Three ways to be guided

Roads, no road at all, or a line of your own — and what happens where one hands over to the next.

A tour south. Two and a half days of tarmac down to the coast, then a morning in a dune field where no map on earth knows a road, and tarmac again in the evening, right up to the hotel. Three completely different ways of being guided. One plan.

The app never asks which mode you are in. It asks one thing only: what are you following right now?

Following roads

The ordinary case, and the one everybody manages. Mapped ways, turn instructions, a fresh route when you miss one. It only gets interesting at the question of which roads.

Schnell — getting there. Motorway allowed, because the corners do not start until the far side of the border and there is nothing to miss before then.

Tourer — the reason you bought the bike. Motorway only where there is no other way through. Otherwise the line a local would ride.

Adventure — takes in farm tracks, forest roads and gravel wherever they make the better link, and plans slower, because you are slower. This, incidentally, is precisely what the rest of the trade calls “offroad”: unsealed, but on the map.

Adventure Light — the same idea, with less appetite for gravel. For 80/20 tyres rather than 50/50. Or for cowards. No judgement from us; we ride a GS ourselves.

Following nothing — NoRoad

There are places where it is not the road that ends but the map’s jurisdiction. Desert. Steppe. A dry riverbed. A dune field that will be a different shape next week.

NoRoad works out no route, because there is nothing to work out. You drop points and get bearing and distance. No turn instruction, no snapping onto a line that is not there. A point counts as reached once you are within a hundred metres — that is the starting value, and it is yours to change.

And no, this is not offroad. Offroad is what everyone else means when they mean gravel tracks that are on the map. Here that is the Adventure profile, riding a perfectly ordinary route. NoRoad is the case behind it: no road, no opinion, just you and a bearing.

Most riders never need it. Anyone who does knew by the second sentence why they were still reading.

Following a line of your own

You have a GPX. Off a forum, from a mate, out of ten years of collected tours.

“Open with MotoNavigator”, and before a single thing is written, the app shows you a list: what is in the file, what it will become, which folder it lands in. Waypoints turn into places; tracks and routes stay what they were. With a dense track it asks exactly one question — keep every point, or boil it down to the ones that carry the shape.

Then you ride it, and here it gets interesting. Somebody else’s line is not a planned route: there is no next waypoint. There is only the line.

So when you leave it — roadworks, coffee, a sign you believed — what follows is not what you are used to. No new route. No “turn around where possible”. You get the way back onto your line, and forwards: onto a point ahead of you, not onto the spot where you came off. Anyone who has been sent twenty kilometres back down a road they had just ridden knows why that is the whole difference.

The seam

Now the part the trade has no word for.

Drop the three legs into one folder in the Projects tab: the run south, the dune field, the way home. Order them by dragging. Then Folder settings… once, and Auto-advance on.

That is all of it. At the end of the first leg the ride does not end, the leg does. The next one loads and carries on. No dialogue, no prompt, no “would you like to”. You stop at the petrol station because you want fuel, not because the software has a question.

Each leg brings its own kind of guidance with it. Run south as Tourer. Dune field as NoRoad. Way home as Adventure. Even a stranger’s track is allowed to be a link in the chain — and where that track refuses to lie down on roads at the hand-over, it gets ridden as NoRoad. You are told, rather than left to work it out at 80 km/h.

And the variants. At home you rarely plan one route. You plan three. The handsome one over the pass. The short one, for the day your backside takes a different view from your head. The one along the valley, because the forecast for Thursday is either lying or it is not.

All three sit in the same folder. Only ever one of them is live — the others are set to Disable, and the chain steps over them. Not deleted, just stood aside. Evening at the hotel, beer beside you, rain radar on the table: one off, one on. In the morning the app rides the one you settled on and keeps the rest where they are.

Two things it deliberately does not do. It never reorders you. And it skips nothing: if the next leg starts two kilometres further on, it gives you the number and loads it anyway. You built that folder, not the app.

Passing it on

GPX carries distance. It does not carry order.

So a collection — several legs, tracks and routes mixed, a sequence that means something — goes out as .mnav. The whole folder travels: structure, order, which variant is parked, and the Auto-advance switch with it. Nobody at the far end has to sort anything out. They ride — or they decide on the spot which of the variants you planned is the live one.

GPX manages exactly one case: a folder holding nothing but tracks, flat, not filed twice over. That comes back the way it was sent. Anything above that falls apart — not because GPX is poor, but because at that point there is no field left that could carry the statement.