The Trail and beyond

deSo despite my legs being worn from 65 miles or so on Saturday, on Sunday Eric and I went for a ride. Since the previous week we had considered but decided against going to the end of the Los Gatos Creek Trail and exploring, I thought we could try it this week.
At this point I need to interject that while I really like my Garmin Edge, the software they bundle with it is utterly worthless. It's not that it's broken, per se, it's just so limited that you quickly learn to avoid doing anything with it. For example, I tried to use it for my previous post to figure out how many miles I was into the ride when I saw the accident. But no, to do that I'd have to zoom the ride profile, and while Training Center has a zoom button, for some inexplicable reason it only zooms one axis, leaving the horizontal axis always at full scale.
I fondly remember the badly translated from German software that came with my Ciclosport CM436. It had garbled menu names, and the word 'Schnauf!' appearing seemingly at random, but you could zoom any which way into your ride.
Fortunately, there's services like MotionBased, and free software like SportTracks, which make the device useful.
Where was I? Oh, right.
So I scribbled some notes on what turns to make after we got off the trail, as my attempts to create a course for my GPS device failed around 1:30 in the morning before the ride, and took them along.
I figured it would be a flat ride, going along a trail, after all, so of course I was wrong. After some initial climbs on Peach Hill, Canon, and Villa Montalvo (I waved at the site of my accident last January when coming down from Canon, but very very carefully...) we had the bright idea of trying to avoid riding along Saratoga Los Gatos road, and having less traffic to deal with.
This involved repeated side trips along roads that really really looked like they'd take you south, and climbed, and climbed...and dead-ended.
Eventually we stopped turning on them. The first road we bypassed in fact turned out to go into Los Gatos. And for that matter, the very first intersection we passed after Villa Montalvo was the route we were looking for, that went all the way to Los Gatos without going along the main road, only it was a labeled 'Not A Through Street'. Note that none of the dead ends we encountered were labeled as such.
I really should have known.

Be that as it may, we then went on to the trail, took it to the San Jose end, and miraculously my little page of scribbled turns got us into known territory. I guess it's when you think you know where you are that you get lost.
Photos here