Greg Rice's Rally Bonus Planner — Help

Recent updates

A running log of what's changed in the app recently, newest first, in plain language rather than developer notes. Nothing here requires you to do anything — these are all things that just work differently (or are newly available) the next time you sign in.

August 28, 2026

Help file: documented what happens when you delete and re-import bonuses

Added an explanation, in Selecting & deleting rows, of what deleting a bonus actually does and what re-importing the same rally book afterward does (and doesn't) restore — including how it can affect a saved route's stops or Start/End location if any of the deleted bonuses were used in one.

August 25–26, 2026

New: each leg can save its own start/end hotel location

The leg edit popup now has Start location and End location fields — usually the hotel a leg begins or ends its overnight stop at. Type an address, click Look up, and it geocodes and saves the coordinates along with it.

• Once a leg has a saved location, opening that leg — or clicking New route for it in the Route Planner — automatically fills in the route's Start/End points from those saved locations, so you're not re-typing or re-searching the same hotel address every time you plan a route for that leg. You can still change or clear either one for a specific route same as before.
• Since the hotel a leg ends at is usually the very same hotel the next leg starts from, saving a leg's end location now automatically fills in the next leg's start location too — but only if that next leg doesn't already have its own start location saved, so nothing you've entered yourself ever gets overwritten. If you have an existing rally and want this to catch up on legs you set up before this update, just open an earlier leg and click Save (no changes needed) to push its end location forward.

Hours & Miles: new per-leg columns, and a totals fix

The Hours & Miles Legs table has five new columns showing each leg's real totals, not just the daily rate you type in: Rest hrs, # Gas stops, Gas stop hrs, # Bonus stops, and Bonus stop hrs — each one correctly accounts for legs that span more than one day.

• The Rally totals row now correctly sums Rest hrs/day, Gas stops/day, Gas stop min, Bonus stops/day, and Bonus stop min across all your legs — 4 rest hours on Leg 1 + 4 on Leg 2 + 4 on Leg 3 now shows 12, not 4. Avg MPH, Avg MPG, and Fuel $/gal still show an average across legs, since adding those together wouldn't mean anything.
• Every column on the Hours & Miles Legs table is now centered, to match the layout of the original spreadsheet. The separate Checkpoints table (addresses and coordinates) is unchanged.

Fixed: Hours & Miles now stays in sync with your legs

• Editing a leg's start or end date now automatically updates its matching Hours & Miles block to match, instead of leaving you to copy the dates over by hand.
• Fixed a rare bug where editing an already-saved leg could silently shuffle the internal order of your legs, which could in turn make a leg's Hours & Miles numbers — or its Out of range flag — show up matched to the wrong leg.
• Fixed a bug where clicking the Hours & Miles tab could show a completely blank screen instead of the worksheet.

Help file: documented the Out of range flag

Added an explanation, with screenshots, of the Range column in the grid and the dimmed map markers it's paired with — see The bonus grid and Map view.

Creating an account

From the sign-in screen, click Need an account? Sign up. Enter your email, a password, and your name, then click Sign up. You'll be signed in immediately and dropped into the main app with an empty rally list.

New accounts sign up as a regular rider. If you need admin access (to manage other users, see below), ask an existing admin to promote your account from the admin portal.

Signing in

Enter your email and password on the sign-in screen and click Sign in. Forgot your password? Use the Forgot password? link to request a reset email.

How the app is organized

Everything lives under three levels, shown in the left-hand sidebar once you're signed in:

1. Rallies — the top-level events you're planning for(eg.. 2027 Iron Butt Rally ). Click + New under "Rallies" to add one.
2. Legs — appear once you select a rally. Each leg is a part of a rally which you would create a route with its own start/end time, used to calculate sunrise/sunset for bonuses on that leg.
3. Bonuses — appear once you select a leg, in the grid on the right. This is where you'll spend most of your time: entering codes, coordinates, points, and availability.

Units & time format

Click ⚙ Settings in the header to choose Imperial (°F, mph, miles, gallons) or Metric (°C, km/h, kilometers, liters), and 12-hour or 24-hour time. This covers riders outside the US planning a rally in kilometers and Celsius.

Units affects the weather forecast popup's temperatures and the Hours & Miles worksheet's speed, distance, and fuel columns (Avg MPH/MPG, Miles, Gallons become Avg km/h, Avg km/L, Km, Liters). Time format affects every place sunrise/sunset is shown — the grid columns, a bonus's popup, and GPX/XLSX export previews.

Both are saved to your account, so they follow you to any device you sign in from. Changes apply immediately — no need to reload the page.

Using this app in another language

This app is only written in English, but riders outside the US can use their browser's built-in page translation to view it in Spanish, French, German, or any other language — the whole page, including the bonus grid, buttons, and popup messages, gets translated automatically.

In Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome, right-click anywhere on the page and choose Translate to [your language] from the menu. You can also click the translate icon that appears in the address bar on some pages, or open the browser's Settings and set a preferred language so pages translate automatically going forward.

Translation works well for the page itself, but a couple of things may not translate: text inside tooltips (like the column header tooltips), and any emails the app sends (like a password reset link) — those stay in English unless your email program offers its own translation.

Rider profile

Click 🏍 Rider Profile in the header to record how you like to ride: your night-riding and bad-weather/rain tolerance, average moving speed, how often and how long you like to stop and rest, how hard you push daily mileage (relaxed/moderate/aggressive), and how much sleep/off-bike rest you need each day. This is saved once to your account — not per rally — and feeds the route planner's Build Route Schedule feature (see Building a route below).

None of this is required — leave the defaults if you'd rather not fill it in, and creating and saving routes works exactly the same either way. It only changes anything once you click Build Route Schedule.

My motorcycles

Click ⛽ My Motorcycles in the header to keep one or more fuel-range profiles — main tank and auxiliary tank capacity, average fuel consumption, a fuel reserve you never want to plan below, and a safety buffer percentage on top of that. Mark one Default motorcycle and it pre-fills automatically — motorcycle, fuel range, average speed, and minutes per stop — when you start planning a new route. Every field here (tank sizes, fuel consumption) follows your Units setting: imperial shows gallons/MPG, metric shows liters/L per 100km.

Click a motorcycle to edit it, or + Add motorcycle for another.

Like the rider profile, this is optional — the route planner's own Fuel range (mi) field works fine on its own without picking a motorcycle here. Picking one attaches it to the route (so you know which bike it was planned for) and fills in Fuel range for you — usable tank capacity (main + auxiliary, minus your fuel reserve) times average fuel consumption, minus your safety buffer — recalculated any time you switch bikes. You can still type over it with your own number afterward if you'd rather.

Creating a rally

Click + New above the rally list, give it a name and (optionally) a year and notes, then Save.

To edit or delete a rally later, click the ✎ that appears next to its name in the sidebar — this opens the same dialog with a Delete button. Deleting a rally also deletes all of its legs and bonuses, so it asks for confirmation first.

Creating a leg

With a rally selected, click + New above the leg list. Give the leg a name and, ideally, a start and end date/time — these are used to compute accurate sunrise and sunset times for every bonus on that leg. Check Daylight saving in effect if applicable.

Click a leg's name (or the small pencil that appears next to it) to edit or delete it later. The same popup also has Start location and End location fields — usually the hotel a leg begins or ends its overnight stop at. Type an address and click Look up to geocode and save it, the same address-lookup pattern as the Hours & Miles checkpoints. Once a leg has a saved location, opening that leg — or starting a new route for it — automatically fills in the Route Planner's Start/End points from those saved locations, and shows them on the map right away; see Start, End, and your motorcycle below for what that looks like. And since the hotel a leg ends at is usually the very same hotel the next leg starts from, saving a leg's end location automatically fills in the next leg's start location too, as long as that next leg doesn't already have one of its own. Each field also has a From PDF… button (§51) that reads the host hotel's name and address straight off a rally book PDF's Schedule of Events page and fills it in for you, geocoding it immediately — handy for skipping the typing on a rally where every checkpoint is the same host hotel.

The bonus grid

Selecting a leg loads its bonuses into a spreadsheet-style grid. Click any cell to edit it in place — changes save automatically (watch the small save indicator next to your name in the header). Use + Add bonus to insert a blank row.

The Formatted Bonus Code column, just before Code, is read-only and updates automatically as you edit a row — it's the bonus's CODE-POINTS-AVAIL-TIMED name, the same format used for the <name> in an exported GPX waypoint.

All column headers have tooltips — hover over any one to see an explanation of what it means and how it's used, like the Formatted Bonus Code column below.

The Range column flags any bonus where a round trip from Start to it and back to End alone already exceeds this leg's Hours & Miles "Miles possible" budget — meaning it couldn't be reached even if it were the only stop you made all leg. It's a heads-up to help narrow down which bonuses are worth planning around, not a hard rule: it never removes a bonus from the grid or map, never stops you from adding it to a route, and the column is sortable — click its header to group flagged bonuses together.

The match to the Hours & Miles worksheet is by position: this rally's 1st leg reads its budget from that worksheet's "Leg 1" block, 2nd leg from "Leg 2," and so on — the same way the worksheet already names them. A leg won't show any flags until that worksheet's matching block has dates filled in and both checkpoints looked up; that failure mode is silent rather than showing a false flag. One limitation worth knowing: the worksheet caps at 3 legs like the original spreadsheet, so a 4th+ leg in a longer rally won't get this flag.

Entering or changing bonus points

The Points column is a normal editable cell — click it, type the new value, and press Enter or click away to save. Use this to correct a bonus's points after import, or to fill in points for bonuses whose import didn't include them (some bonus listing files publish codes and coordinates first, with points released or corrected later).

Availability codes

The Avail column controls how a bonus is scored and how it's shaped on the map:

For timed bonuses, fill in the Timed column with the available window (e.g. 930a-6p). This is a plain text column — it's what shows up in the exported GPX/XLSX, and what the map's legend and popups display.

For a Timed or Timed-Combo (T/TC) bonus, a small 🕐 column next to Timed shows an icon — click it to open a small dialog with two date/time pickers, Available from and Available until. This is optional, structured data separate from the plain text: it doesn't change what's exported, but it's what the route planner's Build Route Schedule feature (see Building a route) checks your estimated arrival time against, flagging anything that would miss the window. Leave it unset (the icon stays faded) and Build Route Schedule just can't verify that bonus — it says so rather than assuming you'll make it. Clear in that dialog removes the structured window entirely without touching the plain Timed text.

Tagging combo bonuses

Some rally packs group individual bonuses into a named combo — collect all of a river's bonuses and the combo pays extra, for example. Click Combo codes… in the toolbar to define your rally's list of combo codes and names (e.g. MISS1 = "Mississippi River"). This list is shared across every leg in the rally, since a combo can span more than one leg. Add codes one at a time with + Add combo code, or click Paste list… to paste in several at once — copy two columns (code, name) straight from a spreadsheet, or paste a comma-separated list; a code that already matches one in your list gets its name updated instead of creating a duplicate.

Once you've defined some codes, click a bonus's Combo cell in the grid to open a checklist of them — check every combo that bonus belongs to (a bonus can be part of more than one) and click Done. Hover the cell afterward to see the full combo names, not just the codes.

A bonus's combo tags are written to the exported GPX file as <gpxx:Category> entries, so they show up as categories on your GPS the same way they did from the spreadsheet's export.

Selecting & deleting rows

Check the boxes on the left of any rows you want to act on — the header checkbox selects all. With rows selected, Delete selected removes them, and Look up selected fetches address/timezone/weather for just those rows.

Deleting is permanent, and re-importing afterward does not undo it. If you delete a batch of bonuses and then re-import the same rally book PDF to bring them back, the app doesn't restore or reconnect to what you deleted — it reads the PDF fresh and adds each bonus back as a brand-new row, even though the code, coordinates, and points may look identical to what was there before. As far as the app is concerned, it's a different bonus than the one you deleted.

That distinction matters if any of the deleted bonuses were used in a saved route. A route remembers its stops, and its Start/End location if one is set to a bonus, by pointing at that specific bonus row — not by its code. So:

• A stop built from a bonus you delete is quietly dropped from the route the next time you open it — and once the route is saved again after that, the stop is gone from it for good. The freshly re-imported version of that bonus does not automatically rejoin the route; you'll need to re-add it from the grid or map yourself.
• If a deleted bonus was set as a route's Start or End location, that field is cleared back to blank as soon as the bonus is deleted.

If you're planning to delete and re-import a leg's bonuses, it's worth checking first whether any of your saved routes on that leg use bonuses from it — plan on rebuilding those stops (and Start/End, if needed) afterward rather than assuming the re-import will pick up where the route left off.

Looking up address & timezone

Once a bonus has coordinates, click Look up missing in the toolbar to fill in its timezone, reverse-geocoded address, and (if the leg has start/end times set) sunrise and sunset — automatically, for every bonus that's missing this data. This runs in the background with a small progress indicator, and results are cached, so re-running it doesn't re-charge lookups for bonuses already looked up.

Lookups are rate-limited per account to keep API costs down. If you hit the limit, wait a bit and try again.

Importing bonus files

Click Import file… and choose a .gpx, .kml, .csv, .tsv, .txt, Excel (.xlsx/.xlsm/.xls), or .pdf bonus listing file. The app parses it entirely in your browser and shows a preview grid so you can review and fix anything before committing — nothing is written to your leg until you click Append to leg or Replace leg's bonuses.

PDF import is built for Iron Butt Rally-style bonus listing packets — a code, point value, GPS coordinates, available hours, and description per destination bonus. Monitoring bonuses (call-in, rest, tracking) and checkpoint info don't have coordinates, so they're skipped automatically; only bonuses with a real lat/lon come through. A PDF laid out very differently may not parse cleanly — check the preview before committing, same as any other format.

Some rally books' bonus-listing pages are flattened images rather than real selectable text (common in newer, more graphically designed packets). If a PDF like that comes up with "No bonus records were found," the app now automatically retries with OCR before giving up (§51) — this can take several minutes on a large book, with a page counter in the import window so it doesn't look stalled. OCR is less reliable than reading real text, so give the preview grid a closer look afterward: a code or points cell the app couldn't read confidently gets a "[OCR: check this row against the PDF]" note at the front of its comment.

Importing a points file

Some rally masters publish the bonus locations and the bonus point values as two separate files — a codes/lat/lon file, and a second file (usually CSV, sometimes plain text) with just the bonus code and its point value, sometimes released later than the location file. Click Import points… and choose that file to merge it into the current leg.

Unlike Import file…, this never adds or removes rows — it only matches each code in the file against a bonus already in the leg's grid and updates its Points column. A preview lists every code from the file, whether it found a match, and its current vs. new point value, so you can check for typos or mismatched codes before applying anything.

Matching ignores case and extra whitespace in the code, since the two files often come from different sources. Codes in the file with no matching bonus in the current leg are listed but skipped — nothing is created for them.

Exporting GPX & XLSX

The toolbar's right-hand buttons export the current leg (or the whole rally, for GPX):

• Export GPX — waypoints for the current leg, ready to load onto a GPS.
• Export GPX (whole rally) — every leg's bonuses in one file.
• Export XLSX — a spreadsheet copy of the current leg's grid.

Check ASCII-fold export (on by default) to strip accented characters from exported names — useful for older GPS units that don't handle non-ASCII text well.

Want a route line, not just a flat waypoint list? See Building a route below — it has its own GPX and KML export with the road-following line included.

Hours & Miles planning

Click Hours & Miles next to Grid and Map in the toolbar to open this rally's planning worksheet — how much riding time a leg actually has once rest, gas stops, bonus stops, and routing time are subtracted, and how many miles that riding time makes possible. It covers 1 to 3 legs, and use the Legs +/− control at the top to match however many legs your rally has. Everything here is saved per rally and shared across every leg, the same as combo codes.

Rest hrs, # Gas stops, Gas stop hrs, # Bonus stops, and Bonus stop hrs show each leg's real total — not just the daily rate you typed into Rest hrs/day, Gas stops/day, etc. — correctly accounting for legs that span more than one day (a 61-hour leg at 4 gas stops/day works out to 10.17 gas stops for the leg, for example). The bold Rally totals row sums Rest hrs/day, Gas stops/day, Gas stop min, Bonus stops/day, and Bonus stop min across every leg in use — 4 rest hours on each of 3 legs shows 12, not 4 — while Avg MPH, Avg MPG, and Fuel $/gal still show an average, since adding those together wouldn't mean anything.

Each leg is bounded by two checkpoints — its start and its end. Type an address for each checkpoint (city and state is usually enough) and click Look up to resolve it to coordinates and a time zone; that's the one place this page calls out to Google. A 2-leg rally shares its middle checkpoint (leg 1's end is leg 2's start), so you'll only ever look up legs + 1 checkpoints total, not two per leg.

For each leg, fill in its start and end date/time and your planning assumptions — routing hours, planned rest hours per day, gas and bonus stops per day and how long each takes, any misc hours, and your average riding speed, fuel economy, and fuel cost per gallon. Leg hours, riding hours available, and miles possible update automatically as you type, and the bold Rally totals row at the bottom of the Legs table adds them up across every leg in use — averaging the per-day assumptions over however many legs you actually have, rather than always dividing by three.

Like the bonus grid, changes save automatically — watch the small save indicator in the toolbar. Only your inputs are stored; every hours/miles/fuel figure is recalculated from them each time you open this page.

Once a leg block here has both dates and both checkpoints looked up, its Miles possible number automatically feeds the bonus grid and map's Range flag for that same leg — matched by position (this worksheet's Leg 1 to your rally's first leg, Leg 2 to its second, and so on). See The bonus grid for what that flag means.

Bonus point planning

Click Points next to Hours & Miles in the toolbar to open this rally's bonus point plan — how many points each leg needs, and how your planned route and actual score compare to that target. Like Hours & Miles, it covers 1 to 3 legs (use the Legs +/− control at the top), and everything is saved per rally, shared across every leg.

For each leg, enter the Target points the rally master published for that leg, then your planned non-riding bonuses — rest bonus, both call-in bonuses, tracking bonus, and arrival bonus. The Gold target (+40%) column, each bonus's percent of target, the Non-riding total, and the red Points needed column (how many bonus points your route still needs to hit target once non-riding bonuses are counted) all update automatically as you type.

Fill in Planned route pts with the bonus total from your planned route in Basecamp or your mapping program, and the Diff vs target column shows whether that's enough — it turns pink when you're short. After the rally, fill in Actual scored to see your final +/− vs target for each leg. The bold Rally totals row adds every column up across all legs in use.

Changes save automatically — watch the small save indicator in the toolbar. Only your inputs are stored; every gold target, percentage, and points-needed figure is recalculated from them each time you open this page.

Map view

Click Map next to Grid in the toolbar to switch views. Each bonus is plotted as a marker whose shape encodes its availability (circle, square, flag, diamond, star, triangle — see the legend) and whose color encodes its point value. Combo bonuses (AC/DC/TC) get a bolder outline.

Click any marker to see its details in a popup, including a one-click link to its weather forecast.

A marker shown dimmed and grayed-out is the same Range flag as the bonus grid's Range column — a bonus a round trip from Start to it and back to End can't fit inside this leg's Hours & Miles budget (see the bonus grid for how that budget is matched to each leg). It's still fully clickable and still shows on the map either way — never hidden or removed, only dimmed — so the bonuses actually worth planning around stand out.

Building a route

Pick the bonuses you want to ride, in order, and the app draws a route line on the map with a stop count, distance, and estimated ride time — then export it as its own GPX or KML file, separate from the plain bonus-list exports above.

Two ways to add stops, and you can mix both on the same route:

• In Grid view, check the bonuses you want (same checkboxes used for delete/ lookup) and click Add Selected to Route.
• In Map view, click Route Mode: Off (top-right) to turn it on, then click bonus markers in the order you'd ride them — a numbered badge appears on each one you've added. Click again to remove a stop. Turn Route Mode back off to go back to clicking markers for their normal popup.

Many rally legs start and end at the same bonus location. To close a loop like that, click the route's first stop again once you've added the rest of the stops — instead of removing it, that adds it a second time as the final stop, and its map marker shows both stop numbers (e.g. "1 & 6"). Click it once more to undo the loop and go back to a one-way route. To remove a specific occurrence of a repeated stop (say you want to drop the closing one but keep the bonus as the start), use the ✕ in the Route Planner panel's stop list instead of the map marker — it removes exactly the one you click, not every use of that bonus.

Click Route Planner… in the toolbar any time to open the route panel: drag stops (☰) to reorder, click ✕ to remove one, and set your average riding speed and minutes-per-stop — those two feed the estimated ride time. Start date/time defaults to the leg's own start date/time but is yours to change (say the route doesn't start the instant the leg does) — set it and the panel shows an estimated finish time too. Recalculate Route refreshes the road distance and the map's route line from free road-routing data; Save Route keeps the route for next time you open this leg; Delete This Route deletes it. Export Route GPX downloads the stops as a route for Basecamp/Garmin — the GPS recalculates the actual road path itself when you activate the route, so the file doesn't carry a separate road-line track. Export KML downloads the stops and the road-following line (Google My Maps/Earth have no route-recalculation feature of their own, so the line is the only way to see the road path there).

The road distance/line comes from a free routing service and can occasionally be unavailable — when that happens the map shows a dashed straight line instead and labels the distance as an estimate, so it's never mistaken for the real road distance. The estimated ride time is always calculated from your own speed/stop-time settings, not a car-driving estimate.

Start, End, and your motorcycle

The Start and End pickers each accept either an existing bonus (the dropdown, same list as the grid) or a custom point — a hotel, rally HQ, or any other spot that isn't itself a bonus. Two ways to set a custom point:

• Type an address into the search box above Set from map… and click 🔎 Find (or press Enter). Works best with a city/state included — "Hampton Inn, Springfield IL" rather than just "Hampton Inn" — since it's a street-address lookup, not a full place-name search. The label defaults to whatever you typed; the line underneath shows the address it actually found, so you can confirm it landed in the right spot before relying on it.
• Click Set from map…, then click anywhere on the map to drop a pin by hand and give it a label — the fallback for anywhere the search box can't resolve.

If this leg has a saved Start/End location — set in the leg's own edit popup, see Creating a leg — the Start and End pickers here default to that location automatically, the moment you open this leg or start a new route for it, so you're not re-typing or re-searching the same hotel address every time. You can still change or clear either one for this specific route same as before; it only sets the starting point.

A bonus picked as Start/End gets "(Start)"/"(Finish)" added to its existing map marker; a custom point gets its own 🟢/🏁 marker instead. The Motorcycle dropdown lets you attach one of your saved motorcycle profiles to this route — it's saved with the route so you know which bike it was planned for, and it fills in Fuel range (mi) from that bike's own tank/consumption numbers (switching bikes updates it again); overwrite it with your own number any time if you'd rather. A fresh route also starts with Avg riding speed and Minutes per stop pre-filled from your rider profile, instead of a generic guess.

🎯 AI Suggested Route

Where Optimize Route (below) only reorders stops you've already picked, 🎯 AI Suggested Route picks which bonuses to ride in the first place — and in what order — out of a pool of candidates you check off, aiming to score the most total points while still getting you back to your End point by the leg's own end date/time.

Set these up first

Two of these are required — 🎯 AI Suggested Route simply won't run without them, and tells you which one's missing if you click it too soon. The rest are optional and fall back to sensible defaults, but are worth setting once so every route you plan uses your own numbers instead of a generic guess.

1. Your Rider Profile (optional). Sets your average moving speed and preferred stop length — pre-fills Avg riding speed and Minutes per stop below on every route. Skip it and those default to 55 mph / 15 minutes instead.
2. A motorcycle profile (optional). Pre-fills Fuel range (mi) from that bike's tank size and MPG. Skip it, or don't pick one from the Motorcycle dropdown, and the route defaults to a flat 200-mile fuel range instead.
3. The leg's Start and End date/time (required). Set under Creating a leg when you create the leg, or any time after via its ✎ edit button — this is per-leg, not a rally-wide setting, so a multi-leg rally needs it set on each leg separately. 🎯 AI Suggested Route uses the leg's End date/time as its hard deadline for getting back to your End point, so it refuses to run without one.
4. Rest stop and/or lunch break rules (optional — only if your rally requires them). Set on the rally itself (✎ next to the rally name) so every leg uses the same rule by default, or override a specific leg individually (✎ next to that leg) — the fields are Rest stop every (hours)/Rest stop duration (minutes) and the matching Lunch break every (hours)/Lunch break duration (minutes), both optional clock-time windows, and a Required every day checkbox for Iron Butt-style "once per calendar day" rules instead of an hours-since-last-stop interval. Leaving a leg's fields blank inherits whatever the rally has set; leaving both blank means that rule simply isn't required. One exception: if you leave the rest-stop interval/duration blank on both the rally and the leg, it quietly falls back to your Rider Profile's own "How often do you want a break?"/"How long is each break?" answers instead of skipping rest stops entirely — lunch has no such personal fallback, so a lunch break only ever happens if the rally or leg actually asks for one. See Rest, lunch & fuel schedule below for exactly how these get applied once a route's built.

Then, build your candidate pool

A pool of candidate bonuses — bonuses you'd be willing to ride if they make the cut, not a final list. Two ways to do this, and they both feed the exact same pool so you can mix and match:

• Check them off in the bonus grid's checkbox column, same checkboxes Add Selected to Route uses.
• Switch to Map view and turn on the 🎯 AI Candidates toggle (next to Route Mode) — then click bonus markers on the map to check/uncheck them. A checked bonus gets a small amber ring around its marker so you can see the pool build up as you click. AI Candidates and Route Mode are mutually exclusive — only one can be on at a time, so a click always means one clear thing (check a candidate, vs. add/remove an actual stop).

A checked bonus only actually joins the candidate pool if it has coordinates on file — one that's never been looked up (see Looking up address & timezone) is silently skipped rather than breaking the run.

Then fill in the route fields

See Start, End, and your motorcycle above for the full explanation of each — quick reference:

• Start / End — an existing bonus from the dropdown, an address typed into the search box (works well for a hotel with its city/state, e.g. "Marriott, Chicago IL" — see above for why a bare business name alone can fail), or a pin dropped by hand with Set from map…. In some rallies the start/end hotel is itself one of the imported bonuses — check the dropdown first before searching or dropping a pin.
• Start date/time — pre-filled from the leg's own Start date/time (step 3 above); change it here any time the route itself won't start the instant the leg does.
• Avg riding speed (mph) — pre-filled from your Rider Profile (step 1); overwrite it for just this route any time, including to see how a slower or faster pace changes whether Daylight-only bonuses stay reachable.
• Minutes per stop — same source as above, and same "just this route" override. This is dwell time at each bonus stop only — fuel stops use their own fixed ~15-minute dwell regardless of this setting.
• Fuel range (mi) — pre-filled from the Motorcycle dropdown (step 2), or 200 mi flat if none is picked; overwrite it any time.

Click it

With everything above in place, click 🎯 AI Suggested Route. It replaces your current stop list with whichever subset and order of your checked candidates scores the most points, while respecting:

• The leg's own deadline — it never builds a route that gets back to End later than the leg's End date/time.
• Timed and day/time-specific bonuses — a bonus with a Timed window, or one only available on specific day(s), is only included at a position where it's actually reachable inside that window.
• Daylight-only bonuses — only included where the schedule has you arriving between that bonus's own sunrise and sunset, using the sunrise/sunset already looked up for that bonus (see Looking up address & timezone) — nothing new is fetched to make this decision.
• Rest, lunch & fuel stops — the rules from "Set these up first" above, applied exactly as described in Rest, lunch & fuel schedule below.

A candidate with no structured Timed/Daylight window data on file isn't excluded just because it can't be checked — it's left in as a soft, visible warning on the built schedule instead (same as a manually-built route already shows), never silently dropped for being unverifiable.

When it's done, a confirmation tells you the total points scored, how many candidates made the cut vs. were left out, and — for smaller candidate pools — the specific reason each excluded one didn't fit (missed its window, or couldn't be fit in without blowing the leg's deadline). It also builds the full rest/lunch/fuel schedule for you automatically — the same one 📅 Build Route Schedule produces by hand — so any Daylight-only or Timed bonus your resulting arrival time would actually miss shows up as a warning right there in the timeline below, not buried in the popup. Like everything else in the route planner, nothing is saved to the database until you click Save Route — so it's safe to try, look at the result and warnings, tweak the average speed or stop time to see if that fixes a close daylight call, and try again with a different candidate pool if it's still not quite what you wanted. The route it builds is a normal, fully editable route afterward — add, remove, or reorder stops by hand same as any other. There's also a hard cap of 25 total stops (start + chosen + end) to match the road-routing service's own limit.

What parameters are used for the AI Suggested Route functionality

Quick reference for everything the search actually reads, and how each one behaves — some can change which bonuses get picked, others only ever add a warning to the resulting schedule:

• Avg Riding Speed — is pulled from the Route Planner's "Avg riding speed" field. That field is pre-filled from your Rider Profile's average moving speed when you open Route Planner or switch motorcycles, but it's editable per-route, so whatever value is showing in that field at the moment you click 🎯 AI Suggested Route is what's used.
• Fuel Range — pre-filled from the selected motorcycle's tank + aux tank − reserve, times MPG, times (1 − safety buffer %), but editable, so it's whatever's currently in the "Fuel range (mi)" field.
• Rest/Lunch Rules — come from the resolved leg → rally → (rest only) your Rider Profile's break-interval/duration as a fallback, but only if neither the leg nor the rally has its own rest interval and duration set. Lunch has no rider-level fallback at all — leg → rally → none.
• Night Riding Preference — is read from your Rider Profile, but it's advisory only. It never changes which bonuses get picked or excludes a route; it only adds a warning to the resulting schedule if a stop would be reached after dark.
• "How Hard Do You Ride?" / Intensity — scales the pre-filled "Avg riding speed" default (relaxed −8%, moderate unchanged, aggressive +8% — still editable per-route), and gives 🎯 AI Suggested Route's search a safety buffer before the leg's real deadline (relaxed ≈8% of the leg's own window held back, moderate ≈3%, aggressive 0 — the full window, same as before this feature existed). Unlike night riding and bad weather, this one can change which bonuses get picked. When a buffer is applied, the results popup says so in plain language.
• "Riding In Bad Weather / Rain" — an advisory-only warning, same pattern as night riding: it never changes which bonuses get picked. It only fires when you've already looked up the 10-day forecast for a bonus (grid's ☁ column, or a popup's "10-day weather" button) during this browser session, and that cached forecast's condition looks rainy/stormy/snowy on the day the schedule would actually reach that stop. No new API calls are made on your behalf — if you haven't looked up a bonus's weather, no warning can appear for it, regardless of preference.

Route optimizer

Optimize Route reorders your existing stops for the shortest overall ride, keeping any Start/End you've set fixed at the ends. It never adds or removes stops — bonus selection stays entirely your own manual pick — and it automatically recalculates the real road route afterward, so the map never shows a stale straight line after optimizing.

Under the hood, it asks for real road distances between every pair of your stops (one request covers the whole set, however many stops you have, up to the same 25-stop cap the road-routing itself uses) and uses those to work out a short overall order — good, not necessarily mathematically perfect, but close enough that hunting for a better one by hand isn't worth the effort. If road distances are briefly unavailable, it falls back to straight-line distances instead of failing outright, and tells you so.

Once it's done, a message tells you exactly what changed — how many stops moved (and which ones, by name, for smaller routes), plus roughly how much distance the new order saves. If your stops were already in the shortest order, it tells you that too, rather than leaving you to wonder whether the click did anything.

Rest, lunch & fuel schedule

📅 Build Route Schedule goes a step further than distance/time stats: it builds a full timeline — arrival and departure at every stop — inserting rest, lunch, and fuel stops wherever they'd actually trigger (even mid-leg, if one stretch is long enough to need more than one). It uses your rider profile and the rally/leg's rest & lunch rules where set, falling back sensibly when either is missing, and flags — but never blocks — any Daylight-only or Timed bonus your arrival time would miss. Every warning is advisory only; re-running it after any change is one click away.

The rest/lunch rules themselves live on the rally (Edit under the rally in the sidebar) and can be overridden per leg (Edit next to the leg) — Rest stop every (hours)/Rest stop duration (minutes) and the matching Lunch fields, all optional. A leg left blank inherits the rally's value for that field; a rally left blank means "not required" for it.

Rest and lunch can each also require the mandatory stop to start within a specific clock-time window — Rest window start/Rest window end (e.g. an Iron Butt-style 11:00 PM–4:00 AM overnight window) and Lunch window start/Lunch window end (typically daytime, e.g. 11:00 AM–4:00 PM) — set independently of each other; both fields in a pair need a value for that window to apply. Once a stop is due, Build Route Schedule checks the clock: if it's already inside the window, the stop starts right then (and still runs its full required duration even if that extends past the window's close). If not, rather than showing the rider as parked and idle, the timeline simply keeps going as normal riding — any fuel or other due stops in between still appear exactly as they would anyway — right up until the window opens, at which point the rest/lunch stop starts there, with its required duration counted only from that moment. A rest stop and a lunch stop are never combined into a single stop even if both happen to be due around the same time — whichever one's window opens sooner takes its stop first, and the other follows immediately after.

Some rallies (Iron Butt-style ones especially) require the rest and/or lunch stop every single day of the rally — including day 1 — landing inside that rule's window, rather than every so many hours. Check Rest required every day (or Lunch required every day) on the rally to switch that rule to this daily mode; a rally uses either the hours-based interval or daily mode for a given rule, never both at once, and daily mode only takes effect when that rule's window is also set (a specific clock-time target is what "once a day" anchors to). A leg can override this independently via its own Rest required every day/Lunch required every day dropdown — Same as rally inherits the rally's checkbox, or pick Required every day/Not required to explicitly override it just for that leg. If a day's window already closed before it could ever be reached — the rally's own start time is already past day 1's window, or a long stop elsewhere ate into the clock — Build Route Schedule flags an advisory warning and skips straight to the next day rather than forcing something impossible.

Build Route Schedule's Timed-bonus check uses the structured window set via the 🕐 icon next to the Timed column, not the plain Timed text itself — see the bonus grid above.

The schedule is saved along with the route the next time you click Save Route — reopening the route later shows it immediately, no need to click Build Route Schedule again unless you've changed the stops, Start time, average speed, stop time, or fuel range since (any of those clears the saved schedule, since it's no longer accurate). Use 🖨 Print Route Schedule to open a clean, print-friendly copy of the timeline in a new tab; your browser's Print dialog (Save as PDF) covers keeping a copy as well as printing one.

Multiple routes per leg

A leg isn't limited to one route — the Route: dropdown at the top of the Route Planner panel lets you build and save several named route scenarios for the same leg, and switch between them at any time. This matters because Google Maps-based tools (including my separate Route Planner & Cannonball AI app, which this app's GPX route export is designed to feed into) can only handle around 10–25 stops in one route before Google's own routing API rejects the request outright. A leg with more bonuses than that doesn't fit in a single route — so instead of forcing every bonus into one oversized route, you can split it into a few smaller ones, each kept comfortably under that limit.

Exporting GPX/KML from the route panel now names the file after the specific route ("<Rally> - <Leg> - <Route name>"), so exporting two different scenarios from the same leg gives you two distinct files instead of one overwriting the other.

Opening a leg with saved routes doesn't automatically draw one on the map — you'll see just the bonus markers until you pick a route from the Route: dropdown (or start a new one). Clear Route from Map, next to the route summary in the toolbar once a route is showing, hides the current route and its gas stops from the map without deleting anything — pick it again from the dropdown any time to bring it back.

Gas station search

Once a route has at least two stops, the Route Planner panel's ⛽ Find Gas Stations button searches a local gas station dataset for stops near the route line and suggests where to fuel up along the way. Set Fuel range (mi) to your bike's real tank range first — the search places a suggested stop roughly every 90% of that range (a built-in reserve buffer). At each stop, a 24h-reliable station (a truck stop or a known 24-hour brand) is preferred over a regular one when there's a nearby choice — if none is nearby, it falls back to the nearest regular station rather than skipping the stop. Click ⛽ Find Gas Stations to run it; if the route fits inside a single tank, no stops are suggested.

Clear Gas Stops removes the suggested stops from the map. This is a planning aid only — nothing here is saved with the route or included in GPX/KML exports, and it resets automatically whenever the route's stops change.

Point color ranges

Click Point ranges… (top-right of the map) to customize the point thresholds and colors used on the map. A bonus is colored by the highest range it meets or exceeds. Add, remove, or reset ranges to defaults at any time — this only affects the map's coloring, not scoring.

Weather forecasts

From a marker's popup, click 10-day weather to open a forecast panel for that bonus's location — daily highs/lows, conditions, and precipitation chance.

Weather radar overlay

Click Radar: Off (top-right of the map) to switch on a live precipitation radar overlay across the whole map — useful for spotting weather along a route at a glance instead of checking each bonus's forecast individually. Click it again (now labeled Radar: On) to turn it off. The slider next to the button controls the overlay's opacity, so you can fade it back enough to still see bonus markers and the route line underneath instead of letting it cover them completely.

Admin portal

Admin accounts see an Admin link in the header. The admin portal lists every rider with their status, role, when they were created, when they were last active, and how many live lookups they've used (broken out by timezone/geocode/weather, hits vs. misses — misses are what actually cost against the API quota).

Adding a user

Click + New user, fill in their email, display name, and a temporary password (minimum 8 characters), then Create user. Share the temporary password with them directly — there's no email invite flow, so they should sign in and can change it via Forgot password? if you'd rather not hand off your own choice.

Each row's Actions column lets you deactivate, promote/demote, or delete a rider. Deactivating blocks sign-in without deleting their data.

Lookup access

The Lookup access column controls whether a rider can use the lookup buttons at all — separately for address/timezone lookups and for weather forecasts. New riders start with both switched on; click Disable next to either one if you want to withhold it from a specific rider, or Enable to turn it back on. Admin accounts always have full access and show an "Admin: full access" badge here instead of the toggle buttons.