Yesterday was a public holiday in Syria, so we decided to pay a visit to the monastery at Mar Musa, about an hour drive from Damascus off the Homs highway. And of course, I always have an ulterior motive to do some mapping on such journeys.

Now that I'm using the OSM data for satnav on my Garmin, my attention is drawn to problem areas on the map. I've had ongoing problems with the Homs highway leading out of Damascus, previously on my trips to Palmyra, which I thought I'd fixed but my trip yesterday informed me otherwise. I've therefore completely remapped the highway and extended the mapping as two roads up to An Nabk, the junction that leads off to the road to Mar Musa... hopefully this will sort out the problem? It's strange, because the route back into Damascus is calculated no problem at all?

You can read all about Mar Musa on Wikipedia, but suffice to say it's a nice little retreat and worth the visit. On the way back, I managed to persuade the group I was with to take an alternative route, based on the advice of my Garmin. In hindsight, this was a bad decision and probably I won't ever be trusted again for directions, as the route led us along a very poor road and straight through the middle of a military zone. Fortunately, the check points were not manned so we weren't turned back, but just goes to show that you shouldn't trust the maps unless you know the roads! I preach again... don't get too carried away with remote mapping! If you remote map a road then at least label the road type as unknown and certainly not as "primary" just because it show up nicely on the satellite image!

I took the still unfinished extension of the southern bypass on the way back and mapped a bit more of it. Hopefully it will be completed in the next few months and it can be mapped properly.

I've been doing lots of small updates to the map in and around Damascus, include remapping Airport Roundabout... just have to hope that some enthusiastic remote mapper doesn't undo all my work based on the imagery!