Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Tag: Cycling

Another adventure starts

Well the adventure had a poor start as whilst waiting for the airport taxi at 7am I discovered my flight was at 8.35 not the midday I thought 🙁 with many expletives muttered I finally got through to BA to change my flight for Sunday at huge expense.

I decided to go to the airport anyway & arrived in T5 at 8.30 and went straight to the ticketing desk where the helpful guy said I could get on the next flight at 10.55 and since their system hadn’t fully registered my earlier change he would just make one charge 🙂 one slight gain from this mistake is he checked my bike in thus avoiding the huge queue at the regular check in desks and also gave me a seat on the emergency exit row.

The flight was uneventful apart from the meal being just an eggy bun! Immigration in Moscow was very efficient and speedy with the bike soon appearing,. Boris the driver from RCTC who are organising my first week on their Golden Ring tour, was waiting for me and after a brief stop at Megaton to get a data SIM (1300 RUB for 30GB) and to hit the cash machine Max 5000RUB a time of we went.

The ride was one hour on beautiful smooth roads, in fact the Moscow circular seems to have 5 lanes, we arrived at the Maxima Irbis hotel.

The hotel is good and I enjoyed dinner sitting with Ian & Catherine from Skeggy who are also doing the ride Next Week.

Hopefully some pictures will appear here…

Cycling the Elbe & Vitava rivers

Over 4 months later and I’m back here 🙂 Although I notice over 40 folks a day still visit the site to check out my Scarpa boots posts etc.

D-Route10_gpxMy next little bike trip is now planned and I leave next Tuesday to get the overnight ferry from Harwich to Hook of Holland it’s 70 miles to the ferry but I might just let the train take the strain for that stretch.

After the ferry it’s a four hour or so bike ride to the main station in Amsterdam to catch the overnight sleeper to Prague. Arriving in Prague early Thursday morning ready to cycle the Vitava & Elbe rivers to the North Sea at (probably) Brunsbüttel after this I will probably do the additional  216km to Esbjerg in Denmark to catch the ferry to Harwich. This has to be before September 29th as the ferry ceases to operate afterwards 🙁

According to my Bikeline books it’s 500km from Prague to Magdeburg and then 500km more from Magdeburg to Cuxhaven (on the left bank) and pretty well downhill or the way so somewhat easier than the Sportivs that Sally has me doing here in the UK 🙂

I must give a special shout out to Øivind Langeland and his bluacciaio.com blog for all his positive remarks about my biking the Danube posts. It was great to follow him following some of my route 🙂 maybe next year we can do some of the Iron Curtain Trail. together.

 

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.