Ride blog 2

Full info about John’s End Polio Now Ride here

Ride Blog 2

I will never forget the sunscreen again! I went out on the weekend for a big ride to a beach town named Mornington and got some nice sun burn!. The round trip was 54.2 km. When I started it was a little overcast but it turned out to be a warm day of about 28c …

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After I got back I played around with maps. I found out my whole bike track is available in 360 view photos. So here’s a link so you can all see where I rode.

Click on the map After it loads up, all you need to do is click on a camera icon over on the left. Each icon represents where I made a turn. Or you can drag the little yellow guy in the top left of the map area to any point on the map for a full 360 view. Once the photos load above the map area you can then click and drag around to change the angle of your view.

You can see all the trees, homes, cars, but not many people. And yes, I checked the nudist beach at the end of Sunny Side Road on the map but there were no surprises there! J

What I have started to do is to map my photos to not only show what I see on my rides but where I see them! Panoramio is the photo tool for Google maps/earth. It’s an easy tool to use and will bring a whole new life to your photos.

So as I rode along on Saturday, for example, I took photos at various spots using my iPhone. After I got back I then uploaded them to Panoramio and then added them into the spot on the map where I took them. Before they get loaded into Google Earth or maps they need to be approved by Google. Otherwise someone could take photos at Sunny Side nudist beach and put them on Google maps! So my photos are not there yet but you can access them directly through my links below.

The state I live in has been ravaged by fires over the last few weeks as you may have heard in the news. Hundreds of lives were lost and thousands of homes, not to mention hundreds of thousands of hectares of bushland. Before the big fire started we has a small one that wiped out a park I like to ride through. You can see what it was like in the Google map and what it’s like now from my photo:

Getting from where I live to my goal (Mornington) I had to go up Oliver’s Hill. It is the first major rise in terrain along the eastern coastline of Port Phillip Bay. It was named after local Frankston fisherman, James Oliver, who built the first cottage atop the hill, in the mid-1800s, from where he kept watch for fish in the waters below.

This isn’t really a very good photo of the hill. After that bend it goes up, up, up:

It was going up that hill where I found the limitations of my new bike.

I got this bike for riding around the trails near home. Most are paved but some are off rode, so it was the right bike at the time. But this thing is horrid on hills and to get to Mornington I had to get through Mt Eiliza. So although it was a nice ride, watching people on road bikes scream past me with ease, as I was busting my guts and sweeting my ass off trying to get up the hills, was very disheartening.

This is where Apple saves the day … kinda. Cranking the music up on my iPod Nano gave me a new thing to focus on and got me through to Mornington.

I road down to a popular fishing spot on the cost named Snapper Point (named after a type of fish you can catch there: Snapper ) I reached my goal … Mornington pier:

Then it was just a matter of turning around and doing the same trip in reverse.

Along the way home I stopped in a local bike shop, Joan’s Cycles, on Frankston-Dandenong Rd,

to check out their range of road bikes. Later that night I ended up ordering a road bike:

So although the mountain bike is great for keeping fit and exercising and even dirt terrain riding, when you have a goal of distance, a specialized road bike will handle it much better. The weight is about a quarter that of my mountain bike. So all in all a good weekend. Now, off to put more moisturiser on the sun burnt calves ...