Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Category: travel blog

Biking with Bikely

Today whilst researching my upcoming bike ride down the length of The Rhine I came across the website Bikely, this amazingly allows you to trace over Google Maps and generate gpx files that my Garmin understands. I can thus plan the whole 1000mile route and let the Garmin Etrex behave like a TomTom device to tell me where to go. Bikely can even follow roads and thus create really accurate files.

An even better discovery was that the user “MockCyclist” had even created a map with the whole route plotted. A fantastic starting point, I’m now modifying his file to cut out the ferries that MockCyclist had used in Rotterdam and some other points on The Rhine.

I’m going to start from where I finished last year, My apartment in Les Gets, probably around the 7th July. I have to be back for my birthday on the 28th!

Here is the route so far:-

Geoff’s Rhine trip

Share your bike routes @ Bikely.com

All 1000 miles of it!

Standon circular walk

Today’s walk with the Cambridge Rambling Club A team was a circular walk starting from Standon and then heading over to Much Hadham. Christine ably led the walk and 10 of us set off on the hottest day of the year so far! Mud rain & snow were but distant memories 🙂 Here is the walk:-

Standon circular walk at EveryTrail

Map your trip with EveryTrail

During Sally’s mega shopping trip I treated myself to some Inov8 trail shoes which I tried out today. I felt a bit of a fraud as I didn’t seem a ‘proper’ walker. They are just so much lighter than wearing boots. My heels still started to hurt at the 12 mile mark after the damage caused by my Thames Path walk,. Hopefully, the bruising on my heels will go away with time. Otherwise they seemed fine, although still uncertain about walking through long wet grass with them.

The Thames Path


After 10 days of walking I completed The Thames Path from its rural source close to Cirencester and its 180+ mile twisty route to the Thames Barrier.

The route encompasses a lot of famous place names associated with Royalty and the English upper classes in fact it could be a tour of them from The palace of Westminster, Hampton Court, Windsor, Eton & Oxford.

Most days I did well over 20miles as the ground is flat, well marked & easy going. My days were:-

Day 1 (May 10th) Ashton Keynes to The Source and back again with Sally who I must thank for the lift 🙂 I stayed at the good Cove House. Distance about 15 miles.

Day 2 (May 11th) Ashton Keynes to Kelmscott about 21miles I stayed at the excellent Manor Farm with an amazing evening meal at The Plough.

Day 3 (May 12th) Kelmscott to Swinford another 21 miles or so Charles met be en-route and made me a coffee in his stunning house plus giving me lots of tips for my upcoming China trip, thank you 🙂
My friend Chris picked me up so I could stay at his house in Abingdon.

Day 4 (May 13) Swinford to Clifton Hamden a 22mile day made possible by Chris picking me up again and providing a seconds night hospitality.

Day 5 (May 14) Clifton Hamden to Goring a short 15 mile day so I could be ready for Sally coming down for the weekend. I met Margaret who is walking bits of the Path over weekends etc.

Day 6 (May 15) Goring to Henley Lovely 21 mile walk with a couple of surprising hills.

Day 7 (May 16) Henley to Windsor/Eton A cracking day of over 23 miles with Sally followed by a meal at Zizzi’s thank you Philip and congratulations on your upcoming wedding 🙂

Day 8 (May 17) Eton to Hampton Court A big 24 miler so a tiring day thanks to AroundMe I located the Lionsgate Hotel even though I had no prior booking!

Day 9 (May 18) Hampton Court to Chelsea another 22 miler this time with aching feet 🙁 Very impressive that the countryside extends so far into London. AroundMe saved me again by finding a cheap hotel in Chelsea, The Oakley the neighbouring Fiamma made me an excellent vegetarian stuffed cannelloni

which brings me to the final day

Day 10 (May19) Chelsea to The Thames Barrier 17 miles to do what a crow could fly in half! Past all the magnificent buildings associated with London, Big Ben, The Globe, Tower Bridge etc etc
All totally awesome except for the nagging pain of two small heel blisters 🙁 🙁 although relieved somewhat by meeting Alwyn & his wife who are planning to walk to Santiago from St Albans, they had just returned from cycling the length of New Zealand having previously crossed Canada and covered fair distances in Australia – amazing the folks you meet when walking.

Geoff’s travelling gadget bag!

I spent tonight shortening all my USB cables so that my electronics can pack away neatly.  In the past I have carried a rats nest of cables & Power Supplies with me.

The result of tonight’s endeavours is shown above. It’s now  below 2Kg including the Asus power supply, Garmin GPS, Olympus uTough camera, Eee 4G, rechargeable battery charger & iPhone.

Its always annoyed me that the Olympus cameras come with a separate power supply and cable rather than charging through their USB lead. Tonight, whilst shortening the camera lead I discovered that if I left the green & white wires disconnected then it would charge through the Eee USB port (OK you also need a complete cable to get the pics off).

On the Eee I have a nLite version of XP Pro (About 3GB in size) with GPS Trackmaker for downloading tracks of the Garmin, Picasa for downloading images of the camera and storing locally on a 16GB SD card. GPicSync ties the images to the gpx tracks. I also have MemoryMap with the whole of the UK at 50000:1 plus The Alps and Pyrenees 🙂 I run CCleaner very frequently to get rid of accumulated crap and keep about 600M free space. It also has iTunes so the iphone can charge and unlocked if anything goes wrong.

So the Thames Path will be the testing ground, at least I will be passing a lot ofelectronic stores if anything goes awry.