Routes or Tracks

I am planning to ride along the driving route directions you can get for the Oregon Trail on the NPS website. My GPS is an old Garmin Quest2 with CN2008 and I'll use Basecamp. I'm waiting for the Monterra to arrive. But for now, am I better off to make a track or a route? What are the advantages/disadvantages of each?

I don't think the Quest 2 is much different from the original Quest, but I could not get my Quest to show uploaded tracks at all.

But, why would you want to use tracks? Is it because the recalculation prompt? Basecamp knows that I'm using CN2008. So then why am I prompted to recalculate. Is that's the issue?

There was an event I was participating in distributing tracks of the trails we were to follow.

Why in a more general sense would you want to create tracks rather than routes of the proposed ride you were planning?

Perhaps no roads go where you want to go, or maybe somebody has gone there already and shared their track.

There are good reasons for tracks, but my original point was that there's no reason to even think of creating tracks, or uploading someone else's to the Quest line because they can't use tracks that way.

Not a matter of wanting to, more of a matter of being forced to.

I vote for tracks if your unit can display them.

I guess it is possible to get routes to work, but in 12 years and several thousand miles of off-road riding each year I have never been able to get routes to work the way I would like them to.

I don't have the time to list all the problems I have had with routes.

But the best thing to do is to do some trial runs with both and see which you like.

The worst thing to do is to choose routes and then start off on the trip without tracks as a backup.

Like many above I only use tracks for dirt riding. However a few years ago I followed he Santa Fe trail driving home from Missoiuri. I made a waypoint for every monument I could find along the trail plus a few forced routes. Then made a route for about each day and followed them with a Nuvi. Worked great.

IMHO, except for gaining a mental map of the general line of travel routes are over rated.

On a couple of occasions I've seen the Garmin software route up an exit ramp, across the road at the top, and down the on-ramp to put the rider right back on the interstate -- except 3 minutes behind where he would have been had he stayed on the interstate and skpped the ramps.

So I vote for tracks and waypoint to waypoint navigation as needed.