrected miles and get receipts showing a 3 hour "rest" and finally to visit Col Jim Young's grave on the Fort Indiantown Gap National Cementary outside of Harrisburg. This new routing got me 10.9 points per mile if I could stick with every crappy logging trail road that Garmin would come with as the "shortest". Even if I couldn't hack the roads or started getting short on time, I could go to fastest for some or all legs and still get well above 9 points per mile. No idea if that was good or not, so I just went for it.
The other thing I liked about the revised route is that it gave me more time to get to Pickens, WV on Day 1 as it was a daylight only bonus. All my bonii after that (until getting all the way through Pennsylvania in my clockwise route) were available 24 hours.
Some products from the forum that made this happen:
From WYNN (thanks Dave): BigFoot, Ram Bone, Uber Ram Bone
From Garauld (thanks Gary): Refreshment system, light brackets, and custom GXM40 antenna bracket, painted mirror extenders
From Real Time Industries (thanks Alex): 3200 Lumen LED lights, Sena SMH10, and decals
On to the nuts and bolts:
So this was to be an efficiency rally. I like that for my first. I felt like i had a fighting chance rather than those that have demonstrated their ability to put on monster miles along with some critical thinking to win rallies. So here we go with route planning. I used MapSource exclusively. I also have Streets and Trips (the crowd favorite?) but found MapSource with 2013 maps newly downloaded did everything I asked of it. I went with a numbe of strategies to try to maximize points per mile. Won't go into all the details here but after 3 days of planning had an epiphany changed the route to include more medium small bonuses (but lots of them) in Pennsylvania in addition to my goal of getting the 777 points for Pickens, WV. Only requirements to be a finisher were to ride 900 corrected miles and get receipts showing a 3 hour "rest" and finally to visit Col Jim Young's grave on the Fort Indiantown Gap National Cementary outside of Harrisburg. This new routing got me 10.9 points per mile if I could stick with every crappy logging trail road that Garmin would come with as the "shortest". Even if I couldn't hack the roads or started getting short on time, I could go to fastest for some or all legs and still get well above 9 points per mile. No idea if that was good or not, so I just went for it.
The other thing I liked about the revised route is that it gave me more time to get to Pickens, WV on Day 1 as it was a daylight only bonus. All my bonii after that (until getting all the way through Pennsylvania in my clockwise route) were available 24 hours.
