We had three primary aims for our trip:

• One action packed days of shopping and chores
• To see friends who we had expected to miss for the next twelve months
• To eat and drink at a variety of our favourite London establishments

Shopping & chore day

With only one working day in London, a new camera to experiment with and a lot of ground to cover this is how our day was organised:

07:30am – We eat BACON! + eggs for breakfast prepared by Graham. Yum!
08:30am – Justin leaves to collect new watch strap from Casio warehouse
10:00am – We head to Travel clinic for vaccinations
(I know not seeming too rushed so far)
11:30am – Leave travel health clinic with sore arm and lighter wallet
12:00pm – Visit Paramo shop to exchange Justin’s rain jacket
12:30pm – Visit various outdoor stores searching for Primus priming pads
13:00pm – Go to Stanfords to collect pre-ordered Mongolia and Russia maps. Pick up maps of China and a few phrasebooks
13:30pm – Justin buys new sunglasses in longest ever shopping transaction due to problems finding price of pair he wants
14:30pm – Lunch as we walk towards Oxford St where we part ways for a little while
15:00pm – Justin buys a new camera case while Emma is shopping for sports bras
15:45pm – Justin finally finds Emma after getting hopelessly lost in Marks and Spencers 16:00pm – We head to Velorution to test out a replacement Brooks saddle for Emma
16:45pm – Quick rest in HSBC comfy chairs after insurance cheque deposit
17:00pm – Emma heads to old work for Friday drinks and Justin is off to meet a friend for dinner
23:00pm – Both meet up at temporary home for a few quick games of Xbox Kinect

Catching up with friends

Having the opportunity to see our London friends again even if only for a few hours was wonderful.

We managed to squeeze in a couple of social evenings at pubs seeing different groups of old friends and between this we stayed with our good friends Cat and Graham, catching up on everything that has happened since they visited us in Istanbul in November last year.

Graham also arranged for us to head along to the Kinetica Art Show where we checked out all manner of weird, wonderful and movable art before racing across central London on the new (to us anyway) London hire bikes. The hire bikes made it a pretty cheap (£3 total) and quick (Fitzrovia to Notting Hill in around 40mins) journey.

Food & drink

It won’t surprise you that while we aren’t gourmet chefs we do have a liking for good food and decent beers. Over the last six months in Turkey we have been missing some of our favourite UK eateries and ales. Tasting our first pints of nicely settled Guinness we were surprised to discover that we had lost our taste for it a little. Other beers, ciders and ales sampled (in moderation) over the weekend were very much enjoyed however.

Eating wise in no particular order we managed to squeeze in the following eateries (plus of course some great nosh at mate’s places):

• Battered sausage and chip supper courtesy of Alex’s Plaice, Kilburn
• Indian curry in Great Missenden for Justin (Thanks to Laurie)
• Indian curry at Vijays, Kilburn for Emma (thanks Cat and Graham)
• Proper English Breakfasts (inc Eggs Benedict) at Nona, Kilburn (Thanks to Andy)
• Pork Burrito from Benito’s hat, Fitzrovia
• Pancake stacks at the Diner, Kensal Rise
• Asian style soups courtesy of Banana Tree, West Hampstead

It was a whirlwind visit but we returned to Istanbul happy we decided to make the trip. Post visit we are now wondering how our extra 10kg of new kit and food is going to fit on the bikes.

Somewhere along the way our route took us a bit further East than we had planned and we realised our original plan was a bit ambitious. As we cycled through Hurt Wood in the late afternoon, we spotted a likely looking forest path and hopped off bikes to investigate. After walking for a few minutes down it we bravely decided to free camp for the first time ever. Queue our first ever camping risotto (why haven’t we made it before) followed by a night of broken sleep where every tree rustle, falling pine cone and passing deer was going to be either a forest ranger, the police or a badger driven wild by our empty tin of salmon.

The next morning It was dead quiet and misty and we were up early and out of the woods before 8am without seeing a soul. As we approached Cranleigh for breakfast rolls the sun continued to shine but it wasn’t to last. Just after lunch it began to lightly rain as we cycled South from Alton and continued to get heavier all afternoon. We consoled ourselves with thoughts of our warm showers hosts in Southampton and by singing choruses of various rain related songs (we know very few full song lyrics).

Reaching the welcoming home of Oanh and Nick the rain soaked afternoon quickly faded as we drank tea and enjoyed lovely fish tacos. We talked late and slept soundly in the warm dry beds after checking the cycle computer to discover we had racked up a huge day of cycling fully loaded at 112.3 km.

Day 3 began with a light drizzle but our spirits were high as we followed Nick through Southampton on our way to cycle along the coast towards Gosport. Our plan was to break the journey into two days camping between Hamble Le Rice and Gosport on Tuesday night before the ferry to Santander on Wednesday. Nick had said pubs in Hamble were good so with the rain still drizzling away we settled by the fire in the King and Queen for a final pub lunch and some quick emails.

From Warsash the route we followed was an un-driveable, muddy, pot hole cratered track so we ended up pushing our bikes along for about 30 minutes. After searching for a free camp spot and only finding flooded tracks or fields we decided to aim for a marked camp site at Gosport. Emma discovered a slow leak on a busy main road which slowed us down although Justin felt like a member of a formula one pit crew as he quickly swapped the tube allowing us to continue in the fading light. Spotting an access road into a park on the edge of Lee-On-The-Solent we decided to make camp: very wet, very cold and very tired. Our tent was only partially hidden, and we listened to fog horns and our rustling bike cover throughout the night hoping no-one would be mean enough to move us on.

We were up early awakened by the sounds of dog walkers and cycled on towards the ferry stopping for a brief breakfast of chilli cooked by the ferry terminal in Gosport (go the Primus Omni Fuel). Justin got his first puncture on the way through Portsmouth but this only caused a minor delay before we sped quickly through the boarding gates and into our warm, dry cabin headed for Santander. Our cabin is now bedecked in drying tent and clothing from every available surface should all be dry by the time we dock tomorrow morning in Spain!!

• 230 kilometres cycled (longest day 112 km, shortest day 10 km).
• 2 punctured rear inner tubes (one each)
• 22 hours cycled (45% in the rain)
• 3 ferries caught
• 2 nights free camping and 1 night with Warm Showers hosts (thanks Oanh and Nick)
• 1 fish tacos supper (thanks Oanh)
• 1 final English pub lunch
• 1 half bottle champagne in forest (thanks Ian), 2 pints John Smiths (and counting) on ferry to Santander.

My key requirements for the solution were:

- Ideally it should be free
- Ability to upload photos to Flickr
- Ability to tweet about new blog posts
- Ability to record bespoke statistics like distance travelled, GPS co-ordinates, weather etc.
- Ability to easily maintain and develop offline ideally the solution should be PHP and/or .Net based

Ideally all of this data should be tied together to provide a rich view of our trip. So the search began, as is usual with me, not for the perfect software but for something to act as the “glue” between the requirements.

Windows Live Writer

Reading around online I quickly found that there was less software available than I had expected (testament to the constantly connected world in which we live). One article I found here listed a few options with some useful comments on pros and cons of each type of software. I quickly identified that Windows Live Writer (WLW) met a few of my key requirements:

- It was free and in fact I already had it installed
- It was extensible using programming skills I already had (.Net)
- Additionally it was still under development and had a recent release along with a community (all be it a small one) of people actively producing plug-ins

Having settled on the software my next stop was to start learning a bit about how WLW plug-ins are constructed. Finding this interview with Charles Teague the lead WLW developer was a great start as he demos a basic plug-in example and talks about the overall framework WLW provides for offline blogging. I found the Twitter Notify plug-in that was perfect for my requirement to add a tweet whenever I posted a new blog entry. I was now left with my requirements for Flickr uploading and bespoke statistics

Flickr Upload

Browsing through the available plug-ins for WLW I discovered Flickr Upload which seemed perfect for what I was after except that it required an active connection before the plug-in would initialise. As I ideally wanted to be able to build my whole post offline this wasn’t quite what I was after and I decided to write a new version.

My version scans the post code before submitting to locate any images, then for each image it displayed a dialogue (title, description etc), uploaded to Flickr and my intention was to replace the original post image tag with the new Flickr upload location. Unfortunately due to the fact that the PostInfo.Contents property was read only I was unable to update the post content with the new Flickr locations. Undaunted I considered my work not bad as a first stab at a WLW plug-in. I then came across the Flickr Uploadr tool and realised it suited my purpose far better than the plug-in I was working on. I could use the Uploadr to organise and tag my images while offline then upload them when I was connected and use the regular image insert function in WLW to add them my pre-written post.

Statistics Insert

Having cut my teeth on messing around with Flickr I moved onto my next challenge to pass statistics with my blog posts. To do this I created a new plug-in that used simple REST to retrieve options and submit values via a PublishNotificationHook when a blog entry is submitted. The statistics are entered into the post using a SmartContentSource that also allows for a contextual menu for any further updates.

To provide access to the contextual menu the statistics are shown in the blog within WLW but are not actually included in the published HTML. So if you want to update or amend any statistics then you just select the statistics and use the context menu.

When the post is submitted my plug-in is called and an XML message is sent to my PHP code containing the relevant statistics. The PHP code then stores the blog details and statistics into a database structure that is based upon the statistics schema for the  Going Slowly site that Tyler very kindly sent to me.

Summary

What I have ended up with is a nicely tailored solution to allow me to build all of my blog posts offline including the association of statistics with each post. When I find an internet connection I can then upload my photos to Flickr, add them to the blog post in WLW, submit the post enter my Twitter message and job is done. I have been working this way for the last few weeks tweaking things here and there before we hit the road and have so far found it works fine.

I haven’t included any code in this post as there are plenty of samples at the locations below, however if you would like a copy of the .Net and/or the PHP code then just let me know and I’m happy to email it out.

Useful Links

http://scottisafooldev.spaces.live.com/
http://www.devx.com/codemag/Article/38214/1763/page/1
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-ZA/wlwdev/threads
http://www.live-writer.net/2008/07/01/how-to-write-a-windows-live-plugin-charles-teague-interview/

The remainder of our weekend was taken up with some bike maintenance including:

• Changing our brakes over to our new Koolstop V Brakes
• Rotating a new chain onto my bike, my chain onto Emma’s bike and her chain into the spares kit
• Getting our commuting bikes into a fit state to hand over to Mark and Andi so they can enjoy a summer of London cycling fun
• Carrying out our first full gear pack!

Packing our Gear

Over the last few weeks we have been slowly selling our belongings, giving them to charity, agonising over if we should store them or add them to the pile of gear we plan to take with us. When we went winter camping a few weeks back we took most of our cooking and camping gear in two rear panniers without a problem but this still left a lot of gear that we hadn’t tested packing at all. The boxes holding our gear have been sitting ominously in our room waiting for us to go through them for our first test pack.

Sunday saw us lay out all our gear and then pack it into what suddenly seemed like eight very small panniers. After an hour or so of careful packing, rolling, re-packing, discovering our laptop dry-bag was a tad to small and general organisation we had all our gear packed. Pleased with our work so far and also needing to test our brakes and chains from the day before we decided to go for a quick test ride. Living up three flights of stairs means “quick” is not a word we normally associate with our bikes, so after another half hour of carrying panniers and bikes we were fully loaded for the first time.

The test ride around the block a few times proved our maintenance from the day before was worth it with our brakes performing really well with the additional load. Getting on my bike for the first time I thought “What am I doing? This thing is way too heavy, I’m never going to make it to the end of the street let alone Turkey!”, but once the bike was rolling my confidence returned and after no time I was leading the way on some additional circuits of the block. In summary the bikes felt good with the extra load.

To get an idea of all the gear we are taking check out our gear section which has a new roll-over navigation image I added today.

Gathering of Adventurers

Earlier in the week we had attended an evening organised by Alastair Humphreys for a bunch of people interested in cycle touring and general adventuring to get together. The evening was great giving us a chance to catch-up with a few cycling folk we hadn’t seen for a while, meet some new helpful contacts (thanks Lander!) and take comfort in the fact we aren’t the only people crazy enough to think strapping our belongings to our bikes and heading into the sunset.

Storage

When deciding to leave the UK one of the hardest things for us has been figuring out what we want to do when our trip is over. We both know that cycling will present us with new opportunities and fill our heads with unexpected ideas but quite how that translates into things like where we live, what we do for work, what we plan for after this trip is hard to figure out. At a more basic level this also means that we weren’t quite sure whether to store our belongings in the UK or ship them back to New Zealand. Luckily for us our good friends Laurie and Anita offered to store our couple of boxes in their garage. This gives us the freedom to decide at a later date where we want our belongings to end up. Just last weekend we piled all our worldly goods into the back of a car and deposited them into Laurie’s garage. I cant believe that after six years in the UK most of our stuff still fit in the back of a car. 

Justin and I wandered Camden on a late Saturday afternoon, looking for a venue for leaving drinks and decided we should have done this same walk as new arrivals. We’ve tried to get as much of London’s grit under our fingernails, spent as much time in pubs and in parks as we can before we go.

One evening on dusk, I found myself daydreaming on my bike and only realised I forgot my turn as I cycled past those steps leading up to St Pauls. I’ve since started cycling past it on purpose, because it won’t always be in line of sight.

Our room in the flat still feels like home, but every day it feels less “ours.” Now pictures have come off the walls and the things we value have been packed and stored. The big space above the landing outside our room which fitted our map of London perfectly is bare and that’s how it sinks in a little that we’re actually leaving for more than a holiday.

After having our heads down, planning this trip and learning about gear for most of the winter, we’ve been trying to catch up with those who will have babies, buy houses, get new jobs while we’re away. Like when we left New Zealand six years ago, we’re acutely aware that life continues.

It will be hard to say goodbye to London. There’s a list of things that we never did, or never did enough, that we definitely don’t have time for now: visiting the Transport Museum, watching a 3D movie at the Imax, wandering some of the other museums one more time; but with limited days left, time with friends is more valuable than any of that.

We’re not sure where we’ll end up when we stop cycling and we hope we’ll sort of figure that bit out along the way. Having spent six years in London, part of me likes leaving unfinished business here. Its a good excuse for coming back.

Overall we are making good progress though as shown by the picture of just a few of the various lists we have been working through. We have lists for things to do, lists of gear, lists of tasks for a specific day and sometimes when we feel particularly disorganised we have lists summarising the other lists. All this serves to reinforce that while there is a lot to do we have done a hell of a lot of organisation to date.

A brief sample of some of the things that have filled our days for the last week or so:

• Turning our room from a cycle repair shop and storage area into a lovely tidy homely loft so we could show it to new housemates. Luckily this is mostly sorted with 4 potential couples all keen to take it.
• Visiting the dental hygienist which was terrifying for Emma and interesting for me. I got a new dental tool called the TePe.
• Purchased a bunch of new gear including helmet, Paramo Quito jacket and gloves.
• Ordering all our bike spare parts as well as upgrading our brakes to Kool Stop salmon
• Donated Emma’s old Mac G3 via freecycle.org to earn some Karma.

We are continuing to find things in our room to recycle or throw out. Both of us are enjoying the feeling of de-cluttering our lives and I’m amazed at how much stuff we kept that on reflection isn’t important at all.

Since the last blog I have finished off our new route map so thought I would plug it here. The map shows our planned route, actual route (when we start travelling) and allows you to make suggestions for places we should visit. Check it out and let me know if you have any comments on how it works.

Being one of a handful of free weekends before we depart, we had decided we should go for a test camp, as long as it wasn’t going to be too cold, or snowing, or raining and with the forecast promising sunny intervals and maybe even a high of 10 degrees, we packed rear panniers with enough to keep us warm for the night. Cue Emma telling Justin: ‘Pack a woollen jumper, it’ll be cold, assume it will be really cold.’

We cycled a familiar route to Hammersmith before turning the GPS on only to find that it was unable to locate any satellite signals. Cue Justin cursing GPS and wondering if he’d have to use the backup maps which we hadn’t even looked at. We tried again at Putney Bridge, this time with success and placing our trust in its automatically calculated route we headed south.

The endless suburbs of South London soon merged into the sprawl of Redhill, and busy roads through Gatwick and Crawley before the countryside opened up. We hit the hills (as well as geese, and sunshine) for the final 25 km to Streat.

Blackberry Woods is a tiny site with only 20 pitches, but its pretty special, being both open all year and allowing campfires. We weren’t really prepared for our outdoor excursion, half expecting that we’d head down to a nearby pub as soon as it was cold and dark, but as we sat in the fading afternoon light in our own private glade starting dinner, we decided to stay put and make a campfire. The sun set with the afternoon’s bird calls morphing into owls and you could see other tiny glows of fire in the distance until the last of our wood burned down.

The night was cold – so much so that in sleeping bags with all of our clothes on we woke up in the early morning because our noses were still freezing. Justin rolled into the hood of his sleeping bag, Emma pulled down her hat. In the morning the tent was dripping in condensation but we realised that we had forgotten to open any vents when setting it up.

Birds were up early but we emerged just after 9, grabbing breakfast at a cyclists tea shop in Ditchling before retracing our steps to Balcombe where we caught a train back to London. All new pieces of kit seemed to do the job so on the camping front at least, we’re feeling pretty well prepared.

March – April 2010: UK / North West Spain / Pyrenees

Depending on weather vs levels of excitement we may cycle from London down to Portsmouth for our ferry on the 24th. In Spain we’ve allowed five weeks to get across the length of the Pyrenees. As that’s ample time we’ll first head west to Picos de Europa and might amble west a bit further / head inland towards Madrid / stride out for Portugal.

May: France

We’ll stick to the South but won’t stick too closely to the coast. With some days up our sleeves we may head into Switzerland or get into Italy before the end of the month. Or we’ll find a good spot to go swimming for a couple of weeks.

June: Italy or Italy / Croatia

Either cycle the length of Italy then catch a ferry to Greece or do a loop in the north followed before heading over to Croatia. Hopefully a liaison with my parents sometime this month. 
 

July / August: Med

Option A: Croatia – Bosnia and Herzegovina – Serbia – Bulgaria – Istanbul

The many countries option – we’d get away from the sea and head into some of the countries we know little about.

Option B: Greece through to Istanbul

The coastal route – a quick hop by ferry at Bari or Brindisi in Southern Italy to Greece before continuing East along the landmass of Greece.

September / October: Turkey

We’ll hang out in Istanbul for a while, decide where to spend winter and finalise plans for the next leg. Should be able to fit in some exploring of Turkey by bicycle. We could high-tail it from here across Russia by train at this point but chances are we’ll stick around for the winter.

November – March / April: Wintering

We’re keen to spend a ski season working in Bulgaria (or any other big snow filled mountains in Europe). Know anyone who would have us? Get in touch!

Spring 2011: Onwards to Asia

Our options are either Central Asia towards Tibet and the west side of China or Eastern Europe / Russia / Mongolia / China, some of that by train. Cycling the length of Mongolia sounds pretty amazing so we’re leaning that way at the moment. After China (which we haven’t even thought about yet) we’ll head for Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, hopping off the bikes by March 2012 at the latest.

Panniers

We gambled on sending our older scuffed up pannier set back to Ortlieb just after Christmas. They had been well used as commuter panniers over three years or so, but Em noticed a stitch unravelling around the trim of her bag which she thought might be covered by the manufacturing defect warranty. We wrote a nice letter and thought, at best, they might fix it for free, and at worse they’d charge us more than the £10 quoted by canvas specialists in Camden to stitch it up. An email this week from wiggle said that Ortlieb have deemed that our perfectly usable panniers are un-repairable, but that replacements would be sent free of charge. We asked by reply if we could pay to upgrade to the lighter Plus version and wiggle said that they’d do that for free!

Bank account

Joint bank account opened with only one lost cheque and two lost applications however as the bank was making up for mistakes with above, the process moved along much more swiftly than the rumoured 6 – 8 week wait that we were anticipating.

Computer

Samsumg N140 Netbook brought from Ebuyer despite silly online purchase shenanigans which saw Justin almost buying same computer for £30 more than his original order. Ebuyer eventually redeemed themselves, delivering package next day and refunding overcharge. Drive partitioned and Windows XP replaced Windows 7 started after only five attempts – not that Justin’s a perfectionist.

Cell-phone

We did a quick search on the net for a reliable cell-phone with good battery life and the Samsumg D500 was the 5 minute research winner. We looked at a photo of one and realise it looks a lot like Emma’s – on checking it’s a D600, but it will do the job nicely. We brought a second battery for £2.50 on ebay instead of a whole new cell.

Also…

Justin’s mum’s Christmas package arrived containing the mugs we had our eyes on in Kathmandu, sealed top drink bottles and nice bamboo tee-shirts. Thanks Mum.