logowill england :: GLMC 2013 A Trip From Z to A Grand Tour locations, maps and data



GLMC A Trip from Z to A Grand Tour

The Glacial Lakes Motorcycle Club is sponsoring a new Grand Tour for 2013, A Trip from Z to A Grand Tour. In a nutshell, ride around and find cities and towns that start with Z, or end with A, or for double points, start with Z and end with A, and take a photo of the town name on a building.

Note the word building. No standalone signs: Must be on a building. Or park bench. Or water tower. But not the green state city limits sign. You gotta go ride into town and find something *cool*. Another tricky bit - you can only use a place name once!

Like last year, or 2011 and the year before I pulled out a few cities to get you started

How'd I do last year? Far better than anything since the Baseball Grand Tour of 2002. Nikki and I got 12 or 13 points (click for my photos), nearly half-way to finisher status! All on CBR250R bitty bikes.

I've collected some data for any one to use, based on US Census Place Names from 2010. This does not guarantee that the place will exist - some may not be real towns, some may have dried up and blown away. Use your best judgement when visiting these towns.

Fun Ideas

Need a state broke out? Email me (below); I'm doing the states around KC that I can hit in a day or weekend loop.

How'd this happen? First, grab the US Census Places Data for 2010. Run through Excel to strip the extraneous columns, leaving City, State, Population and coordinates. Rearrange so city name is in the first column. Open in VIM and change the carriage returns to line feeds

:s/^M/\r/g
Next, UNIX!
grep ^Z places.csv // finds Cities starting with 'Z'.
awk -F "," '$1 ~ /a $/' Places2k10u.csv // find city names ending with 'a' and a space.  

External Data -- this info was created from GPS Visualizer. Cut-n-paste your own list of cities into their site to create your own Google Map. Route files can be created using GebWeb.net's Travelling Salesman Problem Solver - enter up to 20 locations (lat, lon).

If you're into Javascript coding, you can use the Google Maps API to pull up your own custom route; no idea how many locations it supports.

2013 Progress

29-MAR-13
Remembered to fill out and mail our regsitration fees! Guess we'll be getting a late start riding -- too bad cause the next weekend is actually open to go ride!


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Created January 05, 2013      ::      Updated Thursday, September 06 2018 @ 01:45am