Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Tag: Les Gets Posts

Black Sea here I come

IMG_3087Today marks my first cycling day in this years marathon ride which, hopefully, will take me to Les Gets to visit my apartment and maybe meet Euan for a walk or two. I  hope to cycle over to Zurich to see my neühew then onto the start of The Danube River at Donoueschlingen, cycling down it’s full length of 2886 km (1,800 miles) to The Black Sea. Not sure what to do then but maybe go down to Istanbul.

The first day was with Sally on her lightweight racer with me lugging two panniers (hastily emptied a bit to allow the saddlebag to fit). Coming to a hill felt like someone was hanging onto the bike the descents are cool although above 22mph it gets a bit of a shake.

Here are the stats (note I’m wearing a Polar bluetooth H7 heart monitor & the bike is now fitted with the Wahoo SC bluetooth cadence & speed monitor all hooked into the iPhone5. Today I used the Strava app.

Strava_Ride___Cambridge_to_Kings_Cross

 

Now for the fish & chips lets hope they cost a bit less than the local PH drinks.

The photos are up on Google+

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

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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

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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.

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

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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.