on June 1st, 2008
!Dad asked me last week, whether I was still using the pedometer.. I said yes, though I've not been terribly regularly of late. I was already vaguely pondering doing some of the Thames Path while on holiday, not really sure why, it's just there, not too far away, and I've already walked some bits of it near Abingdon/Oxford, so it's collectable.
Yesterday I pondered for a while how to map the route and get one of those nice KML files that google will show. I even pondered going to maplins and buying a GPS with the intention of returning it later (tsk), James as ours in the US, in the hope he'll not get too lost with it ;) Then I wondered if one can rent them (one can, but not at such short notice). I remembered eventually that the Blackberry work insisted on giving me has a built-in GPS, so at least it's useful for something. It doesn't come with any sort of tracking though, just a "you're here" thing. So I looked for blackberry software.
It seems there's already several; MobileTracker, which costs $24 and makes actual tracks on the device, a few others which save tracks to a website for you, and GPSed which is supposed to save tracks locally or on their website, and generally support/convert to useful formats. I created an account and put the blackberry on to charge.
Laying my local map (Explorer 169) out on the bed (how else does one read a whole map) I decided that I could walk from Cricklade to Ashton Keynes and back in 2-3 hours or so. Google claimed the road route was 4 miles (one-way)
So, this morning, or what passes for morning when you get up at around 11, I started preparing and packing. I had tea, and breakfast (nutella on toast), made sandwiches from the left over chicken, filled a bottle with orange squash, packed the lunch, my fluffy walking top, the map, blackberry (having proved the gpsed thing at least knew where it was), the pedometer, camera with fresh batteries, my phone.. And probably a few other bits I've already forgotten (ah yes, my A2, not that I ended up using it..)
Pulling on my walking socks and hiking boots, I got in the car and drove the few miles to Cricklade. I'd planned to park in a pub car park that looked like it was more or less on the Thames Path, but they turned out not to have one, so I parked in a side road instead.
I spent a fair while trying to extract myself from Cricklade on to the Thames Path (on foot), luckily my local driving map (thanks AA!) also had Cricklade on it, which helped, even though some of the paths were decidedly not where indicated. Indeed the actual path on the ground made a 180 degree turn at one point, into a farmyard, which confused me a bit, I had to ask a local where to go next (it turned out I'd missed a very small sign).
After that it was mostly plain sailing, or staggering/wading depending on the conditions. Some paths of the path are very well sign-posted with new-looking wooden signs with etched wording, some rely on the small round while labels with fat arrows on style-posts, and some are just plain missing. Some of it was unkept, flattened grass trails in fields, and some gravel tracks and parts of cycle route 45. I only wandered off the path once, by following some other walkers who were in fact going somewhere else. ("The basin", somewhere north end of the local nature reserve). I backtracked for 5 minutes.
I checked the gpsed thing every so often, it was showing me how fast I was going, but not how far I'd gone or what distance, which seems an odd failure mode. After several tries I figured how to tell it what my gpsed account details were (in some settings parts, leaving the page via "back" asks if you want to save changes, in that particular one it didn't, it just ignored them). It has a nice "view position" thingy which opens the browser to a map with a bright red "you are here" circle on it, which is helpful if you're on a road, but their map doesn't seem to have tracks or trails, so mostly it wasn't too useful, apart from to show me I was next to the Thames, which I kinda knew anyway.
I'd left Cricklade at around 1pm, I arrived in Ashton Keynes at about 3:30. I wandered straight down one street (Back Lane) looking for a pub that my map indicated was there, and missed it. (I think that was the Plough), then headed for the Horse and Jockey which was easier to find. They didn't do tea, sadly, so I had an orange j2o, and ate some of my sandwiches. It's one of those tiny pubs with a front room with a bar in it. Looks like at some point they added the back room as well, all the occupants (all 4 of them) were in the front around the bar.
At around 4:15pm I left again, heading for the roads. I took a narrow public path between some houses with some very odd "styles" (slabs of stone, with a breeze block either side to step on to get over), at one point it came out on someone's drive, between the closed front gate and the actual building, there was a traditional style in the middle of their grass, with no fence attached, and then another through their hedge.. I guess thats what you get when you build on top of a public right of way..
I followed the road out of the village, towards Cricklade, turned north a bit on Rixon Gate, past a gravel works (that's where all the lakes are from. I didn't mention the lakes? Oops, they're everywhere), trudged all the way back to route 45 (cycle route), down it back to the Thames Path, then did a rather better job of finding my way back to the car. At that point I pondered taking a non-main-road route home as I was rather weary, but looking at the map that would have been twice as far which wouldn't have helped. The return wander ended around 6pm, at least I heard the 6pm news as I was attempting to extract the car from its space.
Back home, I failed to find the gpsed thingy's route/tracking data anywhere.. Did it make any? How not useful.. :(
The pedometer says: 24083 steps, 15.89km. 1094cal, 3h44m27s. Yay!
There's also lotsa pictures, now if only I had a way to somehow display them with the non-existant route.
@public, walking
Last modified: 2012-05-18T02:24:51