Thinking about an upcoming ride, I realized I don’t have US maps in Garmie. Unlike Wahoo, which makes maps available worldwide, Garmin very greedily ships with the local map only, and just basemaps for the rest of the world. (A basemap is a vague outline with no features, no road information, etc.) Maps for other regions are available for sale on its site.

When I was preparing for Lejog, I purchased the European map from Garmin. It was a difficult process, and I got the wrong map (I think it was for auto units) the first try. Garmin does not give refunds on the maps, either, so I ended up paying twice. And then it took multiple tries to download and install the map — it was a very large download and I had to restart it several times.

DuckDuckGo to the rescue

This morning when I searched “us map for garmin edge,” the second result was this blog post by DC Rainmaker. The site mentioned for getting the maps has moved — it’s now at garmin.bbbike.org — and the appearance does not match the screenshots. But the procedure is pretty much the same. I searched for Ohio, selected “Garmin Openfietsmap Lite (UTF-8)” for the format (the default), and entered my e-mail address.

Once I’d entered the correct e-mail address (aging is an amusing process), I only had to wait 5-10 minutes for an e-mail with a link to my download. The zip file was more than 400MB and took a couple of minutes to download, and then it took nearly 10 minutes to copy the included image file to Garmie. (I took a moment to donate as I was waiting.)

No additional steps are needed to activate the map. After Garmie restarted, I loaded the first day’s route for the ride, and there the map was in all its detailed glory.

Let’s hope all the other preparations go as smoothly.

(I just had a look at the Garmin site, and the cost of the map for all of North America is not too much. But I’m good.)