Sport Touring Corner By Norm Kern, MSTA Editor / ReasonsToRide.com Contributor
“Should I buy heated grips or heated
Finding Fun Riding Nearby Looking at the area South of Dayton (there is nothing but flat farmland to the North), there are just scattered twisty roads to the West. Heading South, (going just far enough East to avoid the big urban areas) things get better quickly. The hilly areas on the North side of the Ohio river, all the way from New Richmond to East of Portsmouth provide plenty of twisties to explore.
During regular riding season (which is just around the corner!) Sport Touring Corner will concentrate on multi-day trips and rallies, but most sport touring riders with little vacation time and have to get most of their riding enjoyment from short rides of a day or less, limiting them to a one or two hundred mile radius from home. Even though I'm free to travel during the rally season from April through October, there is still another five months in the offseason that includes some relatively nice days even during Winter for day rides. Ohio has plenty of twisty roads, but they are not evenly distributed across the state. It's pretty easy to see why we like the Marietta, Ohio, in the Southeast corner of the map, which is the home of Motorcycle Sport Touring Association's FlyBy Week, but if you look at the Dayton, Ohio area where I live, those of us who like twisties have to dig a bit to find them nearby. Finding Twisty Roads
I found this info in the maps at https://roadcurvature.com where there are downloadable files for every state and most foreign countries. The files are in KMZ format for Google Earth but require conversion to GPX format for most route planning apps, so I did conversions for Ohio and Indiana and posted them on my new Norms Rides website below. The Curvature GPX files can be downloaded from my web page, imported into Garmin BaseCamp and used as a guide for route planning. If the land around you is relatively flat, country roads are going to be arranged in a boring grid pattern, with 90 degree turns here and there based on property lines. Fortunately, rivers and creeks were there before civilization and follow the contours of the land, meandering even in flat areas.
I changed the color of the twisty roads to blue to contrast BaseCamp's default magenta route color. Now I can create new routes, knowing where the twisty roads are and recognizing easy ways to connect them.
Waterways were often the best way to move people and goods before a network of roads could be built. When roads were built they tended to follow rivers as they were the established paths of commerce. Rural roads tended to follow creeks, as they were a natural path. Bridges to cross them cost money so roads often follow them long distances to points that are easier to cross. Larger rivers are straighter, but they carve valleys with tributaries. Roads that along the tributaries often give you elevation changes along with the curves. 18
THUNDER ROADS® OHIO MAGAZINE
Since I have not ridden most of these roads- some might be gravel, not all public and some to not actually go through- they are not recommendations. They are merely roads to explore. When riding them I will mark the good ones with waypoints on the GPS for future reference. Later in BaseCamp I can use that info to change the color of the good roads and delete the bad ones. Some areas of the map have few blue roads. These are flat farming areas with relatively straight roads in a more rectangular
THUNDERROADSOHIO.COM
OHIO’S MOTORCYCLE MAGAZINE
