The weather was glorious today – warm, with a bit of a breeze (as ever, it seemed to be anabatic and therefore detrimental to my inbound speed). The heat was also a bit warm for a climb, so I took a detour out to Rocky Mountain Cycles in Llantrisant to grab a new Camelback. If you’re in the area and need a friendly bike shop, then there’s nowhere better – they even filled up the Camelback for me and topped it off with some powder to keep me going. Pretty good job really, as I was out of bananas and hadn’t eaten much before setting out.

Aside from avoiding decorating and other rather dull chores that need to be done around the home, the idea today was to test out the geotagging of the new Blackberry Bold (9000). I wasn’t convinced that it was doing anything when I was out in the States, but it seems I was wrong. It was almost certainly due to the overshadowing of all the tall buildings downtown that was preventing a good lock. Here in sunny Wales, where we’re lucky to see the sky, it’s no problem. I’ll re-edit this later with some of the images tagged for the trip.

Max speed today was down a little on what I might have expected for the route. I’d have thought that I’d have been able to hit 45mph without too much trouble, but it seems that wind resistance was going to spoil that for me on the way back down from peak ride height. The other problem area was 30 miles out on the return leg – I’d forgotten there were a couple of short but annoying climbs on the way back in – and paid the price for it. Oh well, that’s part of the fun.

Track for 26th July 2008

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The service provides a means of being able to pre-record a route that can be exported to a gpx route in the same way I’ve shown previously. Rather than use Google’s directions service to be able to describe a route, you can simply ‘draw’ it on the Gmap Pedometer service and then export that out for use on your Garmin as before.  Now that’s more like it – as provided the high-res imagery is available in satellite view, you should be able to record off-road routes without too much trouble.

A word of caution though.  The registration/positional accuracy of the Google data coupled with the accuracy of your GPS unit at any given time may well lead to some pretty large error in positioning.  Pretty large meaning, don’t plot any knife-edge routes and expect to be able to follow them blindfolded wihtout mishap.  You have been warned!

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“OpenStreetMap is a project aimed squarely at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways.”

If you’ve been following the recent posts on the new bike and the Garmin Edge, then you’ll be able to see what’s coming. I’m planning on donating all my routes to the wiki as a socially-responsible thing to do It’s also a good excuse to get out on the bike more…

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Route Data

Last Saturday saw pretty good conditions at the start of the route, which deteriorated towards the Northern end as snow and skin-smarting hail set in and the temperature dropped a couple of degrees (and remained low).The problem with the route was that my 9 year old original Mega9 Shimano chain decided it had had enough of being punished in winter weather and popped a link. Now this wouldn’t have been so much of a problem had I actually had a chain tool with me at the time, as losing a link is within tolerance – but I didn’t – so an unexpected walk to Ponty ensued in search of <oh the shame> a Halfords to pick up a new chain tool.Thankfully, after negotiating Ponty’ frankly RIDICULOUS roads and pedestrianisation schemes, I eventually wound up at Halford’s Bike Hut (helpfully located on the 1st floor of their store) and got things sorted. Big thanks to Tom at Ponty Halfords for doing the work whilst I had a mozy about the store – even if he did say that it was nice to see an Old Skool bike :-/ I think I’ll be needing my free bus pass soon.The rest of the day was marked by contrast to the first half as I took NCR 8 back in towards Cardiff, which is strewn with broken glass and litter all over the place down through the lower part of the Valley. It’s a pretty desperate and depressing place in winter weather, where (puts on Urban Geographers hat) successive former Welsh Office and Local Authority plans have sought to gentrify the larger urban areas in order to revitalise the valleys and surrounding towns. It hasn’t worked yet.The final stretch was a bit of a ‘mare as I’ve pretty much burnt out by the time I’d got back towards Radyr. This is what happens when you take a couple of weeks off and eat Floridian junk in between. Still, looking forward to taking a similar route again next week.

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