Walks and GPS data

[lnr]

Today we got the train to Waterbeach (a ridiculous journey involving two legs of 5 minutes each on trains and a 45 minute wait in Cambridge, but at least it was sunny), and walked the 11 miles to Ely, and then got the train home again. It was a bit windy in places, and a bit hard work, but fun. We saw lots of birds, including several we hadn't yet ticked off in our little bird book, and generally had a nice time, although it was nicest while the sun was out.

I took the GPS along, and it did quite well, only running out of battery after nearly 5 hours, about half a mile from Ely station. According to it we averaged 2.1mph overall, and 2.9mph while moving, which seems pretty reasonable. Having got home I downloaded our data as a GPX track, and tried uploading it to Bikely.com, where I normally keep bike ride and walk maps - for some reason it only imported 23 points though, which showed us merrily crossing and recrossing the river. So instead I tried importing directly into Google maps, which seems to have worked much better, though it split it into 4 sections. I drew a 5th section by hand to finish the route.

Waterbeach to Ely, on Google maps

I wish I knew what to do to make it play nicely with Bikely though!

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Comments

[james-r.livejournal.com]

Interesting - how does your GPS receiver normally output logs? Is it raw NMEA sentences? (things starting $GP...,). (I've recently been playing with processing GPS data for the updating of openstreetmap I've been doing).

[lnr]

Um, I've no idea what it stores it as on the device, but I use a piece of Windows freeware called easyGPS to just pull out the most recent active log as a track, and save that as a GPX file.

Checking the web it sounds like it just stores the current active log natively as a file called current.gpx anyway.

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

I've always meant to do the Ely to Cambridge (or wherever I collapse that's on a bus route) walk. I guess spring is a nice time to do it.

[lnr]

The whole distance is about 16 miles, and there aren't many places where you could give up, at least not on the west side of the river. Might be better to go down the other side. A slightly less windy day with a bit more sun (but not too much) would have been perfect.

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

Hrm, will have to get my map out.

[nja.livejournal.com]

Very different from when I did that - and harder going I'd think, with all that water about. More ducks and geese, too (are those wigeon at the back of your third shelduck photo?).

[lnr]

None of the water was on the route itself, so that wasn't too hard going: the problem was definitely more the wind. We'd considered going the opposite direction, and that might perhaps have been a wiser choice, but the Cathedral does make a good landmark.

Wigeon: if so we failed to identify them at the time, so they probably don't count :) The photos are actually clearer than what I was seeing through the binoculars at the time, and we were having enough trouble working out what the shelduck were, so I kinda missed them.

Looking at the one on the centre right it could well be: greyish body with light reddish brown head with a white stripe down it. But it looks a bit white on the front too, and I can't make out the back. The rest of them don't look like anything in my book at all, but they're all a bit fuzzy :)

[lnr]

Bigger version of that photo here: http://pics.livejournal.com/lnr/pic/004771hb/g441