The Beginning of the Beginning

Posted on 7th September, 2010 | Tagged:

I have done most of this journey many times before, it being roughly the same as Weymouth to Bath. There are two traditional stops:

  • Sherbourne
  • Shepton Mallett

I stopped at Sherbourne briefly, for 10 minutes, eating some sun dried bannanas and figs (generally figs and other dried fruits have not been part of my regular diet) before setting course for Castle Cary, which I first visited some years ago when I arrived at the train station for the Glastonbury festival.

Sherbourne

Sherbourne Abbey

Didnt stop after at Shepton as planned, my knee was hurting (as it usually did) and was generally aching all over. Partly I think because I was "going for it", and partly because, despite cycling 30-40 miles every other day for the past 3 months and regularaly doing longer rides at the weekends, actually, I think it was just because I was riding too fast. Weeks later, after the novelty had worn off I rarely pushed myself farther than was comfortable and the only pains I get now are in my derriere.

Bristol City Center

Bristol City Centre, statue of Neptune

By the time I arrived in Bristol City centre I was "bonked" ("defaillance" is a good french word here) and on the 1 mile journey to my acomodation for the night I was overtaken by mere commuters casually trundling back from work. I was put up by friends and had a nice beer or two on Stokes Croft before going back for another beer or five before going to bed.

I purchased a new mobile phone in anticipation of the trip, a GT540 which is loadded with google's android. Its most useful feature throughout the trip has been the GPS, and as I spent the majority of the trip without 3G access, the most useful application has been MapDroyd.

MapDroyd

MapDroyd is an offline map application that uses maps from OpenStreetMaps. Basically this enables me to see my position on a map wherever I am provided I have downloaded the map for the region in which I am located, which is easy only when you know where you are located (i.e. it was tough in Spain, more on that later).

The application is lacking in some respects, it does not provide a simple arrow pointing in the direction you are facing as Google Maps does (although it will align the map in the direction you are facing) and it does not provide directions and thus distances from point to point and it also does not track your position, but then neither does Google Maps (or if it does it doesnt tell you about it!).

Best of all, unlike many "free" applications on the Android App Market it does not have any advertisements. Although I do not think it is Open Source, so I do wonder where the catch is.

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