So I was out on a mountain trail ride that I've been on before so I was not doing any navigation - just riding and letting the 1030 plus log the experience. When I got to my usual turnaround point I was feeling good and had plenty of Sun left so I wanted to continue on a few more miles to a tunnel that the trail goes through. I've never been there before but know where it is. I wasn't sure how much further it was though. I figured 2 or 3 miles but I have this fancy 1030 plus and it should be able to help me out.
i went to the map screen and scrolled around to where the tunnel was and told it to navigate to it. Unfortunately, I was at a massive trail junction with routes in every direction. The shortest route to the tunnel was on a double black single track that I really had no interest in doing. I wanted to continue on the wide fire road with the gradual climb. Unfortunately, the 1030 plus decided that I should take the hard route. I was wondering if maybe I could tap a mid-way point on the route I planned to go, and add that as a "via" point so it would force the 1030 plus to see things my way. I guess that was asking too much. I couldn't see a way to do that. So, I had no idea how much further I had to ride and headed off anyway, depressed that my fancy navigation device knew the answer but didn't want to tell it to me. I went probably a half mile or more, all the time glancing down at the screen and seeing the fancy navigation device telling me to "Make a U-turn" and do it the hard way. Eventually I stopped the navigation and clicked on a spot up ahead around the bend on the fire road. I figured the only way to do this was to do it incrementally so my fancy navigation device couldn't find any other way but my way to do it. When i got to the next point, I would start a new navigation run with a new point a bit further down the road, and so forth until I was past the point of going back to do the double black single track route that garmin felt was better for me.
It was a frustrating day. I wish I could pick an end point and navigate to it by adding some middle points to force the route to take MY trail. I guess that's too much to ask. Yes, I can probably do this at home but sometimes you don't know how you'll feel on a ride (especially steep mountain climbs) and you make it up as you if you feel you're up to it. I want that freedom. I don't want to plan ahead every time.
To top it off, I climbed 3500 feet from the starting point. The main screen told me that. It also told me I had only descended 11 feet. It was a 14% nonstop grade so 11 feet made sense. When I decided to go home I told it to navigate back to the start, along the same route I came up. I expected to have 3500 feet to descend and nothing to climb (except maybe 11 feet). I don't recall the number of feet to descend (I guess I didn't pay attention to that) but the 1030 plus was telling me that even though I only went down 11 feet on my massive mountain climb up to where I was, I would have a total of 2700 feet to climb on my way down the 3500 foot hill I just came up. Some errors are expected, but 2700 feet was completely insane. I was on my brakes for 30 minutes going down hill.