Introduction and Preparation

 2024  Glacial Lakes MC “ Which Way Do We Go ” Grand Tour

Introduction

There was a time during last October and November when it looked like there would not be a 2024 Glacial Lakes MC Grand Tour.

The Rally Master of the previous two Grand Tours had indicated that he wished to step down from the role, and there did not appear to be a stampede of volunteers to take up the reins.

However, in mid-December, Lee Blauvelt, a competitor from last year's event, put his hand up  and assumed the responsibilities of 2024 Rally Master.   Thank you, Lee.

As was the case last year, there had been some discussion on what would be this year’s theme.  

Some suggestions were :-

• Compass headings, towns with N/S/E/W in it.
• Capitols, different point values for township meeting halls, county courthouses,
  state capitols and nation's capitol.
• Geology, town names with geological features like hill, mound, valley, island, etc.

In the end, the new Rally Master announced that the 2024 theme would be  “ a search for cities, towns, villages, boroughs, hamlets, and townships that have compass points in the name. “

Game On !

Preparation

Once the 2024 Grand Tour theme had been announced, it was time to start on the pre-ride activity of deciding just where the bonuses were and how to get there, and here we seem to have two schools of thought on how best to proceed.

The first group is the Think Less – Ride More school, which involves riding down your driveway, making a right-hand turn at the letterbox and disappearing into the distance looking for locations meeting the North-South-East-West requirements.  

This school’s theme song might be the Steppenwolf classic “ Get your motor running, head out onto the highway, looking for adventure . . . . "

The second group is the Plan the Ride / Ride the Plan school, which involves performing research to identify potential bonus locations (Google and Wikipedia are your friends), then developing an extensive route plan to maximise “points per mile”,  and then actually riding the plan.  

This school's theme song might be the Jackson 5’s hit “ A-B-C, it is as easy as 1-2-3, or as simple as Do-Re-Mi . . . "

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has read my previous blogs that I fall into the second school.  

This brings us nicely back to the 2024 theme of  “ a search for cities, towns, villages, boroughs, hamlets, and townships that have compass points in the name. “

While the Compass points are easy to understand, as in North, South, East & West, the question is just what are cities, towns, villages, boroughs, and hamlets ??

Wikipedia provides the following definitions :--

• A city is a type of human settlement of a notable size, like a very large or commercially important town.
  
  
• A town is a type of human settlement generally larger than villages but smaller than cities, though the criteria to distinguish between them vary considerably in different parts of the world. 
  
  
• A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town.  Villages are often located in rural areas, but the term urban village may also be applied to certain urban neighbourhoods.
  
  
• A hamlet is a human settlement that is smaller than a village. This is often simply an informal description of a smaller settlement or possibly a subdivision to a larger settlement. 

In summary, we are looking for human settlements that range in size from a handful of houses to around a million houses, located in areas that have compass points in their name.

After some further discussion on the forum, the Rally Master made a ruling that all the communities (locations) identified for the Grand Tour needed to be a municipality, meaning there is a formal means of government in existence, like a Town Council.

I think that this is an excellent definition that will help many participants. 

My difficulty is that we don't have Town Councils here in Oz.  We have a Federal Govt, then a State Govt, then a Local Government and each Local Government is responsible for a geographic area and all the cities, towns, villages and localities within its designated boundaries.

In my home state, the smallest LG area is about 2 sq-miles, while the largest is 20,000 sq-miles ( about half the size of Pennsylvania ).

The largest LG area in Oz is the East Pilbara in Western Australia which has responsibility for an area of 146,550 square-miles ( about half the size of Texas ).

The situation in Oz is clearly complete different from the situation in the USA.

After some consideration based on comments made in the forum, I decided that my “screening filter” for communities for my 2024 GT would be as follows :--

• Does the Australia Post Office recognise the location with an official Postcode (zip code) ??
  
• Does the Australian Census Bureau list the location and keep population records for the location ??
• Does Google Maps show the location and its boundaries ??
• Does the location have a sign with the appropriate "compass" name ??
  
• Does the facility with the sign have the same street address as the “compass” location name ??

If a location meets these 5 requirements, my intention is to include that location in my riding plans.

As Wile E. Coyote would say “ genius, pure genius ”.

Ultimately, sometime in late September, the Rally Master will decide if I got it right, or if I have screwed up badly.   Until that time, and now armed with an Oz location definition, it was time to get to work.

Firstly, I downloaded a complete list of the Australian Post Office postcodes off the web, and imported the data into an Excel spreadsheet.  

All up there were 15,386 “human settlements” in Australia that are recognised by the Australian Post Office.   Not unexpectedly, there are very few "population locations" in the middle of the various Australian deserts.

Once I had these locations loaded, I divided the data up by state with my initial focus on my home state of New South Wales.  Other states, particularly Victoria will follow in due coarse.

I then performed a quick and easy data sort to filter out all locations that do not have the words North / East / West / South in their name.  This reduced the number of potential locations down to a manageable number.

On a personal note, I also made a decision to exclude any potential bonus location within 100 km / 65 mi of my home in Sydney.  

I mean, it is supposed to be a Grand Tour, not a Neighbourhood Tour. 

Of course, not all these potential locations are going to qualify, for one reason or another, but I think I will have enough to make for an interesting Grand Tour.

The final step was just a matter of checking these potential "population locations" against the Australian Census Bureau and with Google Street View, where I quickly found that Post Offices, Public Schools, Fire Stations and Community Halls typically have a sign with the town name.

Now, I would very much like to share the final results of my research with you, but as Tom Cruise once said in Top Gun,  " I could tell you, but then I would have to kill you " 

After all, it is a competition  . . .