I keep a county road map tucked away in my handlebar bag for those times when I feel like exploring new routes. It’s a good map, but it’s a nuisance to use: My Louis Garneau HB-09 bar bag doesn’t sport a built-in map case. So, not long after buying the Garneau, I fitted a Cyco Active Products Barmap to the top of the bag, holding it in place with velcro loops and shock cord.

And here it is:

This picture tells a story. While the Barmap is well made, it’s a little on the small side—not bad for holding a cue sheet, maybe, but not really big enough for a typical accordion-fold paper map. Which is why I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for something better. And now I think I’ve found it: the Zefal Doomap. The name’s a bit off-putting, I admit. (Was I alone in reading it as “Doofus” on first encounter? I doubt it.) But the Doomap is cleverly designed, incorporating a transparent PVC envelope and an articulated stiffener to keep an open map from flopping about as you ride along. The mounting system is flexible, too, and the case can be folded in two different ways, accommodating both half-sheet and full-sheet layouts. To be sure, it’s a bit dear at the going price (about USD20), but I’ve paid more and gotten less.

Now here’s a look at the mounting system…

…and the instruction sheet, with its helpful overview of the different configurations.

As the next photo shows, there’s plenty of room for a typical road map, and when used in the full-sheet mode, the Doomap let’s you take in a lot of country at a glance:

That’s a real plus. I like my Garmin GPS, but the commemorative-stamp-sized display is too small to give much of a feel for the big picture, and this is often a problem during on-the-road navigation. Now the problem is solved. A small-scale paper map in a Doomap case fills the gap nicely. I’ll need to kludge the attachment system a bit, however. My bar bag, cyclometer, and GPS take up most of the available real estate on my handlebars. But this shouldn’t pose insuperable difficulties.

And then I’ll be taking it on the road. Will the Doomap do the job? Stay tuned.

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I recently wrote a piece for Paddling.net outlining the uses of the Kindle e-book reader. And as the title of that article suggests, books are just the beginning. Many manufacturers make PDF versions of their user guides and manuals available for the price of a click, and since the Kindle has no trouble digesting and displaying most PDFs, I’ve now loaded a sizable library of product manuals onto my 3G. Never again will I have to rely wholly on my (somewhat fallible) memory when I struggle with the more arcane functions of my GPS! It won’t make any difference if I’m traveling by pedal or paddle, either. What works in a riverside camp will work equally well during a lunch stop on a cyclotour.

And the story doesn’t end there. Why should I limit myself to manufacturer-supplied manuals and user guides, after all? I can roll my own, too. Making PDFs is pretty straightforward, after all, and my Paddling.net article outlines the basic steps. But maybe you’re wondering why I would want to go to the trouble. Well, here’s a for-instance: I do all the work on my bike that needs doing. All of it, without exception. So frequent jobs like changing a tube, cleaning a chain, or fitting new brake shoes are pretty much second nature. But other jobs come round only once in a blue moon. Take replacing a shifter cable, for example. A couple of years back, I snapped a cable on a grocery run into town. I had a spare cable, but I’d never had to replace one before. To make matters worse, it was January, and the shifter in question was an SRAM GripShift. A great shifter, to be sure, but fitting a new cable to any twist-grip shifter is a notoriously fussy job. (Farwell compares it to threading a moving needle in an unlighted room at midnight.) I struggled for a few minutes, but I soon realized I needed the help of a repair manual, and at that point I decided to beat a retreat before frostbite claimed my fingers. Luckily, the failed cable was the one controlling the front derailleur, so it was a simple job to wedge the cage over the middle chainring and soldier on. I was down to seven speeds, but I only had 10 miles to go. Needless to say, I didn’t set any records on the hills, and it was all hills on the way back.

Back home, in a heated room with a repair manual (and a wee dram of Islay malt) at my elbow, I swapped out the old cable for a new one in short order. OK. That’s an exaggeration. It took me the better part of an hour. Farwell is right. It is a fussy job. But the outcome was never in any doubt. Suppose, however, that I’d been 100 miles from home base instead of 10 when the cable parted. Or 1000. What would I have done then? I don’t have room in my panniers for the 1088 pages of Barnett’s Manual. But I do have space for my Kindle. The good news? That and my carry-along repair kit give me the tools I need to do almost any job.

But first I need to do a little homework. So now I’m working up a series of take-along guides, illustrated PDFs outlining a variety of common (and not-so-common) roadside repairs. Here’s the list so far:

• • Replacing a broken spoke
• • Truing a wobbly wheel
• • Dealing with a broken chain link
• • Replacing brake and shifter cables
• • Adjusting derailleurs
• • Removing and replacing cranks
• • Adjusting old-style cup-and-cone bottom brackets
• • Overhauling pedals

At one time or another, I’ve had to do all of these things, and so far I’ve been lucky. I’ve been able to do them on my workbench at home. If trouble struck while I was on the road, however, I’d probably need something to jog my memory. But even if I didn’t, it would still be good to know that help was at hand, just in case. So I figure any time I spend preparing the guides will be time well spent. Don’t you agree?

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Some time back (OK, a looong time back), I wrote a piece for Paddling.net that I subtitled “The Virtues of Simplicity.” It concluded with a ringing call to arms, in which I argued that, since “self‑reliance and simplicity lie at the heart of what we [paddlers] do,” we should “heed the warning implicit in the note, ‘Batteries not included.’” The unstated implication, of course, was that we’d all be better off if we left most of our electronic gadgets at home. Good advice, that. Or so I thought at the time. But times change, and change comes increasingly fast. Today, it’s almost impossible to imagine any right‑thinking paddler heading out to the backcountry without a small arsenal of electronic aides: cell phone, GPS, e‑book reader, personal locator beacon…

And I’m no exception. Which is why I figured it was high time to revisit another topic from the past — water disinfection. Here, too, change has come fast. A for‑instance: In my most recent foray into the subject, a column optimistically titled “Water Purification Brought Up to Date,” I pooh‑poohed the idea that portable ultramicrofiltration (0.02 μm) systems would soon become available. But now, only five years on, they’re … well, not commonplace, exactly … but widely advertised. It’s true that field reports are mixed, with some users complaining that flow rates are dishearteningly slow. Still, the technology to filter even the smallest pathogens from water has indeed left the laboratory and ventured out into the backcountry.

Me? I’m not likely to embrace this particular advance any time soon. You can put my hesitancy down to impatience, if you like. Or simple laziness. In my experience, filters are fiddly things, and I blanch at the prospect of maintaining an ultramicrofilter in the field. I do use a gravity‑feed microfilter for bulk‑treating water in camp, but even this comparatively coarse (0.2 μm) filter requires a certain amount of coddling. Which is just one manifestation of a larger problem…Read more…

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