What, you expected me to have a basic cycling computer?

But it's not just the gadget appeal, honest ...

For a touring cyclist, a GPS is genuinely useful:
- you can use it to navigate fiddly back-lanes routes
- you can capture the details of organised rides to repeat them on your own
- you can track your mileages and speeds to help plan future trips

You'll see that all my ride reports begin with a GoogleEarth track of the ride. I simply download the tracklog from the ride into Mapsource and then select View in GoogleEarth to create them.

My criteria for a bike-mounted GPS were pretty simple: full turn-by-turn navigation, decent battery-life and a high-sensitivity antenna (once you've experienced that ability to hold a lock anywhere, there's no going back).

Using standard AA batteries was preferable so I didn't have to charge it each day but could instead just carry a couple of spares and wait for it to run out of juice.

The Garmin eTrex Vista HCx fitted the bill perfectly. Ok, it costs £200 without mapping, but I already owned Mapsource with full European mapping, and Garmin will give you an unlock code for a second GPS free of charge. And since I was already spending the wrong side of two grand on the bike, I figured another couple of hundred to complete the package was relatively small beer.

I added a Space Bar and handlebar mount to mount it on the TRICE just above the right-hand handlebar, next to the mirror:

Leaving room for a Megahorn on the other side of the grip (this tucks away neatly behind the mirror, the thumb botton on the lower part of the handlebar):

The Vista is in a quick-release mount, so it can be slipped off the bike in a couple of seconds.

For navigation, the eTrex works in much the same way as the Zumo, just in a slightly less sophisticated way. For example, instead of a touchscreen, you have a joystick, and instead of voice-prompts you get bleeps to draw your attention to the instructions shown on the screen. While this takes a bit of getting used to when you've been spoiled, it works well enough.

There are times when you won't want to mess around, or won't have access to a PC, and just want to navigate directly to an address using the GPS alone. This is, of course, trivial to do:

But f or cycling touring, you'll generally want to choose a scenic route on quiet roads. There are a whole variety of ways of doing this, but in my view the Rolls-Royce approach is creating the route in Google Earth. In that way, you can see the actual ground you want to cover - not an abstract representation of it. If you want to know how to do this, see my detailed picture tutorial.

Another way of finding great cycling routes is to have someone else show you one - a friend, forum member, organised ride, etc. GPS makes it simple to repeat these routes later: just switch your GPS on and it will automatically create a tracklog of your journey. Back at home, upload it to your PC, tidy it up if required (chopping off any bits you don't want), then save it for future use. Here's a tracklog of a pleasant loop on quiet roads:

The unit logs times, distances, speeds and even altitudes, so you can see the type of terrain you've covered:

As well as overall stats (average moving speed, overall average speed including stops, etc), you can analyse specific sections of the route:

(It's pure coincidence that I happen to be showing a downhill section here, you understand ...)

The Vista has the usual Garmin boon of being almost infinitely customisable, so you can do things like select the screens displayed as you press the 'next screen' button, and choose what data is displayed on what part of the screen.

Although not a cheap cycle accessory, it is good value for money.