Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Cambridge to Les Gets the final map.

After much effort with dodgy computers I’ve stitched together all 10 days of my travel to Les Gets. Joost at Everytrail listened to their customers and have now enabled importing pictures from Picasa. So here is the trip with all the photos beautifully geotagged. The GPS data is down to street level so you can see every turn and mistake I made.

Unfortunately the GPS height data is very ‘noisy’ and Everytrail doesnt seem to have any statistical smoothing,  so the ascent/descent numbers are  wildly out. It says I climbed 57,653 feet and descended 56,402 feet 🙁 (Although the overall effect is not bad as it implies I’m at 1251 feet whereas I’m at 3800 feet) However, the trip profiles are correct.

The cyclometer displayed a distance of 779 miles and the GPS 801 miles, The boat covered 21 miles where i didn’t pedal 🙂 So pretty amazingly the correlation was spot on!

The moving average for the whole trip was 10.7mph and the overall average including stops when travelling was 7.9mph. So my biking is just over 3 times faster than me walking!

Here it is:-

Cambridge to Les Gets bike ride

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Trip Sharing with Google Maps

Biking to Les Gets Day -1

The big day arrives tomorrow, Sally and I bike off to London with me continuing on to my apartment in Les Gets (if I’m up to it!).

My Caradice saddlebag is all packed and Howes have fixed my Dawes bike up!  The Eee is coming with me so hopefully the photos will get put up on Picasa and  the days cycling up to Everytrail

Here’s the proposed route all 694miles of it!

Cambridge to Les Gets – Proposed

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Trip Sharing with Google Maps

Tomorrow night I’m staying with my friend & Pilates instructor, Daphne, in London whilst Sally returns home then its a early start to Canterbury. Hopefully, I will get a ferry early Tuesday to Calais then another 10 days and I should be there.

Cycling again after 40 years……

Its been in my head for a long time to cycle down through France, in fact checking my Quicken I can see that I treated myself to a new bike for £669.98p for my birthday 10 years ago! A bike that has not been used for over 9 years ……

Finally I’ve decided to bike to my ski apartment in Les Gets, not in the winter season 🙂 but in the next few weeks. As the crow flies its 800km or about 500miles. After enduring Peruvian and Ecuadorian driving for the past few weeks I’m pretty well OK with roads now…..

The bike is booked into Howes, on my birthday, in a couple of weeks, to get it into shape, in the mean time I thought I would get myself into shape by doing a bit of training. Here’s today little ride of 21.5 miles cycled at 12.5mph so not bad as a starter 🙂

Watlington to Gayton bike ride

Widget powered by EveryTrail: Share GPS Tracks>Watlington to Gayton bike ride

Blackpool to Edinburgh
Les gets
Dover to Les Gets

In my youth my longest ride in a day (I was about 17/18)was the 200miles from Blackpool to Edinburgh and doing 100mile days was pretty normal at the weekends,  so lets see if the leg muscles have weakened with age.

Cumbrian Way and Everytrail

Finally, one week later, I can publish our trail and photographs for our Cumbrian Way weekend. Sally and I are both quite proud that we managed over 60 miles and 8400ft of ascent in three days walking. The weather was in our favour being cool and sunny most of the time.

The reason for the delay in updating is that I had a big struggle getting Everytrail to accept 3 days of walking in one trail. Finally cracked it by using Garmin Mapsource on XP to bring in all the various gpx files in from the Garmin, edit out all the oddments and connect the three days together. The output from this worked fine in Google Earth but Everytrail insisted that at the end of each day we moved in a straight line back to the end of the first day! Finally cracked that by importing the file into Ascent on the iMac then re-saving it, before finally posting to Everytrail.

The Cumbrian Way is an excellent walk through stunning scenery the waymarking is sporadic in parts and I can well imagine the  section over Caldbeck Fell would be very hairy in poor visibility. We stayed near Skelwith in the Elterwater Park Guest House which at £84.49 for the night we felt was over priced. (The proprietors obviously are followers of Stelios and his business model of charging extra’s eg one night stay, debit credit card charges) The night in Keswick was at the Abacourt House B&B , £62, Clean & very central.

Many thanks must go to to George & Jacqui, friends since I did the Duke of Edinburgh award in the 60’s, for putting as up and taxiing us to the  start and finish

Here is the walk (warts and all) :-

Cumbria Way walk

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging

and the profile:-

Cumbria Way profile
Cumbria Way profile