Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Category: travel blog

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+

What happened to the daffodils on a Daffodil Dawdle?

Yesterday was Sally‘s big day of walking the Daffodil Dawdle, a marathon size walk that has to be done in 10 hours or less. Her concern wasn’t the walking but the test it presented in her map reading prowess. Fortunately at the 11th hour David emailed her a gpx file which we easily managed to load into her Viewranger app.

Sally & Gina I presume?

Since she was walking with her Twitter friend Gina I decided to stay at home. However, I couldn’t let her zoom 50,000 steps ahead of me in the Fitbit leader board soi decided to walk from Cambridge to meet her. With the combination of Latitude and the aforesaid GPX file I was able to ‘bump’ into them when they were 2/3rds of the way around. As you can see conditions were less than summery.

 

The conditions were pretty gruesome all round , the most hated part for me was the ice sticking to the heal of my boots meaning I had to keep stopping to hack it off 🙁 plus the paths were a quagmire in many places.

Daffodils I presume?

Overall I did 51,000 steps (However Sally still did 7,000 more steps than me). No daffodils, in flower,  could be found, just a few shoots.

Overall an excellent day out. Especially the warming soup & cake at the end thanks to our new found friend Jayne and the LDWA.

All my photos of the day can be found on that rubbish service called Google+ try looking here, Good Luck!

Three Peaks & Three Gadgets

Moves storylineLast saturday Sally and I did the Yorkshire Three Peaks walk. A great walk it was too, especially tagging along behind two members of the LDWA who specialise in 100mile non stop walks. So we moved had a brisker pace and had fewer shorter stops than we are accustomed to with The Cambridge Rambling Club 🙂 The weather was very low cloud with 12″ or so of freshish snow on all three peaks.

The gadgets I was carrying where an iPhone5 with the Moves app running & the route in the Viewranger app (although not tracking). I also had the route stored in my Garmin etrex 20 which was also storing our track as we walked it. Finally I was wearing my trusty Fitbit Ultra.

I’m pleased to say they all worked flawlessly and all their batteries stayed live for the 11 or so hours we were out. I was also carrying my Canon 550D with a 18-135mm lens.

Moves

This is a very nifty app that automatically works out if you are walking, cycling or just sat in a vehicle! It works by using the internal GPS (battery only lasts a few hours) and also the various internal motion sensors. At the end of the day it produces a summary and storyline (see left image). For this walk (and to and froing  before & after) it gave a result of 58,499 steps, 25.7 miles in 10hours 29mins. You can also see the times we summited and the little stops we had.

I now use this app everyday the biggest disadvantage (apart from battery life – which to me is OKish)is that you cannot easily create a database of activity.

I kept the iPhone in an Aquapac case to stop water damage & also took a TeckNeti EP387 7000mAh external battery pack with cable. (Total weight 368gm)

 

 

 

Fitbit

Fitbit data March 16th

As anyone knows both Sally and I are obsessed with this amazing device.

This gave a reading of 60,600 steps, 28.6 miles. 523 floors climbed (5230 feet in normal speak) and 5340 calories burned over about 12.5 hours .  So it agrees very closely to Moves.

 

 

 

 


GPS

Using Ascent OSX app we get the profile and speed as:Screenshot_22_03_2013_14_47

Screenshot_22_03_2013_14_45

This worked out we had walked 24.8 miles in a moving time of 8hr 45min (average speed 2.8mph) with an ascent of 5,579 feet. So the other devices had a pretty good correlation. So the Fitbit really does work 🙂

All my photos of the days walk can be found here.

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First Great Walk

Tomorrow I try my first New Zealand Great Walk it’s the Tongariro Northern Circuit and goes around two active volcanoes Mt Tongariro and Mt Ngauruhoe. What makes it different for me is that I have to take all my food & possible water for two nights & three days. I’ve booked both the Oturere Hut and Walhohonu hut and taxi service to take me to Mangatepopo and collect me from the Whakapapa Village Centre

The weather forecast is looking OKish although there are certainly high winds. I don’t intend on going to the summit’s so hopefully should be OK.

I’ve downloaded the relevant New Zealand Topo50 maps into the Viewranger app and will be taking a spare battery.

Should be interesting – now to pack my bag 🙂