I decided to ride straight back Friday morning, so I'd have some time to decompress before I had to go back to work. It was about 500 miles give or take, 8 hours or so counting stops.
I just pressed GO HOME on the Zumo 550 and let it take me where it wanted, which for the last 2 hours of the ride was US Interstate 81 - I was lucky there wasn't much traffic on it.
Up until then, I got to ride some good mountain highways, like 17 and 7, and some US 88 which was pretty much empty except for me.
I got off of 88 to get gasoline, and when I followed the gps out of the gas station lot, it looked like I'd be back on 88 in like 30 seconds. But over the hill NY State Highway had it blocked off, and detoured, and no matter what my gps told me to do, I kept hitting detours. I just wanted back on 10 or 88, either would do. Finally, I had to hang a U-turn and head north, get on 10 North and ride it until it intersected the highway I wanted on, back about 5 miles north of the exit I had taken initially to get gas. I lost close to 30 minutes on that mess. I hate road construction, especially when it blocks on-ramps.
For a long time, I was running at just one bar water temperature, until about noon. I had left Mt. Snow at 6:30 am. By the time I got home at 2:00pm-ish the ambient temperature was in the high 80s, and I was running 3 bars while moving so still running cool.
While I was at Mt. Snow, my Garmin Zumo 550 blue screened and locked up. When I called them, I asked them if it was using the Windows 95 Operating System. I was pretty steamed. So they wouldn't send me one to my lodge in Mt. Snow, because it would take "at least 10 days to process the order" and I was wondering if I was going to have to use my smartphone's Navigator to get home. I had no way of printing google maps off my laptop.
So I just threw it on the bed. I figured since it was still warm, that meant it was running and just the display was messed up. So sure enough, I went out to run a 100 mile sportbike route in a loop around Mt. Snow, and then stopped on the route and had lunch at a rocking barbeque pit, and when I got back it was black screen (off). So I hooked it up to the USB to my laptop and it went into USB Mass Storage mode just fine. I let it recharge, and then it started up just fine, and worked all the way home.
Today I UPSed it back to Garmin for a replacement. I'm not having luck with Garmin gps units, this is 3 that have failed in fairly short order (6 months or less). That says only negatives about Garmin as far as I'm concerned. Not to mention their map update software is brain-dead, and I say this as someone who did 25 years in the IT industry, including managing multi-million dollar projects to successful completion. If I had software staff like Garmin has, they'd either make the software user-friendly and idiot-proof, or they would be terminated and I'd get people who could do it.
Living the Gypsy Life