Big bike tours are among the greatest things in the universe. The experience is just too awesome not to record and share with friends, family, strangers and anyone else who will pay attention.

The Cycle Oregon social media team will be there all week to help capture the essence of the ride. And, as usual, we know many of you will be packing almost as much gadgetry as we will be, to record your own experience. So here’s the scoop on how to put it all to use.

 

GPS and Mapping
The fine folks who do the beautiful course maps you’ll get at check-in have also loaded course maps AND campsite maps onto Maprika. Maprika is a sweet smartphone app you can use during the day to track your progress on the road. At camp, you can use it to find your way to the beer garden and even find your friends (who are probably already in the beer garden).

GPS files for each day can be found on www.ridewithgps.com. The easiest way to find both the Maprika and Ride With GPS files is to do a search (CO2013 and Cycle Oregon 2013 work well).

Staying Connected
We’ll be visiting some pretty remote places, so staying in constant contact on the road isn’t going to happen. However, most of the campsites have cellphone/data connections depending on your carrier (can you hear me now?). The phone company in John Day is anticipating that we will overwhelm cellular data capacity and will be providing Wi-Fi to the campsite. Check our Facebook page for additional details.

If you’re a blogger or want to share your Cycle Oregon experience with your friends and family via social media, make your way to The Blogmobile. There you’ll have access to connected laptops you can use to blog, Facebook, Tweet, Pin, upload to Strava or otherwise tell the world about your daily acts of valor. The Blogmobile is open from 4 p.m. until 10 p.m. every day we have cellular data coverage.

Getting Charged Up
If you’re looking for a place to charge your gadgets, look for the Community Cycling Center tent in camp. They’ll top you off for a small daily or weekly fee, which goes toward the great work they do.

A Window on Cycle Oregon
If you aren’t able to join us this year, you can follow all the action over the Internet, including:

www.cycleoregon.com/blog
https://www.facebook.com/CycleOregon
https://twitter.com/cycleoregon (Twitter users please use #cycleoregon in your Tweets)
http://www.flickr.com/groups/co2013 (post event)
The Oregonian and other publications will be creating content all week, and we’ll provide links to it on our Facebook page.