With a morning to kill in Velez-M?laga, Spain, I decided to explore the mountains behind the town, using Rego. This article explains how I did it.
Finding my routes
At dinner last night, I used my iPhone to login to Wikiloc?a huge database of GPS tracks?and search for interesting routes in the area. Filtering on circular hiking trails less than 20km in distance, I found three candidates and downloaded them to Rego.
To do this, I just tapped the “download” link at Wikiloc:
After which the iPhone provides me with Rego as a destination:
At this point, I had my three candidate routes in Rego, ready to go! You can see them in the list below. Rego assigns routes a different icon, and assigns the red pin color by default.
Getting to the trailhead
The following morning, I parked in the industrial area of Velez, next to the school where my daughter would be attending and all-day chess training course, and used Rego’s link to Apple Maps to guide me to the trail-head:
Once Rego sent the trailhead location to Apple Maps, I could use the walking mode in Apple Maps to find my way to the trailhead.
(I could have just as well used Rego’s own walking mode for this, but had I been driving this option would have been more convenient.)
Using Rego to navigate the trail
The route I was walking passed through many cattle and farmer dirt tracks in the hills behind Velez. To help navigate, I would frequently open Rego, and activate the “walking” navigation mode by tapping twice on the navigation icon in the lower left-hand corner of the map. In walking mode, the app uses the iPhone’s motion sensors to rotate the map in the director you’re physically walking, making it easy to know which direction to turn at those confusion junctions.
Using Rego to navigate, I was able to hike through the whole complex route without once getting lost or confused. Well, technically that’s not completely true. At one point, having been lost in thought for a while, I realized I’d gotten off course. And then I used Rego’s walking mode to find my way back!.
Battery usage
The entire 12km route took me 2.5 hours to complete. The iPhone 6’s battery went from 100% to about 50% during that time. I had also taken along an Anker mini charger, with capacity to recharge the phone about 1.5 times, just in case.
Considering that I was running Strava in parallel to record my route, I was pleasantly surprised at the relatively little drain on the battery. Not using Strava, and with the lightweight charger in the backpack, it’s great to know I could likely use Rego in that navigation assisting role for an entire day of hiking if I wanted!
I just had to snap a photo of this ?determined? cactus, that actually grew through the fence!