Tourist in MSN

I met the OP on a brevet earlier this month, so my comment on cell coverage was more oriented towards the areas close to us.

You are quite right on spotty cell coverage for some of the areas where cycling is good. In my bike touring travels I have found lots of places with no coverage. I was really surprised how much of Northern California along the coast had no coverage on one of my bike tours, I had Sprint and my touring buddy had ATT, yet we were using pay phones (remember them?) to make reservations at hostels and when I had wifi in restaurants I was using intenet calling (Google Voice) to make phone calls.

I am a retired Geological Engineer. I worked with maps almost every day of my professional career. I use a GPS for navigation, not a phone, I ALWAYS have the maps on my GPS for where I go. Plus I also have the maps on my smartphone as a backup.

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A side note off topic, if you leave the country for a trip, I suggest having an internet phone capability. On my phone I use Google Voice (with Hangouts app and Hangouts Dialer), and before I had a smartphone I had Google Voice on my laptop computer. When in Hungary one of my credit cards stopped working and I called the credit card company using motel wifi and my laptop to talk to them. And when I was in Iceland and one of my cards stopped working I used Google Voice on a smartphone (with no sim card) on the hostel wifi to call my credit card company. And I can get voice mail messages e-mailed to me with a recording.