The GPS does, as you've found, recalculate the route from just the waypoints.
Right, well that's lesson one learned I think.
So it would appear that the GPS is only 'seeing' the waypoints and not the route? And yet when I download from Mapsourse, the transfer option gives me the choice of what I want to transfer: maps, waypoints or routes? So if it's downloading a route, why does it feel compelled to 're-navigate'? It's a bit late in the day now, but I think I know the answer
Like, a route is not actually a route, but collection of way points, and the GPS does the rest? It fills in between the way points. And basically your job is to put it in a position where it cannot do anything other than what you want it to? Whereas I was thinking a route was the 'final thing', road by road, turn by turn....like what I've been viewing in MapSource.
I do understand, as WB explained, that most people use a GPS to follow a specific route, without deviation. Similar to all technology - rubbish in, rubbish kind of thing. On all the Audax rides I've done, I don't see many people who display both a routesheet and a GPS on the handlebars. They might have a routesheet stuffed in a bag somewhere as a backup, but it's invariably one or the other. That's the whole point of a GPS, to replace navigating with a routesheet.
It's a quick learning curve here, and I don't have much time [like 3 days!], so I was interested in using the unit to 'take me there' under its own steam, to hand the decision making process over to 'it' rather than me having to worry about where I was going. Not because I can't read maps, or don't want to work out a route [I enjoy doing both], but taking into account the length of tour I'm looking at doing [down through France into southern Spain] I just don't have the time to sit down and plot the route through individual roads etc. I really don't have the time, I screwed up on the planning front a bit with this.
In one sense, when I get off the ferry at St Malo and ask the GPS to plot a route between two points 200km apart, it's neither here nor there if I'm taken 20km off course, providing that course doesn't involve motorways or crazy dual carriageways that most sane individuals wouldn't go near etc.
It will still be better than stopping ever 2 km, getting the map out deciding which road I'm supposed to be taking, because I just don't know the area at all . Fine if you've got loads of time, but I want to do about 180km a day, so I need to keep moving, and certainly nobody appears to have dropped a routesheet through my letterbox hitherto!
I have a test run in the morning to Oxford and back, about 120km round trip. The GPS has to get me there [even though I know where I'm going!], we'll see how it does.
Once again, thanks for the replies folks.