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

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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

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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.

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

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Blackpool to Edinburgh

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.

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

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and the profile:-

Cumbria Way profile

Today’s Cambridge Rambling Clubs “A” team walk should have been led by Larry unfortunately he was indisposed so Jill took over at the last minute, hence the couple of blips on the GPS trail!

The walk was designed as a figure of eight with Ickworth Hall in the centre, acting as a rendezvous point for the start and lunch. In the morning we were blessed with sunshine and a cold wind the afternoon turned into a battle across a ploughed field in a squall!

Here is the walk and trail with (even though I say so myself) a fine shot of Ickworth Hall!

Ickworth figure of 8 walk

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Today’s ramble with the Cambridge Rambling Club A team started further afield

The start was at Audley End, Vera led 13 of us, at a cracking pace, across the rolling Essex countryside to The Langleys were we stopped for our sandwiches outside the The Bull. Tea was taken alongside the stream in the very pretty village of Arkesdon.

The countryside was still very wintry & bleak looking with only an occasional burst of snowdrops to brighten the day a little.

Audley End to Langley walk

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We did just over 16miles in 5hr 11min of moving time with 1hr 35min of stops. Surprisingly for us flat landers we did 0ver 1900ft of ascent!

Graph of elevation and speed, from HoudahGeo

Walk elevation & speed

A Happy New Year to all my readers Good to see that you are a person of excellent taste and recognise a real quality blog!

After spending the first 12 hours of the new year in bed with Sally we decided a walk was in order. Neither of us could face the annual new year swim in the river.

So we decided to walk the opposite way and go to Baits Bite Lock via Chesterton and then return via Fen Ditton.

Here is the route with photographs. The GPS is a bit wonky in places,  as I kept it in my pocket so reception was poor under the willow trees

Baits Bite Lock walk

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In the process of trying to tidy up the GPS traces I stumbled across TrailRunner which looks quite interesting and may replace the rather expensive Ascent package that I currently use. Here is a screenshot of it with today’s walk:-

TrailRunner screenshot

Another bit of software than Euan suggested was Trails for the iPhone, it certainly pulled in my Everytrail walks pretty neatly

Today’s 13.3mile walk was with the Southern Norfolk walkers group. The 61st event led by Paul! Twenty of us joined him on this event. The weather stayed dry but overcast.



Santon Downham Walk

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To import the trail I tried using the Ascent software as suggested by Euan, However, I can’t get it to display the imported trail in Everytrail – The folks at Everytrail are working on it – maybe Todays pictures are all taken with the iPhone as the Olympus’s rechargeable batteries have gone all dodgy on me. NB: Chris from Everytrail reports the bug has been  squashed so it should work now

Ascent does produce activity charts like this though:-

Another day another new iPhone application. Today it was EveryTrail.

In the past I used my Garmin Etrex as a GPS and a regular camera, by fiddling with LoadMyTracks, HoudahGeo and Flickr I managed to upload my walks to Everytrail. Today it all changed

Here is my test walk around Cambridge with the iPhone:-



cambridge station walk

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EverTrail iPhone screen

On the iPhone the application looks like this, very intuitive to use, give it your login name ad password then just walk and take pictures. It isn’t using the cell networks or WiFi so these can be switched off. I didn’t and the iPhone battery was dead in about 2 hours

Battery life is a real issue with all these new applications, it means its a playphone rather than a real tool for saying doing day long hikes.

Other than that its a great little application – the log was uploaded over WiFi in a few minutes at home.

It could be improved by having the screen shut off and some positive indication that it is locked to the satellites, maybe buzz if it loses the GPS signal. A screen showing satellite positions and strengths would be cool too. I also noticed that it lost the Altitude data when transferring to Everytrail – not so bad in Cambridge but annoying on a mountain walk.

Apologies for poor image quality – obviously a sticky finger left some traces on the camera lens – a snag when you have to hold the phone for so long!

A good free application that is really only limited by the poor iPhone batteries and satellite receptio.

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