Mobile Blogging 2007

In the year or so since I did the end to end ride, it's become considerably easier to add blog entries that contain pictures. Last year, blogger.com couldn't accept pictures in entries sent to it by e-mail. As a result, it was necessary to e-mail blog entries first to Flickr, and then arrange for them to be sent on to blogger. Flickr held the pictures and inserted the appropriate HTML into the entries sent to blogger. This year, pictures in e-mails are accepted by blogger, so using Flickr is unnecessary. Unfortunately, GMail, which I'm using as my e-mail service, doesn't interpret HTML inline in e-mails correctly. So, it's not possible to add links to mail this year. Oh well, at least the process is simpler.

South Coast Ride Route

Here is the route for next month's 'side to side' ride. Oficially, we're calling it the South Coast Ride. For the first couple of days it follows one of the standard LE-JOG routes from Land's End and across Dartmoor to Moretonhampstead. After that it runs further south, staying reasonably close to the coast as far as Poole. It crosses to the Isle of Wight (Lymington to Yarmouth) on day 6 and returns to the mainland (Fishbourne to Portsmouth) on day 7. The last three days again follow as close to the coast as practically possible. In the following table, you can click the name of each sector to see a map of that day's actual track. The routes are all posted at MapMyRide.com. A low resolution summary route is also available.

Date	Sector	Distance	Total
2-Sep	Land's End to St Blazey	59.8	59.8
3-Sep	St Blazey to Moretonhampstead	54.5	114.3
4-Sep	Moretonhampstead to Bridport	58.9	173.1
5-Sep	Bridport to Bournemouth	72.8	245.9
6-Sep	Bournemouth to Lymington and
	Yarmouth to Wroxall	46.7	292.6
7-Sep	Wroxall to Bognor Regis	52.5	345.1
8-Sep	Bognor Regis to Eastbourne	57.0	402.1
9-Sep	Eastbourne to New Romney	55.2	457.3
10-Sep	New Romney to North Foreland	53.6	510.9
11-Sep	Around North Foreland	9.9	520.9

There are small discrepancies between the distances reported in the tracks in MapMyRide.com and in this table. I used the data from my bike's computer for the table. The distances at MapMyRide.com are from the GPS tracks. These are usually within about 0.5% of one another. Where the difference is greater, it is due to us having meandered around a town or city looking for specific shops. I removed the meanders from the tracks themselves.

My Dawes Ultra Galaxy

This is the bike on which I'll be riding the Side to Side ride next month.

Side To Side

It's time to do another major ride. After over a year of small trips and longer day trips, Andrew, my eldest son, and I are about to embark on a journey along the south coast. As my previous ride was a true 'End to End', it seems appropriate to call this new one a 'Side to Side'. We're starting at Land's End and ending at North Foreland, well known to shipping forecast lovers everywhere! It's actually at the South East tip of the Thames Estuary. The ride is about 480 miles in length and will take about 9 days. That's an average of about 53 miles per day.

As this ride was Andrew's brainchild, it's only fair that he gets to choose the charity involved. This time we're raising money for Cancer Research UK. Andrew has set up a site for donations at justgiving.com.

Pedaling starts in earnest on September 2^nd. Before then there are final preparations to make and some new kit to describe. More soon.