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Day 0 – The Prologue

After a long (8 hour) but uneventful train journey through seemingly endless bands of rain, broken up with various cups of coffee and a foot-long Subway sandwich at Inverness, we made it to Thurso on time, the girls about an hour back in the car.

Dan and I checked in to the Pentland Hotel and immediately set about our prologue – a 64km round trip to John O’ Groats, under time pressure – we needed to be back in 2h30 to get dinner at the hotel. Taking the back road out, it was dry to start but we soon got caught in a heavy rain shower – quite scary in the extremely bleak surroundings of rural Caithness. After a while though, we made it to John O’ Groats which was basically a giant car park and a small, pretty harbour with views to Orkney.

With dinner beckoning we didn’t hang around. The rain stopped for the return leg along the coastal road. After the first, and only considerable hill, I struggled to match Dan’s 38kph pace and started to see stars. A bit of slipstreaming got me sorted and we sped past Mey and picturesque Dunnet Bay, making it back with 5 mins to spare.

2h25 for 64km with an average of ~22kmh out, 30kmh back – ouch. We burst into the hotel bar in full cycling gear and carbed up. Tomorrow is more than twice as long, with 10 hills, so the pace will be a lot slower…

Caption for the pic of Dan: Cavendish who?

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Day -1

Ok cycle last night from Edinburgh Waverley station to parents – 10.6km in 32:30. Half in the rain, half dry. However, properly raining this morning, so gratefully acceping lift in to station with parents. Weather forecast for next three days now looks very wet indeed, will be a real challenge for us – and the bikes – but should hopefully clear up by Monday when we go through Glencoe.

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Moblogging

Hoping to be able to blog my Big Cycle, mobile reception and iPhone battery-life notwithstanding! Trying out the WordPress for iPhone application, with photo adding feature. Impressed so far.

Here’s what will be waiting for me when I get back home…

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Two Weeks

…until I step on a series of trains up to the far north of Scotland, before cycling back home. If all goes to plan, I should be back in London 11 days later, after 9 days of cycling, a day of travelling and a prologue.

Training has been going reasonably well, with a series of day rides radiating out of London, to Oxford, Brighton, Eastbourne, Rye and Canterbury, as well as an unplanned ascent of Leith Hill. The Kent hills are typically small, but numerous and steep – perhaps not the best practice for the longer, but generally gentler hills in Scotland.

It has been exceptionally hot here in London over the last few days. It isn’t forecast to stay this way, but I hope that we will get some sunshine in Scotland, and that we can cycle faster than the midges can fly! Nine days of rain would be a great shame. The long-range forecasts at the moment are unclear.

I would love to be able to push my location live to a map on this blog, but the iPhone can’t do this (unless I had an application open all the time, which would quickly eat the battery.) So I’ll probably aim just to stick up a blog post each day.

I should pass Gregory cycling in the other direction, somewhere just north of Inverness on the 19th.

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Dopplr

I’ve had a Dopplr account for a while now. It’s a rather cool service for basically saying where in the world you will be. It’s a shame that not many people I know are on it, as like all social networking sites, it gets better and better as your network moves onto it.

One unexpected freebie that Dopplr did at the end of last year is take everyone’s historical data and create a personalised report of what they did in 2008. In the usual Dopplr style, it’s attractively presented and a little quirky – with the famous city colours (each city has a colour associated with it, based on a conversion of its name into hexadecimal).

Here’s mine for 2008 – it links to a larger version on Flickr:
My 2008 Dopplr Report

I only made two foreign trips last summer, and so far only have one planned this year, although it will be a lot further away than in 2008.

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Summer Plans

This summer, I’m aiming to take advantage of the rare confluence of a job with a good amount of holiday allowance, and the fact I’m earning, to do quite a bit this summer.

The plans so far are:

  • 28th May-3rd June: Trip to Vienna and Bratislava.

  • 2nd-11th July: Dolomites 5 Days (JWOC Spectator Races) in Trento, Italy. Unfortunately clashes with the State of the Map conference in Amsterdam.
  • 17th-26th July: One possible week for a Thurso-London 1400km bike ride I’m planning.
  • 2nd-8th August: Scottish 6 Days, this time near Perth.
  • September & October are looking like great months for City Race orienteering – London, Oxford, Cambridge and Chester are all planned for that time.
  • 6th-16th November: San Francisco Golden Gate Getaway.
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Spectacular Cycling Viaducts in the UK

I’m on the lookout for the most dramatic viaducts you can cycle or walk across, in the UK. A bit of Googling hasn’t revealed a definitive list, so I’m building up on here – suggestions welcome.

So far, I know about:

A useful resource is here.

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Oddities on Google Maps

Here’s a couple of odd names on Google Maps

Someone, somewhere, typed this in:
picture-1

Where did the “f” come from?
picture-2

Both of these screengrabs are from Google Maps, they are (c) 2009 Google with Map data (c) 2009 Tele Atlas.

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When Tilecutters Go Bad

I’ve been playing around with Tiles@Home over the last few days – here’s a tile that I just generated, while changing some transparency settings.

streeto_16_32703_21918

Hmm, back to the drawing board.

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Google Tube Maps

Google has added a tube/metro network layer for various cities, including London.

On the one hand, a geographically accurate map is useful for, for example, realising that you might as well just walk between Blackfriars and Farringdon. On the other hand, it isn’t very useful when you are actually using the tube, to have each station connected to the next with straight lines, as overlaps can cause problems. In the screen-grab below, the Victoria line (light blue) doesn’t stop at Manor House, and the Piccadilly line (dark blue) doesn’t stop at Harringay Green Lanes.

googletube

Something very odd seems to be going on in Hammersmith – the H&C (pink) line is shown ending several hundred metres north of its true end station, at what looks like a depo. The actual H&C end station is shown instead as being connected to the Piccadilly line (dark blue) whereas you would actually need to go to the bottom station to get a Piccadilly train.

googlehammersmith

There is also a mysterious extra link on the London Overground line which doesn’t appear on any tube map.

…and while we are on the topic of Google and public transport, my local station appears to have split into two:

googlehomerton

The one on the left is correct, the one on the right doesn’t exist. All along the route in fact, the stations are mostly doubled up, with the “x” one being correct and the “x Rail” one being wrong.

Thank goodness we have OpenStreetMap where, if something’s wrong, we can go in and immediately fix it. Being my local area, of course, the map is already pristine:

osmhomerton