dst. (km) Today 80.0 Trip total 145.0 Odometer ??.? Today’s distance estimated.
The sun comes up at 4.30 am! Jet lag kicks in and I’m wide awake. Lie around until 7 am dozing and listening to the birds — and trying to stretch my neck and shoulders. Ouch!
Pore over the maps and changing my mind — my original plans were to go further north, I think I’ll explore Cornwall!
dst. (km) Today 65.0 Trip total 65.0 Today’s distance estimated.
Day the first, long and arduous. Out of Heathrow and found that the airline had ripped off the speedo cables — finally, after years of the cables looking “nearly ready to rip off.” Then I managed to twist the valve while trying to pump up the rear tyre and flattened it — always the rear. After removing wheel and tyre I repaired it and finally got on my way.
A bunch of random cycling stuff; after wondering over the weekend what had happened to the Wide Open Road tour of France in July, and making up my mind to mail them today, I received an update from them about their ride — now I have to make up my mind which has the higher priority — going on the tour, or living here in a place that I really enjoy…
I’ve no idea what the motorist did, but months later I found this note to myself in one of the notebooks that I carry while cycling. If I wrote it down at the time then they probably either tried to hit me or threw something at me or similar….
Gold Holden Kingswood
`###-###`
21:12
Very sore shoulder and left knee since I was run off the bike path this morning by two annoying women out walking. Initially they were walking on the left — suprisingly, since 50% of pedestrians ignore the council sign telling them to do so — then turned a corner onto a bridge, glanced back at me, and decided to suddenly swap sides right in front of me from the LHS to RHS of the path!
Driven into in the Monash Uni car park by a student who drove straight past me and then turned left, no indicators, didn’t even look. After the loud bang, he turned and said “Oh, sorry mate”.
Arrived back in Melbourne at 06:15 and leisurely made my way through customs and to the baggage area. There was no point hurrying since bicycles and other large pieces of luggage are the last things to be brought out.
By the time that the bike turned up the crowds had dispersed and I walked straight through customs. There was a momentary delay when I stated that the bike was not spotlessly clean, but after a quick peek in the box I was allowed to continue without having to quarantine it for six months!
As I was sitting in the aircraft on the ground at Frankfurt I got to see the way that Lufthansa staff handled my bicycle. The box came down the ramp with the other oversize luggage and the handler attempted to pick it up by wrapping his arms around it length-ways rather than use the hand-holds cut into the sides of the box. Since his arms couldn’t quite reach around it and it slid out of his grasp he just threw it across the ground onto the trolley.
dst. (km) Today 0 Trip 3442.6 John cooked us a big fry-up breakfast before we headed off to Warwick to catch up with Amy. We got there around noon, but she still hadn’t got home from her party in Oxford the night before. Such is the life of a first-year university student. She was stuck at the station waiting for a friend and eventually turned up around 2:30, then the seven of us went out for a late lunch at a pub in a nearby village, three pretty 19 year-old girls, Toby, John, Lynn and myself.
dst. (km) Today 0 Trip 3442.6 A strange coincidence — yesterday afternoon as I was walking through Leeds I passed a shop called “Teenage Kicks” and started singing the song of the same name…. This morning Lyn left the TV on at breakfast and there was a brief interview with Fergal Sharkey, ex singer of The Undertones and now on the Radio Licensing board.
They opened the interview with a twenty year-old video clip of the Undertones playing their most famous song — “Teenage Kicks”.
dst. (km) Today 0 Trip 3442.6 Slept most of the way to Derby in the bus, being exhausted from staying awake reading until 2 am, and from all the running around with bus stupidities. It was noticably cooler at Derby than down south, my breath fogging, everyone wearing thick jackets. I asked someone for directions to the train station and they were of the “up there, keep left, right at the pub… you can’t miss it” variety — I thought I didn’t have a chance, but luckily quite quickly ran into signs pointing the right way.
dst. (km) Today 116.3 Trip 3103.5 Stats. Avg ??km/hr Riding ?? An absolutely magical day for my last day of riding in Spain. Blue sky, no wind, and a balmy autumn feel to the air. I left around 9:30 this morning, riding along the beach and my bike felt terrible! It was all twitchy and jumpy since this was the first day in almost six weeks that I’ve ridden with empty panniers!
dst. (km) Today 0 Trip 2711.2 In the morning I walked up the hill and around the castle and fortifications, everything was all very wet and green, water dripping out of stone ceilings, moss growing everywhere.
I was sitting and thinking of all the little things I’ve seen, things I probably haven’t written down, things I’ll probably forget…
the goat giving birth in the pouring rain, with the farmer standing by.
dst. (km) Today 115.38 Trip 2594.0 Stats. Avg 19.3km/hr Riding 7hr 30’ Morning in an inland mountain town, very much like mid-autumn in Canberra where I grew up. For the first time all trip I needed blankets on the bed at night!
Where? Jaca(42.5666667,-0.5500000) Pamplona(42.8166667,-1.6333333)
dst. (km) Today 109.12 Trip 2332.2 Stats. Avg 20.6km/hr Riding 5hr 16’ 22” I managed to leave around 9:30 am this morning and spent the first half of the day riding through flat, ordinary, honest farmland. Mostly piggeries and corn-fields, it was almost pleasant to be just riding — no touristy things to gawk at, no fabulous destination — just riding along, getting gradually closer to Pamplona.
Sticking to the back-roads I had a very quiet day, its feeling very autumnal all of a sudden, after weeks of the south and the coast.
dst. (km) Today 118.3 Trip 2221.8 Stats. Avg 20.7km/hr Riding 5hr 42’ 8.30 am found me sitting half-way up the mountains watching the sun rise up out of the Mediterranean and over Barcelona, gradually lighting up the rocks around me. I left in the dark, coming out at about 7.30 am to climb to the top, but with no map, no light and unmarked tracks criss-crossing the mountain I had only instinct to guide me, so I just kept heading up until I found a good rock to sit on, then sat on it!
dst. (km) Today 63.36 Trip 2103.2 Stats. Avg 13.6km/hr Riding 4hr 37’ 4” Getting out of Barcelona was a bit of a nightmare. None of the minor roads seemed to be signposted and I kept getting directed back towards the Autovias — of course bikes aren’t allowed on the Autovias, so I had to keep turning around and heading back the way I’d come. It took me from 10.15 am to about 12.
dst. (km) Today 0 Trip 2032.9 Another day of being a tourist. I shouldn’t have bothered with the two day bus pass yesterday. There was very little that I felt like seeing today — I was all museumed out. Did a bit of wandering around the shops this morning and saw a reasonable looking leather coat for 55000P, but not good enough to grab me.
I got off the bus at the bottom of Montjuc and found that half the places were closed since it was Monday, the other half were closed since it was siesta time!
dst. (km) Today 0 Trip 2032.9 Spent the day being a tourist on the bus, I should probably have only bought a one-day ticket since I managed to see nearly all the places I was interested in. And that was all the Gaudi buildings and Parc Guell.
I could have bought dozens of books on Gaudi and his works but resisted the lot since I’m not carrying them with me!
dst. (km) Today 0 Trip 2032.9 7.30 am, sitting in Barcelona bus terminal after a horrible night in the bus. The bus was smoky, the guy in front snored and the lady sitting next to me smoked even though it was the non-smoking half. Her reasoning — the smoking half was full and like most Spaniards, she smokes.
Observations from the night: The bike survived but the bar-ends rub on the top tube when all folded back, and the whole Spanish coast is an ugly mass of resort hotels, concrete boxes stretching to infinity.
dst. (km) Today 22.59 Trip 2032.9 Stats. Avg 6.1km/hr Riding 3hr 33’ 33” Happy birthday to me.
Stuck in a town I don’t like, and I can’t really figure out how to get away from quick enough.
11:30 and I’ve been rolling gently around town, I checked out of the hostel and got a pleasant surprise paying the bill, less than I expected, then went back and forth between bus and train stations, neither making very much sense to me so off to the tourist information and found that the next train to Barcelona is on Sunday, so I booked a bus ticket for this evening.
Vanity site? Technology experiment? Learning tool? Blog? Journal? Diary? Photo album? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you…
I experiment. I play. I write and I take pictures. Some of the site is organised around topics, other parts are organized by date, then there’s always the cross-references between them.
Its all been here a fairly long time. Like the papers on my desk, or the books on the bedside table, the pile just grew… and it all grew without much plan or structure. I try not to break URLs, so historical oddities abound.
Long ago it started as a learning experiment with a few static HTML pages, then I added a bit of server-side includes and some very ugly PHP. A hand-built journal/blog on top of that PHP, then a few experiments in moving to various static publishing systems. I’ve never wanted a database-based blogging engine, so over the years I’ve tried PHP, nanoblogger, emacs-muse, silkpage and docbook before settling on Emacs Org mode for writing and jekyll for publishing. But the itch remained… I never really liked jekyll and the ruby underneath always seemed so much black magic. So now the latest incarnation is Org mode and hugo.
