It's all in the detail

It would appear you spend as much time planning everything as you do training for it. I've been spending lots of time in front of the computer screen plotting little detours around the biggest of evil hills. Take a look at the map below of the first leg of the journey.
 

Would you just look at those hills! And you should have seen the original route. So, when doing all this, you have to take a step back from it. And then stretch the elevation map out a bit as after a while it's just possible to convince yourself that those are not really hills. Nope, the real hills don't start until day 2!

Now one of the things that's started to worry me is being a bloke. Not that I'm worried about being a bloke you understand, just that we have this view that we know our directions like the back of my hand. I mean have you seen the back of my hand? Anyways, it's just possible that at some point in the 1000 miles that I may, just possibly, let the blokes down and take a wrong turn. To remove the slight small degree of possibility of that occuring I've decided to invest in a bike satnav device. So that way, should I take a wrong turn into a farmers field, down the hill and into a raging river, I can blame it on the technology.

And it doesn't stop there.

It was suggested that I make some sort of video diary of the journey. Hmm, how does one do that exactly? I guess I start with a camera, waterproof perhaps, and bike mountable most likely. A quick trip to Park Cameras and the good people behind the counter removed a few digits from my bank balance in return for a GoPro camera. A Hero3 don't you know. It sounds all tough and rugged for the adventure type of folk. And actually it's really quite cool. I did a quick test with it on the car dashboard on the way home. To the next challenge, getting the video off the camera during the trip so I can upload to youtube. Hmm. My plan was to take along my small Galaxy Tab for updating the blog on our travels and so I now need to get the video from the camera to the Tab. And as both devices have wifi I found it's pretty easy to connect one to the other and download the files. A quick edit and off it goes to youtube. Although I really need to test that bit. (note to self). So now, when that wrong turn happens, you will be able to see the spectacular event in full HD technicolour detail.

 Finally, it turns out that the nice people of Northlands Wood Primary school, where Leo attends, would like to monitor the progress of our trip. With the suggestion of putting up a huge map in the hall for the children to plot our progress. Wow. That's kinda cool. To help, I tend to use Endomondo on my mobile phone which tracks my cycle routes in real time. I use it to record my journeys, monitor fitness levels, times, maps, etc. Anyone following us through this blog will be able to do the same thing during the trip. A word of caution however, should my tracking signal increase in speed significantly then it could be a sign that I'm in the back of an ambulance or some little urchin has just nicked my phone. So keep an eye out.....