To Do List

Finish mapping and add up projected mileage - done

Print daily route guides with campsite details to put with maps - done

Cut up paper maps and laminate - done

Find camera, batteries, charger and charge batteries done

Fit kickstand, panniers, front bag etc to bike and try to sort gears out (not quite done on the bike service...) - done

Get camping gear & clothes together; pack done

Check bike toolkit done

Do food shopping for camping food/snacks done

Sort Latitude app to show location done

Get some playlists and podcasts on i-pod

Wasted evening

So, came home determined to plan two days in one evening, sat down and planned a route along bike route 4 (through Milford Haven to Carmarthen) and then decided it was too out of the way, with too many large towns and too much coast road (which means a lot of ups and downs).

At any rate, I've a day's cycle route that I don't think I want to use this time round though it looks a very interesting route with lots of castles and other antiquities to see. But steep.

So back to square one. The re-planned route goes over the Black Mountains, but I've tried to avoid roads with more than one chevron in any direction (I might get through my new brack blocks). I've now made it as far as Offa's Dyke on planning, with three more days to plan to get me home - which I think should be possible (though I hope the offer of car rescue is still there if I do get stuck!) Given that it takes about 5 hours to plan each stage, it's not going to be done very soon, but it's getting there.

A tribute

The death of someone you have known is always a shock and on Saturday, I came into such sad news.

Ron Espin was a leader with the Boys Brigade at my home church in Rushden, including at the Girls and Boys Brigades' summer camp (I'll never forget his rendition of 'eating people is wrong') and also more importantly from the point of view of this blog, with the Duke of Edinburgh's Award - Expedition section. Ron was part of the team of leaders that got me and my friends through, booking the campsites, driving us up and down the country, being there at checkpoints and generally chivvying us along, usually with a liberal dose of very dry humour.

These past couple of days, when I have sat down to planning, to drawing maps and putting together kit lists and food plans, I've been thinking back to the first time I did all this, over 20 years ago, for my Bronze, Silver and Gold awards, all completed successfully - thanks to the leaders such as him that put the time and effort into helping us all.

Thanks Ron.

Big country

The initial mapping is now about 2/3rds complete; from home to the start to the end point and starting on the return journey.

Started sticking the road maps together to get the big picture; it's a long bit of paper. Looked at it from the reasonably flat bits of home to the emptiness of the fens, the close-packed villages of Suffolk and Lowestoft with its yellow stripe of sand; back again, squeezing between the ugly blobs of cities (in particular the sprawling mass of Birmingham)to the green patches that are the mountains and National Parks of Wales, to flatter country again and less densely populated areas, and another yellow bit of sand at St David's.

Feels a bit hubristic actually. Well, see how it goes.

Lowestoft Ness

I believe I could spend longer poring over maps and routes than actually cycling it. Perhaps that's half the fun! The bit that exercised the route planning muscles most was getting into Lowestoft and avoiding busy A-roads. I was delighted to see (using Google aerial maps) that two of the largest roundabouts have cycle route cut-throughs and one a cycle lane alongside it. It's so good when planners get it right.

I thought they went in for some dead straight roads in Scotland (they do!) but you can't beat the twin B-roads that run from Pakefield right into Lowestoft and deviate neither to the right nor to the left. The Romans would have been proud of them. Fortunately, Google maps showed that I need neither of them. A road runs down to the promenade which runs for miles along the wide sandy beach, all the way up to Lowestoft town. That will do nicely (wind permitting).

Once in Lowestoft, it's a case of negotiating some pretty industrial looking areas (it's a working port) to get to the Ness, which is sandwiched between a gas storage tank and 'Gulliver' the largest wind turbine in the UK (and the only commercial turbine in Suffolk!) Ness Point has its own website - http://www.ness-point.co.uk/
and seems to be attempting to make something of tourism, but hasn't yet. Nevertheless, it's the official start point for me.

Planning

The planning continues, albeit with a few hiccups. I've struggled to get gpx files out of bikeroutetoaster.com before, so didn't even go there this time. I was recommended wheresthepath.com but unfortunately every time I logged in the site had exceeded the allowed daily downloads of map tiles (it's restricted by the OS - for copyright reasons I imagine). A bit of searching turned up a site that was vaguely familiar; maptogps.com, and finally, this worked. I plotted the route for day 1 from home to the first campsite, a distance of about 78 miles and then managed to download the route to my Garmin gps unit. And it seems to work! That's the good news. The bad news is that I seem to have lost the route from my pc - it's not saved anywhere that I can find - so I can't edit it or even check it to draw on my paper map. But that's a minor niggle; I've got the main towns and villages noted and it *should* be logical. For the next ones I'll plot the route as I go to avoid the risk of losing them too.

As for the hardware, I took the Dawes to Halfords for a service the other day; walking out holding my bike helmet was rather like going into the vets with a dog and coming out with just the lead. I didn't want to have to hand my bike over but simply don't have time to do it. And let's face it, it's done over 7,000 miles from new and no doubt deserves a bit of TLC.

It was a revelation cycling to work and back on my road bike; downhill wasn't any faster, which was interesting but the uphills were a breeze; how wonderful to waft up hills with so little effort.

The other problem with turning in the Dawes is what's in it; I found the Garmin unit with no problems but it needs two AA batteries - and where are my spare batteries? In my panniers of course, spares for the bike lights... Luckily found a pair with a bit of life left in them, which will do to get the route onto the Garmin. I've only ten days left to finalise the planning and packing and of the two weekend days left, I've a wedding to attend on Saturday (which am looking forward to very much). Time is, as ever, tight.

The packing will hopefully not take too long and the charging pack for phone and ipod is done already; the Portapow (a USB recharging pack) arrived in the post and has already charged up the phone successfully. This time I've packed the relevant leads as I managed to forget to pack a very important USB lead on my last trip, necessitating an unplanned detour to a local PC World.

Planning progress

With just two weeks to go, some frantic map planning has been going on - some of it extremely detailed, some very rough. Strangely I found the first three or four days the most tricky. Heading from home to the start and back west again, I wanted to go out and come back a different way, and ended up going either too far north (Swaffham) or too far south, and settled in the end for a 'third way' with slightly different roads but still taking in Ely.

Kettering really is in the centre of the fat bit of the country, and I found with a slight degree of horror that one planned route would take me along roads that are on my daily commute to Northampton, something I'm very keen to avoid on holiday. So I planned a southerly-ish route from Ely to Olney, avoiding well-known (one might say worn-out) routes and instead heading quickly to Bedfordshire and roads that I first cycled as a youngster, probably on my first Dawes bicycle. There is a campsite at Emberton and then it's into some scenic countryside heading to Stratford for the end of day 5. From there across the Malverns (the scenery starts getting more and more lumpy from now on) into Wales and the Brecons, hopefully arriving at St David's on day 9.

I've seen St David's (it's very nice) so don't see much reason to hang around particularly as I seem to get there after just 30-odd miles of that day's cycling, so the plan is to start heading back straight away. Coming slightly south I can get to Monmouth and come up through Oxfordshire to get home on day 14. The total estimated distance is 840 miles.

This is a very rough back-of-the-envelope distance but I did just want to see if it might be possible to go from home to home, and it looks as if the idea is a goer. I've also found most campsites to aim for (often the limiting factor of a day's ride). Now to start cutting up the road atlases and drawing the route on them, and setting up the Garmin gps. For some reason I can't seem to get routes to gpx on bikeroutetoaster.com, which is my favourite planning website, so will try another that has been recommended - wheresthepath.com. I think this site is better as it uses OS maps, but unfortunately there's a limit on the maps that can be downloaded per day and at night I've sometimes been unable to access it.

It shouldn't be too hard though, should it? Going east-west, the sun is either in your eyes, or it isn't. Simples.