Shaun McDonald's Blog

With the English bank holiday weekend (Scotland has the August bank holiday on the first Monday instead of the last), I thought that I would go for one of my longer cycle rides and see if I could beat my previous record of 150 miles. On the Saturday morning I packed the 4.5 litre of water, home made pasta, chocolate and extra clothing layers into my panniers. I finally got going at 1pm, which was a lot later than I was expecting.

The first part of my journey was heading north to the River Thames on the Waterlink Way/National Cycle Route 21. Then I followed the Thames to the Woolwich ferry using the NCN4 and 1. I decided to add a little extra adventure to my journey by crossing the River Thames a couple of times. First using the Woolwich Ferry to get to the North bank, which is free. Then following a part of the new Cycle SuperHighway 3, which is a rebranding of the previous cycle path that it runs along, to head east towards my next crossing. To get back to the South bank of the Thames, I used the Dartford crossing. You can’t cycle over, however a free pickup truck service is provided to take cyclist and bike over to the other side.

After a nice chat about traffic and cycling with the traffic officer who took me across, I then re-joined the National Cycle Route 1 most of the way to Whitstable. I decided to follow a straighter new cycle route from just before Gravesend to Strood, which is part of the old A2 prior to it being upgraded.

Shortly after Sittingbourne while following the NCN1, I seen on the right hand side of the road a car with the two door windows smashed a couple of people and another vehicle, which looked rather unusual. I continued further up the road until I was out of sight, as I didn’t know how they would react and then reported the car break-in to the police via a 999 call. As I didn’t know how to describe my current location well, thus I took a photo of the screen on my phone (which ended up against my face while talking thus unable to look at the screen) with the latitude and longitude, and gave the lat/lon to the operator, which worked. On Sunday afternoon I got a phone call from the police following up with some clarifications to the useful evidence. They were pleased that I had phoned in the incident as a witness as most people would have just turned a blind eye.

A bit further down the road I stopped to eat some of my pasta, and suddenly some dark rain clouds came over and the heavens opened. Luckily it was just a fairly short shower and I had managed to find a bit of shelter for it to pass. It did worry me a bit as to how much more rain there would be for the rest of my journey. Luckily once that cloud passed it was clear for the rest of my journey.

From Whitstable I followed the coast, much of which was on the path or promenades that runs along the edge of the sea. As I was getting into Ramsgate at about 2 am after 107 miles, I was getting too tired to be able to continue the rest of the night further round the coast safely, so I found a nice bench and shelter overlooking the sea to put my head down for a few hours. Luckily I had a towel with me that I was able to use as a pillow.

Shortly after 5am I set off again slightly refreshed with the first signs of dawn. The route of the NCN1 down to Deal is quite nice. After Deal however it turns inland a little and into a very long climb that seems to just go on forever. It was nice to be able to get to the top and see the nice view across the English Channel. After a little decent there is the White Cliffs of Dover National Trust site, which has a nice view overlooking Dover ferry port. (Yeah, I’m sure you already know that I quite like travelling by ferry from time to time.)

From there I headed down the short and steep downhill into Dover, the downhill was over way too quick considering the amount of uphill. I then took the train home, going the full length of the straight track from Ashford to Redhill (with a change at Tonbridge). The reason I mention it, is because it does look quite strange or unusual at lower zooms on a map, when there generally is more curves in rail lines.

On the Sunday late afternoon/evening I took a nice 5 hour nap to catch up my sleep, before getting up for a few hours to catch up on a few things before heading back to bed for a full nights sleep.

In total it was 133 miles over 20 hours, which is my second longest cycle in one go. The Dunwich Dynamo was 127 miles including the ride to the start. At some point in the future I want to ride from Dover anti-clockwise round the coast, particularly to try hill out of Dover and the long downhill into Deal. I’d also like to do Dover-Brighton via the NCN2.

At the start of October I took a week’s holiday up north in Dumfries in the run up to the Dumfries Mapping Party. It was a great week of mostly cycling, sightseeing and ended with a mapping party, held in the local leisure centre, DG One, which has some council meeting rooms.

Heading out I was waiting on the Royal Mail delivering some OpenStreetMap reflective vests, which were supposed to have been delivered a few days earlier, though unreliable mail delivery is one downside of strike action. It meant that I had to delay my departure from home, thankfully I had bought the flexible train tickets from London to Dumfries, rather than the advance fares where you can’t change the train your travelling on and were only a couple of pounds cheaper when I was purchasing my tickets.

The original trains that I had planned to get had a short, reasonable delay between them, however the train I ended up getting from London meant that there was over an hour wait in Carlisle. I couldn’t be bothered waiting, so I decided to set off towards Dumfries following the National Cycle Network Route 7, which at the time was only mapped to the edge of Carlisle. When I crossed the border, I checked the train times from Gretna Green on my phone and realised that the train that I would have got from Carlisle was due in about the time it would take me to get to the station. Sure enough I had a minute or two to wait on the platform before the train (with space for six bike at one end of the train, yeah ScotRail do know how to transport bikes unlike some other train companies I can think of) appeared. Later on in the week I completed the rest of the NCN7 from South of Dumfries to Gretna Green which hadn’t already been added to OpenStreetMap.

Cycle track from my week in Dumfries

I’ve had a little play with the Party Render scripts to produce the lovely image on the left. I customised the place names that were shown a bit to make it clearer.

On the Wednesday meeting up with the local OSM contact (who goes by the name disgruntled, or known in the real world as Sally) for the first time at the Wednesday Wheelers meetup. It was quite interesting to see and hear the older generation happily cycling 10-30 miles for their regular weekly meetup. I felt quite at home considering my normal commute (well at the time) was 8-10 miles in each direction, and most people I speak to are surprised at the distance I cycle each day.

Then on the Thursday I took a rather long ride over the hills of Ae and added the lcn 10 from Dumfries to Moffat. Sally had already mapped the first section of the route, which was a really nice cycle track, which had been converted from an old railway line. It was fairly flat until I got to Ae, where there is the Forest of Ae mountain bike trails, with some really steep hills that I wasn’t expecting. Thankfully just before the climb, and in time for a late lunch there was a nice little cafe, with a bike shop in the same building. Heading over the hills there were some really pretty views. It was also nice being in the middle of nowhere and only being able to hear some birdsong, and the light breeze in the trees. Once I hit the downhill, I found it pretty scary, as I wasn’t used to going down such a long hill with that style of track and occasional cattle grids.

On my return I took an earlier, but late running, train to Carlisle and cycled round Carlisle to get a bunch of it mapped.

I was really impressed with the way that Sally had managed to write and get published an article in the local paper. She’s also been a great local contact and mapper. Dumfries council organised the nice venue, with the event being part of the Smarter Choices, Smarter Places programme in Scotland.

I’ve been uploading the photos I’ve taken to Flickr in various sets. Then importing them into CycleStreets, so that they will appear in the route listings when you plan a route in the Dumfires area.

This year for Christmas I went over to Germany to see some family I haven’t seen for 11 years. I really should learn some more German, so that I can speak with my grandmother, rather than needing my cousin, to translate for me. She learnt more English than I learnt German, though she needs to learn it for her university course.

While I was there I got the village Singhofen mapped, all on foot, and often freezing temperatures. At least it was dry, and I had my big duvet jacket, so didn’t notice the cold as much. There are plenty of quiet roads that lead off to the neighbouring villages, and some of the finer details that still need to be completed. Hopefully next time I go, I’ll have a bike, which will make it rather a lot faster to do the surveying.

Some people think that Germany is complete, in fact most of the small towns and villages have been forgotten about. Many of them are missing any roads going to them. The Germans are organised enough to have a list of places that need mapping, with an accompanied slippy map.

To get there I used the Eurostar from St. Pancras to Brussels, there I changed to Thalys to Köln, where my cousin and her boyfriend picked me up. While I was in Brussels, I had an hour to kill so went out for a quick walk and found some unnamed streets. I also found this cart that had fallen on the  tracks in the station:

I have a 44MB NMEA (27MB GPX) track @ 5Hz of my journey back, with the exception of when I was on the DeutcheBahn train from Koblenz to Köln, which seems to be like the UK’s Virgin trains in their expertise in blocking GPS signals.

One interesting thing I found outside Köln train station was that there was a lot of bicycles standing there with a lock between the back wheel and the frame, and not locked to anything fixed to the ground.

Happy new year to all.

On Saturday I took a random day trip to Calais on the train and ferry. It’s been eleven years since I last travelled on the Dover to Calais ferries. This time I was on foot instead of being in a car.

I learnt quite a few things that I should do differently the next time.

• Don’t get lost in Dover by taking a wrong turn
• Take the bike
• There is a 45 minute check-in for foot passengers, while only 30 minutes for car vehicles
• Aim for an earlier return ferry, so that I don’t have to take the 2304 from Dover to Faversham to change at 23:42 to arrive in London Victoria at 01:29, and then have to take a night bus home. (The stop before London Victoria on the last train is Dartford).

 The Dover Docks. (I’m sure that OpenStreetMap can do better than the commercial mapping agencies, however it isn’t going to be easy, as I doubt the port authority nor the border controls will allow you to wander round the port.)

Got 2 stations added.

Tomorrow, will be the final installment of the Summer 2008 London Mapping Marathon. We will be moving to the Fortnightly Winter 2008-9 Random Pub Meetup. Each week will be a different pub in a potentially unmapped area, for those hard core mappers out there. I’m looking for suggestions on where we could go. On the 24th December we will be going to that thingy pub at latitude 90, longitude -0.12345.

Matt Amos has started organising a mapping party in the Wembly area of London on Sunday 12th October 2008. Hopefully we will have a few weekend mapping parties, in the more outlying parts of London, over the course of the winter.

Later in October I will be going to a mapping party in Kyiv.

Last weekend (22-25 August) I went over to Dublin for the Dragheda Mapping Party. I took the train and ferry over, instead of flying, so that I could take my bike. I did get some coding and catching up done on the train and ferry. I found it interesting that Virgin Trains run electric to Crewe, then attach a diesel locomotive on the front to continue into Holyhead. I also found that Virgin Trains now have “enhanced mobile reception” on their trains. I did have to give up trying to use the GPS as Virgins don’t have enhanced gps reception.

I was staying in Dublin and travelling up to Dragheda each day. There has been some considerable progress in the area over the weekend, going from only the main roads mapped to most of the town being mapped by the end of the weekend.

There was some pre-event publicity in a local paper. However the original press release that went out somehow got completely mis-interpreted.

On the Saturday there was a lot of overlap between the mappers, so we got all the traces and photos loaded on to Dermot McNally’s Mac, and done the editing all at once. It prevented people adding the same roads multiple times.

On the Sunday morning I was picked up by Dermot and we done some car mapping on the way to the venue. At one point we had to get out and hold the vegetation back so that we could take a picture of the street sign.

On the way back I hit the start of the 17 day closure of the west coast mainline for rail works, so had to change trains and get lost going from Birmingham New Street to Birmingham Moor Street. I did manage to get a trace all the way back, and map a few streets in Holyhead. Probably should have stayed in Holyhead to do some more mapping and take a later train.

On Saturday I took a 30 mile cycle out to North Berwick. The tail (westerly) wind did help, and helped my decision on whether to cycle west, north or east.
I took a couple of stops along the way for refreshments. I got into North Berwick about 5pm, just as the sun was setting.
When I got to the train station, the train was due to leave in about 5 minutes time. There was an announcement to say that it was 10 minutes late. Did it appear? Nope. The next one appeared and left on time though. One thing that I noticed is that with the train being electric, it is considerably quieter than the desiel trains that run between Edinburgh-{Glasgow, Bathgate, Fife via Stirling}.

A week past Wednesday, I took a cycle straight from university along the Union canal to Falkirk. It was the furthest West I have cycled along the canal towpath. It was an enjoyable quiet cycle that too just over 4 hours. I needed the exercise.

I even got around to taking a few of pictures on the way. The two photos attached to this post were taken only a few minutes apart, a short distance apart.

I’ve now seen the Falkirk Wheel, for the first time. As it was very dark by then the pictures of it didn’t come out well.

After getting into Falkirk around 8pm, I popped into Tesco for a quick shop, before hopping on the train with my bike home.

The next day I had some horrible slow puncture that got rapidly worse that meant I had to push the bike home. It was a lovely thorn that was stuck in the tyre that caused the puncture. Pushing the thorn out and patching the inner tube seems to have fixed it. The hardest part of the repair was tyre back on to the wheel, but I managed.

Yesterday I managed to get another puncture, this time on the other tyre. It was caused by a bit of glass 8mm long and about 2-4mm wide. It caused so much damage to the inner tube that meant that patching it just didn’t work. So after a couple of failed attempts I stuck in a new inner tube.

Yesterday I took a cycle along the union canal. I set out, without deciding exactly where I would turn back. The sun had already set, so it pretty dark going along most of the canal.
It’s starting to get colder as the puddles on the tow path were starting to freeze in a few places.
By the time I was 6 miles away from Linlithgow, my bike light was become rather dull, with the warning light on. As I wouldn’t have enough light to get all the way back home from there, I decided to take the train from Linlithgow to Edinburgh Park station for £3.30. At Edinburgh Park I was the only one to get off the train. It was only about 5 minutes from there home.
Acording to Google Earth, I cycled about 19 miles in around 2 hours.

I made the whirlwind trip to Hamburg for the 2nd Mac Porters Meeting at the Google offices there. I seem to have survived my first flying trip (in both senses). It was great to meet the porters in person again or for the first time.

I really liked the Eurostar on my Lyon trip, far smoother in parts, though longer. You can also move around a lot more on the Eurostar and have no seat belts too. Now all we need is for a high speed rail link between Edinburgh and London that make the Eurostar even better.

It was great being able to play with a Mac Pro! Even without ccache installed, a build of OpenOffice.org takes about 1 hour and 20 minutes. This is dramatically less than the current build times that I’m getting on my MacBook, of around 8 hours. Now I really want one, but simply cannot afford it.

It is also quite nice to have a shot of working with 2 monitors with my MacBook. It is a lot better to be able to work with different part of a project on different screens. For example, the source code on one and the result on the other screen. However I’m trying to put off getting a monitor until I have a job or can afford it.

With the help of Oliver Braun, I managed to get the link to the Applications folder inside the disk image working properly. I was very close to getting the line of make file in the correct place. We’re looking at possibly increasing the size of the background image to make it look a bit better. Follow issue 72008 to track the integration and testing of my patches.

Minutes of the events on Saturday are available on Eric Bachard’s blog. Sunday’s events should be coming soon. EDIT: The events from Sunday are available.

I have to thank Martin Kretzschmar for his sofa, otherwise I would never have gone.