So, we all make mistakes. Hopefully we learn from them. Sometimes it’s really great when someone else makes a mistake and you can learn from their missteps, without having to mess up yourself. In this newsletter, I hope to let you learn from my most recent mess up (see this newsletter for another one of my mess ups).

We were tandem mountain bike riding with the Eastern Tandem Offroad Rally last weekend and at one point I noticed that my Garmin 1000 was no longer on my handlebars. We searched all over and could not find it. Guess I should have used that strap to secure it better on the bike!

I did eventually get my Garmin back! A very nice person found it along the trail. I am a firm believer that most people are genuinely good, especially if you give them the opportunity to be so. Our contact information comes up on the Garmin when you turn it on. The Good Samaritan saw this and contacted us. A number of people at the rally asked us how we set up our Garmin to show our contact info. So here we go…

I stumbled across this neat trick that lets you set your name and phone number to be displayed for a while before the home screen comes up. Rather than recreating that info here, I’ll just point you to the source – the DC Rainmaker site, which has all kinds of great info on Garmins.

And, another thing I learned is that if you have a Garmin with a tether like the 1000 does, you should wrap the tether around your handlebar and loop the unit through, so even if it falls off the mount, it’s still attached to your bike. I will always be doing this in the future, especially on the mountain tandem.