I have a GPS bike computer

Summary

(This is a story about technology. Sort of.) Many bicyclists with a GPS bike computer probably have it primarily to record their bike rides and then upload them to places like Strava. I'm a bit unusual in that while I do record my rides and make some of them public, and I've come to value this, it's not my primary reason to have a GPS bike computer. Instead, my primary reason is following pre-made routes. When I started with my recreational bike club, it was well before the era of GPS bike computers. How you followed (or lead) our routes back then was through printed cue sheets, which had all of the turns and so on listed in order, often with additional notes. One of the duties of the leader of the ride was printing out a sufficient number of cue sheets in advance and distributing them to interested parties before the start of the ride. If you were seriously into using cue sheets, you'd use a cue sheet holder (nowadays you can only find these as 'map holders', which is basically the same job); otherwise you might clip the cue sheet to a handlebar brake or gear cable or fold it up and stick it in a back jersey pocket. Printed cue sheets have a number of nice features, such as giving you a lot of information at a glance. One of them is that a well done cue sheet was and is a lot more than just a list of all of the turns and other things worthy of note; it's an organized, well formatted list of these. The cues would be broken up into sensibly chosen sections, with whitespace between them to make it easier to narrow in on the current one, and you'd lay out the page (or pages) so that the cue or section breaks happened at convenient spots to flip the cue sheet around in cue holders or clips. You'd emphasize important turns, cautions, or other things in various ways. And so on. Some cue sheets even had a map of the route printed on the back. (You needed to periodically flip the cue sheet around and refold it because many routes had too many turns and other cues to fit in ...