My musical renaissance began in earnest at the age of 15 when my parents bought me a Sony mini hi-fi system for my birthday. It had a CD player, reasonably high definition speakers and an FM radio. The radio was my favourite feature of the system, I began a life long habit of listening to music while I worked (or studied, at the time). A few weeks in, I quickly grew bored of listening to Capital FM - the most 'pop' of the popular radio stations - and switched to XFM, a rock radio station. It was then my musical taste started to diversify, and I became well acquainted with popular artists such as Muse, Keane, Athlete and so on.
In sixth form, at age 16, I started a Young Enterprise business with my peers, Paul and Herman. Herman, the visionary of our group (a great talker who sadly doesn't talk much to me nowadays) decided that we'd build a student run record label, 'Renegade Records' and we got to it. Paul handled the finance and legal aspects of our business (he's now a lawyer, so I guess that worked out well for him) and I took care of everything else. I spent hours printing CDs, emailing and calling people, and just generally managing. It was great fun. With a team of 17, we recruited bands, produced CDs and organised two concerts. We did well, raising nearly a thousand pounds for charity and learning some important life lessons about people management, failure and how to sell an idea.
We didn't get far in the end of year competition that Young Enterprise organises, getting knocked out by a team that made a calendar and sold £3000 worth of advertisements on it. (Evidently this was the right decision by the judges - based on the relative strength of adtech companies versus music tech...) We did however get the chance to represent our school in the annual Ogden Trust business competition, eventually coming second in the country. We were amusingly bested by a team we had left in runners up position in the two previous rounds. This culminated in a tour of the HSBC building - the first time I set foot in Canary Wharf and not the last.
One of the websites that my more musically involved Young Enterprise colleagues recommended was a music streaming website called Last.fm. Little did I know at the age of 17 that I'd one day be on the other side of the servers that ran the website, so to speak. Last.fm was my favourite website for a long time. As a growing music lover, my music collection expanded massively from a few gigabytes to tens of gigabytes. I'd spend hours in Fopp, an indie music shop in Cambridge, searching for cheap obscure music - some of which I liked, some of which I returned. Still, this was inefficient. And the recommendations my friends suggested often didn't match my mood. As my taste became more and more refined, I found myself relying more and more on the superb recommendations engine that powers Last.fm.
Fast forward a few years and I'd become a bona fide audiophile with a non-trivial FLAC collection and some decent headphones. The music I'd collected became one of the main motivational forces that took me through my travels and added an extra dimension to the places I'd visited. Hiking through the Himalayas became all the more stunning when coupled with Howard Shore's soundtrack to the Lord of the Rings (at least until it became so cold my Sony Walkman's hard disk platters refused to spin anymore). R.E.M. took me through the rainy race days in Northern Kenya. A constant quest during my time in India was to identify a song I heard at the gym in my first week and could not figure out. Eventually I heard it again when the mobile phone of the taxi driver who was dropping me to the airport rang - on my way out of India. He shared it with me and I'll share it with you:
When I returned to London to start work at Barclays Capital, I found myself with less time to listen to music. Locked down corporate systems and a day filled with meetings meant my headphones were rarely used. My 15 minute commute was occupied with trying to find a pocket of air in the Tube carriage to squeeze into and I never managed to have enough space to put headphones in my ears. Still, music played a big part in my life. my first date with my ex-girlfriend was at a candle lit jazz concert. My friends and I had started exploring the live music scene in central London and I discovered some fantastic artists.
The time came, quicker than expected, for me to find a new employer. At the end of spring my friend Sam linked me to the jobs page on Last.fm. I didn't think they'd hire someone like me but I came back to the site a few months later as I was finding new music to take on holiday with me and saw the same opening. I applied, they had a great interview process which I did well enough in to get an offer. In September 2011, I walked into their office with a stunning sense of surrealism that I was now actually working on a product that I actually used and loved.
As a music enthusiast, the constant tenet of my passion for music was discovery. My musical taste at age 17 was a subset of my musical taste at age 23. It's why we listen to the radio - to get access to new music. There's a lot of utility in someone more qualified curating your playlist, which is why DJs can acquire such celebrity status. Picking tracks is an artform. But just as Amazon enabled the long tail of books, the long tail of music was growing as more and more content was ripped, seeded and downloaded. Suddenly the same 100 top tracks weren't enough for the above average listener. The marginal cost of acquiring music was close to zero and they wanted it all.
In the breadth of all of this choice though, people needed guidance. Last.fm provided that - it was the radio stream with a catalogue longer than the stock of all of the CD stores in England. This catalogue, coupled with insightful recommendations based on a user's own past listening history made its recommendations almost always hit the spot. Sadly, the product came to languish. New product development has suffered over the last half a decade as its new owners struggled to understand the value their product provided. Without a true understanding of its value, they mispriced it. They tried to cover its pages with adverts and, as advertising prices hurtled downwards, underinvested in their product. What's worse is that Last.fm is still built around the old way . The majority of their content comes from the major labels and there's a lack of interesting indie content on the service. This becomes restrictive - for many many reasons (mostly legal) that I don't have time to cover here.
The idea of an infinite radio stream is an important concept though and something that Soundcloud, my favourite product, has executed on brilliantly. Originally just a site for music creators to post and share their sounds, they flipped the balance of power around and essentially put music consumers and creators on the same level. There is no distinction between a creator and a user. They operate a brilliant social model, similar to Twitter, where users can either post their own content, reshare other users' content and favourite content. This enables a whole hierarchy with consumers at the bottom, curators in the middle and creators at the top. It's a beautiful and disruptive solution to getting music out of the stranglehold of the major labels.
When artists upload music to Soundcloud, they do so willingly. Users can stop and start and skip tracks as they like - something that the labels explicitly forbid on standard radio services. Soundcloud allows users to keep up with their favourite artists' new uploads with absolutely no friction by offering a stream that just continues to plays. In fact, the music never stops on Soundcloud. When it runs out of content, it finds some more. And it somehow always knows what to play next. Most of the content is from upstart artists and so you're almost guaranteed to find something new.
It's this endless stream of good music that makes Soundcloud so valuable to every music lover, creator and curator. My 100+ gigabyte music library is languishing on my hard disk as, each day, I keep Soundcloud open more than Facebook.
Soundcloud is also an exceptional promotional tool for the artist. My friend Siva (who incidentally designed all the artwork for our Young Enterprise bands) and I use it extensively to share music through our reggae blog Millennial Roots. It allows artists to bump their tracks up to the top of search results, to offer freedownloads of samples or demo tracks and to embed their track in as many blogs as they like. Soundcloud's business model hinges on this value that it provides to creators of music. By offering free music to users, a presence on Soundcloud is, more often than not, an easy route to growing a good audience for any new artist. Spending €5 a month for this level of user engagement is a minimal expenditure for the shrewd band manager.
The future is in intelligent discovery - as Netflix, Amazon and Last.fm have shown us. But discovery can't exist without content. By cutting the entrenched incumbents out of the process, Soundcloud have democratised promotion of music while providing an super smooth discovery experience.
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The tragedy of studying at Cal is that it's a stunningly beautiful place to study but there's scant time to explore! I've been getting slammed the past couple of weeks - having started the many interviews that are to come, and having struggled on a homework assignment. As soon as that was handed in, another was immediately available and I'm back to square one now with two on my plate.
One of the classes I'm taking, Advanced Robotics, is excellent and is exactly what I was looking for in my Master's degree. That said, I can't help feeling somewhat lost with each class. It's getting better as we've moved away from controls (which is ostensibly part of mechanical engineering, which explains why I had no idea what was happening for the first 6 weeks of class) and moved back towards classic AI. It also wasn't immediately clear to me, particularly without a background in controls, what exactly the relevance of the methods we learnt was. I'm now starting to get an appreciation of how you might be able to use them though, mainly through the homeworks.
In the last homework, we programmed a tetris game AI that uses an approximate linear program to generate a policy for how best to play tetris. We also applied linear quadratic regulators to help stabilise a inverted pendulum (a famous problem, also known as the cartpole problem) and to hover a helicopter. In the first case, we used a convex optimisation library called CVX to solve a linear problem. This approach seems particularly common in courses here at Berkeley.
I helped my teammate Gita out with one his homework assignments to find the shortest path in a graph. Instead of just asking students in his class (CE290i) to implement Dijkstra's, they managed to shoehorn the most horrific Java wrapper of a C linear program solving library into their assignment. Instead of writing a beautiful piece of code that could have solved the shortest path problem in maybe ~ 20 lines of Java code at a stretch, it was necessary to generate a string, pass it via some obfuscated interface to this solver and parse the output (of questionable precision). Yuck.
For the majority of my assignments I've been using MatLab, which presents a nice clear interface for implementing programmatic solutions to mathematical problems. It's not my favourite language though - I like writing clean code and it's easily possible to write unintelligible code in MatLab. Perhaps in the same way that you could in other weakly typed languages like Python or Javascript. MatLab also runs extremely slowly - being an interpreted language. Prof Abbeel mentioned that if you were actually implementing these solutions, you'd use C and see a speedup of ~ 1000 times.
In particular, one of the ideas that came to me during the many bleary eyed hours I spent staring at / trying to do the second homework was to use some of the control policy algorithms from robotics to control thyroid disease. As I've mentioned before - I suffer from Hashimoto's thyroiditis, an autoimmune disorder which effectively means my thyroid gland functions less well over time. The typical approach advocated by mainstream physicians treats it pretty poorly. I feel normally energetic on about 1 in 7 days. The other 6 days of the week I'm sleepy for a good part of the day (hypothyroid). Often I'm unable to focus well (hyperthyroid). It's a difficult condition to live with as a normally productive person. Still, I manage.
Where a control algorithm could come in is by more closely modelling the relationship between the different thyroid 'variables'. The normal treatment assumes that a patient's TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) level is inversely proportional to their Free T4 (thyroxine) level. i.e., if your TSH is high, you need more synthetic thyroxine. If it is low, you need less. From my reading and shallow understanding of the endocrinological system, that's not an accurate assessment of the situation. There are perhaps five variables, if not more that need to be tracked. A patient's thyroid gland may not adequately convert T4 into T3 (this is the form of thyroxine that is usable by the body). Additionally, this conversion takes its toll on their adrenal system, requiring cortisol to carry out the conversion (I think). Taking supplemental T4 for a significant period of time can deplete these levels.
I'd be interested in trying to work out the actual relationship between these variables and perhaps implementing a control algorithm that could determine the optimal policy for medicating a patient. The only caveat is that collecting this data would be exorbitantly expensive (~ $200 for every data point) and that you'd need a lot of it. This is one of those projects that might have to wait for my one-day startup to go public. Incidentally, this autoimmune disorder is the same that Larry Page suffers from. I'm hoping that having a billionnaire with the same problem means some actual research will be done into it :).
This digression aside, these assignments are tough. I suspect they'd be easier if it hadn't been 4 years since I finished my undergraduate degree (and about 6 years since I last studied any maths). The Advanced Robotics course is tough too because I'm the only Master's student taking the course. I've tried to make friends with PhD students to study with but it's difficult - they have their own offices and are generally smarter than me! Luckily there is a sizeable group of Master's students to work on Computer Vision assignments with and that seems to be going well so far.
The other main activity of the last two weeks has been forming (by way of recruiting MBA students) a team for our application to the Lean Launchpad class at the Haas (business school) run by Steve Blank. This is one of the classes that helped me choose to attend Cal based on the advice of Kevin Yien and a handful of other students. This started with almost getting shot down by Steve Blank after my very first pitch at the information session (thankfully saved by an accurate but witty retort). It continued with a networking session and ended up with us forming a team with three MBA students, myself and my teammate Gita - also an engineering student.
Somehow this class wasn't widely advertised amongst CS graduate students and most MBA students wanted people who could build software for their teams. It was a little sad to take myself off the market of available team members. This class won't fulfil my core requirements next semester which means I'll be taking it in additional to my normal workload. I'm hopeful that there is some crossover between the work in the class and our capstone project. Still, next semester is going to be extremely busy.
I've made a conscious effort this week not to buy granola. That was my comfort food of choice and being high in both sugar and fat, it probably wasn't doing good things for my health in the quantity that I was consuming it. I've also succumbed to the coffee shop culture here and have been consuming caffeine regularly. Hopefully I'll get a chance to reset soon.
One of the classes I'm taking, Advanced Robotics, is excellent and is exactly what I was looking for in my Master's degree. That said, I can't help feeling somewhat lost with each class. It's getting better as we've moved away from controls (which is ostensibly part of mechanical engineering, which explains why I had no idea what was happening for the first 6 weeks of class) and moved back towards classic AI. It also wasn't immediately clear to me, particularly without a background in controls, what exactly the relevance of the methods we learnt was. I'm now starting to get an appreciation of how you might be able to use them though, mainly through the homeworks.
In the last homework, we programmed a tetris game AI that uses an approximate linear program to generate a policy for how best to play tetris. We also applied linear quadratic regulators to help stabilise a inverted pendulum (a famous problem, also known as the cartpole problem) and to hover a helicopter. In the first case, we used a convex optimisation library called CVX to solve a linear problem. This approach seems particularly common in courses here at Berkeley.
I helped my teammate Gita out with one his homework assignments to find the shortest path in a graph. Instead of just asking students in his class (CE290i) to implement Dijkstra's, they managed to shoehorn the most horrific Java wrapper of a C linear program solving library into their assignment. Instead of writing a beautiful piece of code that could have solved the shortest path problem in maybe ~ 20 lines of Java code at a stretch, it was necessary to generate a string, pass it via some obfuscated interface to this solver and parse the output (of questionable precision). Yuck.
For the majority of my assignments I've been using MatLab, which presents a nice clear interface for implementing programmatic solutions to mathematical problems. It's not my favourite language though - I like writing clean code and it's easily possible to write unintelligible code in MatLab. Perhaps in the same way that you could in other weakly typed languages like Python or Javascript. MatLab also runs extremely slowly - being an interpreted language. Prof Abbeel mentioned that if you were actually implementing these solutions, you'd use C and see a speedup of ~ 1000 times.
In particular, one of the ideas that came to me during the many bleary eyed hours I spent staring at / trying to do the second homework was to use some of the control policy algorithms from robotics to control thyroid disease. As I've mentioned before - I suffer from Hashimoto's thyroiditis, an autoimmune disorder which effectively means my thyroid gland functions less well over time. The typical approach advocated by mainstream physicians treats it pretty poorly. I feel normally energetic on about 1 in 7 days. The other 6 days of the week I'm sleepy for a good part of the day (hypothyroid). Often I'm unable to focus well (hyperthyroid). It's a difficult condition to live with as a normally productive person. Still, I manage.
Where a control algorithm could come in is by more closely modelling the relationship between the different thyroid 'variables'. The normal treatment assumes that a patient's TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) level is inversely proportional to their Free T4 (thyroxine) level. i.e., if your TSH is high, you need more synthetic thyroxine. If it is low, you need less. From my reading and shallow understanding of the endocrinological system, that's not an accurate assessment of the situation. There are perhaps five variables, if not more that need to be tracked. A patient's thyroid gland may not adequately convert T4 into T3 (this is the form of thyroxine that is usable by the body). Additionally, this conversion takes its toll on their adrenal system, requiring cortisol to carry out the conversion (I think). Taking supplemental T4 for a significant period of time can deplete these levels.
I'd be interested in trying to work out the actual relationship between these variables and perhaps implementing a control algorithm that could determine the optimal policy for medicating a patient. The only caveat is that collecting this data would be exorbitantly expensive (~ $200 for every data point) and that you'd need a lot of it. This is one of those projects that might have to wait for my one-day startup to go public. Incidentally, this autoimmune disorder is the same that Larry Page suffers from. I'm hoping that having a billionnaire with the same problem means some actual research will be done into it :).
This digression aside, these assignments are tough. I suspect they'd be easier if it hadn't been 4 years since I finished my undergraduate degree (and about 6 years since I last studied any maths). The Advanced Robotics course is tough too because I'm the only Master's student taking the course. I've tried to make friends with PhD students to study with but it's difficult - they have their own offices and are generally smarter than me! Luckily there is a sizeable group of Master's students to work on Computer Vision assignments with and that seems to be going well so far.
The other main activity of the last two weeks has been forming (by way of recruiting MBA students) a team for our application to the Lean Launchpad class at the Haas (business school) run by Steve Blank. This is one of the classes that helped me choose to attend Cal based on the advice of Kevin Yien and a handful of other students. This started with almost getting shot down by Steve Blank after my very first pitch at the information session (thankfully saved by an accurate but witty retort). It continued with a networking session and ended up with us forming a team with three MBA students, myself and my teammate Gita - also an engineering student.
Somehow this class wasn't widely advertised amongst CS graduate students and most MBA students wanted people who could build software for their teams. It was a little sad to take myself off the market of available team members. This class won't fulfil my core requirements next semester which means I'll be taking it in additional to my normal workload. I'm hopeful that there is some crossover between the work in the class and our capstone project. Still, next semester is going to be extremely busy.
I've made a conscious effort this week not to buy granola. That was my comfort food of choice and being high in both sugar and fat, it probably wasn't doing good things for my health in the quantity that I was consuming it. I've also succumbed to the coffee shop culture here and have been consuming caffeine regularly. Hopefully I'll get a chance to reset soon.
No comments yet!
This week marked the beginning of the Fall recruitment cycle on campus where hundreds of employers will try their best to attract Cal students. That's actually a little incorrect - employers don't seem to have try very hard here, certainly not as hard as employers tried during my time at Cambridge. I'll go into more detail about that later.
As you can imagine, engineering jobs are very prevalent here - certainly disproportionately so, compared to most other types of jobs. In particular, software engineers were sought after by nearly every firm, which has made my job easier. This past week we had the university wide careers fair, which showcased a few hundred employers and was spread over three days. On Wednesday this coming week is the EECS (Electronic Engineering and Computer Science) career fair, which I'm very much looking forward to. In a few weeks time is the Startup Fair, which should be equally exciting.
We also had an Employers' Breakfast before the second day of the career fair this last week. This was interesting but it seems as if the employers hadn't been fully briefed on who was attending this breakfast. For instance, one recruiter was looking for software engineers graduating in December to begin work in January. She didn't realise that every single person in the room was on the MEng program which finishes in May. Whoops.
My attitude towards the job hunt here has been somewhat cavalier. I acknowledge that as a software engineer, it's not going to be difficult to get, at the very least, interviews at the firms I want to work at. (Whether I make it through each firm's gauntlet of interviews is another question entirely...) Having had five internships now and three years of experience, it's fair to say that I have an understanding of what kind of work I'd like to do and for what sort of company. A lot of the companies presenting at the fair were the usual big corporates which were not particularly exciting. A lot of the companies also refused to sponsor international students - which is an issue I've never encountered before back home (being a British citizen).
Using all four of these metrics, I was able to make my 'walk' of the fair more efficient. (I also looked up the list of employers online and filtered them down beforehand, so I knew exactly which stalls to go each day.) This seemed less arduous than what many undergrads and many of my less selective MEng colleagues were doing - visiting each stall in turn. Given the extensive queues at each stall, it looked like a painfully slow process. (Tip for future fairs: get there at the beginning. At 11am it was basically empty. At 12pm it was BUSY.)
I've been a little confused by how the process works here, having read that employers receive thousands of online applications and you're best served by putting your resume directly in front of them. Before I came to Berkeley, I made an extensive spreadsheet detailing the exact jobs at employers I'd want to work for but held off applying directly until I could meet the recruiters directly because of this advice. As it turns out, there's no right answer - it depends on how meticulous (or disorganised) the recuiter is.
The process here essentially works as follows (note that I omitted many of these steps):
1) Dress unlike you normally dress. Dress unlike you would normally dress at work. Wear your smartest suit. (Seriously?)
2) Bring a portfolio of resumes. Preferably customised for each employer but if you don't have time, it's fine to bring multiple copies of the same resume, as long as you customise the 'objective' statement on your resume. (I didn't have space for an 'objective' on my 1 page resume. I wrote individual cover letters for my shortlist of firms.)
3) Queue at your stall and prepare to overhead many conversations where students try to sell themselves to the recruiter. (Queueing, ugh.)
4) Introduce yourself to the recruiter. Hand them your resume.
5) Ask them specific questions about their job while they scan your resume. Try to sell yourself through these questions. (I think my questions were possibly a little too efficient.)
6) Try not to appear unnerved while they make marks on your resume. (As long as it's not a big X you're hopefully OK.)
7) Go home and submit another resume online. Turns out the one you gave them was just for them to later more easily retrieve your online application. (Apologies to the trees out there.)
This whole process seems so completely over the top to me, especially coming from a university like Cambridge where the balance of power between employers and students was the other way. Firstly, wearing a suit to a careers fair? If any employer is so crass as to judge candidates by their appearance even BEFORE their interview, then I'd have serious questions about their work culture! As for queueing up to be pre-screened at the careers fair, it all seems rather backwards to me. The reason we have online applications is that it's all the more efficient. To fall back to paper because of the volume of applicants is just crazy but seemingly necessary.
The only justification I can come up with is that Cal is a BIG university with a lot of students. Getting any sort of job here is a tougher process than back at Cambridge. There are applicants from all over the US from many other equivalently good universities and employers can be as selective as they like. In England, Oxford and Cambridge are, for some reason, in a league of their own above other universities. There are also just 70-90 computer science undergraduates coming out of Cambridge each year. It's easy to see why they're so much more in demand. Here on the other hand, several thousand undergraduates roll out of Cal and other similarly prestigious universities every year. Every competitive advantage helps.
As you can imagine, engineering jobs are very prevalent here - certainly disproportionately so, compared to most other types of jobs. In particular, software engineers were sought after by nearly every firm, which has made my job easier. This past week we had the university wide careers fair, which showcased a few hundred employers and was spread over three days. On Wednesday this coming week is the EECS (Electronic Engineering and Computer Science) career fair, which I'm very much looking forward to. In a few weeks time is the Startup Fair, which should be equally exciting.
We also had an Employers' Breakfast before the second day of the career fair this last week. This was interesting but it seems as if the employers hadn't been fully briefed on who was attending this breakfast. For instance, one recruiter was looking for software engineers graduating in December to begin work in January. She didn't realise that every single person in the room was on the MEng program which finishes in May. Whoops.
My attitude towards the job hunt here has been somewhat cavalier. I acknowledge that as a software engineer, it's not going to be difficult to get, at the very least, interviews at the firms I want to work at. (Whether I make it through each firm's gauntlet of interviews is another question entirely...) Having had five internships now and three years of experience, it's fair to say that I have an understanding of what kind of work I'd like to do and for what sort of company. A lot of the companies presenting at the fair were the usual big corporates which were not particularly exciting. A lot of the companies also refused to sponsor international students - which is an issue I've never encountered before back home (being a British citizen).
Using all four of these metrics, I was able to make my 'walk' of the fair more efficient. (I also looked up the list of employers online and filtered them down beforehand, so I knew exactly which stalls to go each day.) This seemed less arduous than what many undergrads and many of my less selective MEng colleagues were doing - visiting each stall in turn. Given the extensive queues at each stall, it looked like a painfully slow process. (Tip for future fairs: get there at the beginning. At 11am it was basically empty. At 12pm it was BUSY.)
I've been a little confused by how the process works here, having read that employers receive thousands of online applications and you're best served by putting your resume directly in front of them. Before I came to Berkeley, I made an extensive spreadsheet detailing the exact jobs at employers I'd want to work for but held off applying directly until I could meet the recruiters directly because of this advice. As it turns out, there's no right answer - it depends on how meticulous (or disorganised) the recuiter is.
The process here essentially works as follows (note that I omitted many of these steps):
1) Dress unlike you normally dress. Dress unlike you would normally dress at work. Wear your smartest suit. (Seriously?)
2) Bring a portfolio of resumes. Preferably customised for each employer but if you don't have time, it's fine to bring multiple copies of the same resume, as long as you customise the 'objective' statement on your resume. (I didn't have space for an 'objective' on my 1 page resume. I wrote individual cover letters for my shortlist of firms.)
3) Queue at your stall and prepare to overhead many conversations where students try to sell themselves to the recruiter. (Queueing, ugh.)
4) Introduce yourself to the recruiter. Hand them your resume.
5) Ask them specific questions about their job while they scan your resume. Try to sell yourself through these questions. (I think my questions were possibly a little too efficient.)
6) Try not to appear unnerved while they make marks on your resume. (As long as it's not a big X you're hopefully OK.)
7) Go home and submit another resume online. Turns out the one you gave them was just for them to later more easily retrieve your online application. (Apologies to the trees out there.)
This whole process seems so completely over the top to me, especially coming from a university like Cambridge where the balance of power between employers and students was the other way. Firstly, wearing a suit to a careers fair? If any employer is so crass as to judge candidates by their appearance even BEFORE their interview, then I'd have serious questions about their work culture! As for queueing up to be pre-screened at the careers fair, it all seems rather backwards to me. The reason we have online applications is that it's all the more efficient. To fall back to paper because of the volume of applicants is just crazy but seemingly necessary.
The only justification I can come up with is that Cal is a BIG university with a lot of students. Getting any sort of job here is a tougher process than back at Cambridge. There are applicants from all over the US from many other equivalently good universities and employers can be as selective as they like. In England, Oxford and Cambridge are, for some reason, in a league of their own above other universities. There are also just 70-90 computer science undergraduates coming out of Cambridge each year. It's easy to see why they're so much more in demand. Here on the other hand, several thousand undergraduates roll out of Cal and other similarly prestigious universities every year. Every competitive advantage helps.
No comments yet!
The two weeks of 'bootcamp' really flew by, perhaps quicker than expected. Whilst our scheduled classes only occupied half of each day, other activities and assignments took up much of the free time we had. We've had several 'business' classes, taught by lecturers either from the Haas business school or poached from other business schools. These have been very different to the traditional lecture format I'm used to but, perhaps because of this, all the more engaging. These typically involve case discussions, as an MBA program might, where we discuss the background and issues surrounding a business decision and eventually try to reason out (as a class) what the correct choice is. We've also had a fair amount of marketing work which was interesting but disproportionately time consuming.
One of the interesting events was a mixer with the other new 'professional program' graduate students, namely the MBA, LLM (Master of Law), JD (Doctorate of Law) and MPP (Master of Public Policy) students. These students were, as every class, varied - some interesting, some less so. One of the most colourful characters was a Brazilian student who was former a mergers and acqusitions banker at an investment bank in Brazil. Our conversation reminded me a lot of my interview with an MD at BarCap called Omar Selim - who was possibly the most unpleasant person I have ever met in my career. I have a naturally rounded posture from spending many hours of my life on a bicycle and the rest of my life in front of a computer screen. It's not a slouch so much as the way my back muscles naturally develop. Still, the Brazilian student decided to take it upon himself to teach me how to speak to people in person, including: standing up straight, squaring off my shoulders so that I was parallel to his frame and looking at the other person in the eyes. All this for the purpose of appearing engaged in our conversation. What he failed to understand was the reason I was actively looking for a way to escape from our conversation and were he a genuinely interesting and pleasant person, I would have naturally looked engaged in our conversation!
Another highlight included a team bridge and campanile (tower) building competition where we were fortunate to have a civil engineering student on our team. (Side story: he was from Botswana - how awesome.) Our popsicle (or lollypop) bridge did really well, hitting the max load their 'load testing' machine (a bicycle pump with a plate attached) was able to provide.
That weekend during the bootcamp, I hitched a ride with my cousin Sawan as he drove back from UC Davis to his home in Saratoga. Sawan's dad (my father's cousin) has lived in Silicon Valley for decades and his stories of the area are fascinating. It was Sawan's sister's (Risha's) birthday that evening and we went straight to an upmarket restaurant and shopping area called Santana Row where we spent about 45 minutes circling the various parking lots looking for parking. I found this rather entertaining - all the rich technologists with their luxury German cars must find it less so. Eventually we parked at a cinema complex across the street and ate at a restaurant called Maggiano's where, as a permanent promotion, they give each diner the exact same main course again for free to take home at the end of your meal. Strange, right?
On Saturday I met up with Anish, my long term travel buddy who moved out to Silicon Valley in January. After a scenic hike up the Panoramic Hill, we visited the ISKON Hare Krishna temple in Berkeley to attend their Saturday aarti. I've never been to a Hare Krishna aarti before but the combination of music and chanting was quite relaxing. I can understand why people enjoy it. We later had dinner in the infamous 'Gourmet Ghetto' district in Berkeley at an eccentric vegan cafe called Cafe Gratitude. This place apparently shut down over summer because it previously operated a not-for-profit business model where visitors could pay what they like. Presumably people liked to pay less than the food cost.
All the dishes at the cafe had names beginning with 'I am', followed by a adjective. The waitress' reply after you ordered would be 'you are'. It was interesting. After we ordered, she asked if we'd like to hear the question of the day. This was an open question to think about while we ate - and she didn't ask for an answer. The question that day was, 'What do you have faith in?'. We found that quite amusing, having just come from the temple.
The next day I went for a ride in the hills with Alberto - a Spanish student on the same program as me - who was impressively quick on a $120 Walmart bike. Being a Sunday morning, we encountered many local riders. Most of these were surprisingly slow, despite having all the kit.
On Monday I joined a group of new international students to go find dinner in Berkeley. We went to a restaurant called Sliver - a quirky pizzeria that is apparently a clone of the original 'one-flavour' pizza restaurant, a place called Cheeseboard which is a little further from campus. Both places serve just one flavour of (vegetarian) pizza each day and you can order it by the slice. Sadly it was more expensive than all the pizza we ate in Italian but thankfully, just as tasty. One of the freshman (first year undergraduate) students in the group amused me greatly when, after learning I did my undergraduate at Cambridge, he commented that I'd 'really picked up a British accent'!
Gita, one of my project teammates, and I were also able to drive down to the 3D Robotics Berkeley office to meet Brandon, our industrial sponsor. Their office was an exciting place with quadcopters and aircraft hung off most walls and 3D printers taking a central position. One of the highlights for me was meeting Chris Anderson, the founder of 3D Robotics and the former editor of Wired - who is one of my tech idols and favourite authors.
Other than numerous meetings for my capstone project, the rest of the week was filled with preparing for our marketing presentation. While it wasn't as slick as some of our peers, ours was humourous. We had to run market tests for our product, an energy drink which claimed to be easy on the gut. We tested this claim specifically. I found that it was easy on my gut but sadly my teammate did not have the same experience. (Incidentally, that same teammate happens to be one of the worlds' quickest Rubiks cube solvers. Berkeley is pretty awesome, eh?)
At the end of the week, I had been expecting a delivery from Amazon, which never arrived. After calling UPS to check on the package, it looks like they had made an error when transcribing the address and instead of delivering my package to me, they had misread the D as an 0 and had delivered it several hundred houses further up the street. We live on a hill, so that was about 2 miles uphill. The package that I was expecting contained a large kitchen trashcan and I made it clear to Amazon that it wasn't feasible to go collect it, especially not without a car. They promptly sent another and apologised for the inconvenience.
That weekend, I set about realising my dream of having a monitor at eye-level, which I accomplished at Last.fm using an Ikea hack. Whilst I had previously vowed never to return to Ikea, the promise of having enough spare space to host actual speakers was tempting enough. I had planned to pick up the shelf and take the bus back (with my bicycle) but, predictably, I spent longer in the store than was healthy. There were many different shelf options and, not having a tape measure, I had no idea how large my desk was. This was resolved by taking several sized shelves down to the 'desk' showroom and physically comparing them - a test flawed by the fact that my desk is no longer sold by Ikea. Eventually, I settled on a shelf that was about the right size and queued behind all the undergraduates who had just moved in for the semester and were buying furniture.
Having wasted more time than I had imagined - I just missed the hourly bus that runs from San Francisco to the UC Berkeley campus. Initially, I misread the bus times on the 'Transit' app and thought it'd be just 12 minutes but soon realised this was the bus to San Francisco. Oops. The other bus was about 40 minutes away at this point and I was convinced I could walk to its next stop in less time than that and thus avoid waiting around at the crowded bus stop. This didn't really happen though because I walked in the wrong direction. Eventually I loosed my backpack strap, slid the shelf in under my armpit and put the other end to rest on my handlebars. After an awkward and wobbly push off, I was away - cycling with a 6 kilogram shelf and steering with my right arm. The intersections proved to be slightly tricky but I made it through without any major incident. Eventually I made it to the road up to our apartment where I actually managed to catch up with two girls wearing Cal triathlete gear. They were not amused when I said hello to them.
My shelf built, I succumbed to Amazon's will and ordered the Andrew Philips speakers I had been lusting after. Somehow, in the couple of weeks since I first searched for them, their price had been gradually lowering itself. When it got to $75, I had to admit defeat and haven't regretted placing the order since! Just before the speakers arrived however, two large packages arrived. It turns out that the original trashcan we had ordered had made it down correctly. So had the replacement trashcan that Amazon sent. We'd gone from having no trashcans to having two! Amazon requested that I send back the second trashcan but being carless, I asked if they could pick it up. They said it wouldn't be economical to do so and that I may as well just keep it. Winning. This is Anish's birthday present for next year sorted.
The next day my flatmates and I got some nice bonding time when we ran numerous errands and went to brunch (really just lunch IMO) at a Thai temple in Berkeley. This is a very Berkeley establishment - a temple that hosts brunch on Sundays in order to raise funds. The food was tasty, authentic and the atmosphere jovial. I particularly liked the coconut pancakes that were dessert. Nom.
One of the interesting events was a mixer with the other new 'professional program' graduate students, namely the MBA, LLM (Master of Law), JD (Doctorate of Law) and MPP (Master of Public Policy) students. These students were, as every class, varied - some interesting, some less so. One of the most colourful characters was a Brazilian student who was former a mergers and acqusitions banker at an investment bank in Brazil. Our conversation reminded me a lot of my interview with an MD at BarCap called Omar Selim - who was possibly the most unpleasant person I have ever met in my career. I have a naturally rounded posture from spending many hours of my life on a bicycle and the rest of my life in front of a computer screen. It's not a slouch so much as the way my back muscles naturally develop. Still, the Brazilian student decided to take it upon himself to teach me how to speak to people in person, including: standing up straight, squaring off my shoulders so that I was parallel to his frame and looking at the other person in the eyes. All this for the purpose of appearing engaged in our conversation. What he failed to understand was the reason I was actively looking for a way to escape from our conversation and were he a genuinely interesting and pleasant person, I would have naturally looked engaged in our conversation!
Another highlight included a team bridge and campanile (tower) building competition where we were fortunate to have a civil engineering student on our team. (Side story: he was from Botswana - how awesome.) Our popsicle (or lollypop) bridge did really well, hitting the max load their 'load testing' machine (a bicycle pump with a plate attached) was able to provide.
That weekend during the bootcamp, I hitched a ride with my cousin Sawan as he drove back from UC Davis to his home in Saratoga. Sawan's dad (my father's cousin) has lived in Silicon Valley for decades and his stories of the area are fascinating. It was Sawan's sister's (Risha's) birthday that evening and we went straight to an upmarket restaurant and shopping area called Santana Row where we spent about 45 minutes circling the various parking lots looking for parking. I found this rather entertaining - all the rich technologists with their luxury German cars must find it less so. Eventually we parked at a cinema complex across the street and ate at a restaurant called Maggiano's where, as a permanent promotion, they give each diner the exact same main course again for free to take home at the end of your meal. Strange, right?
On Saturday I met up with Anish, my long term travel buddy who moved out to Silicon Valley in January. After a scenic hike up the Panoramic Hill, we visited the ISKON Hare Krishna temple in Berkeley to attend their Saturday aarti. I've never been to a Hare Krishna aarti before but the combination of music and chanting was quite relaxing. I can understand why people enjoy it. We later had dinner in the infamous 'Gourmet Ghetto' district in Berkeley at an eccentric vegan cafe called Cafe Gratitude. This place apparently shut down over summer because it previously operated a not-for-profit business model where visitors could pay what they like. Presumably people liked to pay less than the food cost.
All the dishes at the cafe had names beginning with 'I am', followed by a adjective. The waitress' reply after you ordered would be 'you are
The next day I went for a ride in the hills with Alberto - a Spanish student on the same program as me - who was impressively quick on a $120 Walmart bike. Being a Sunday morning, we encountered many local riders. Most of these were surprisingly slow, despite having all the kit.
On Monday I joined a group of new international students to go find dinner in Berkeley. We went to a restaurant called Sliver - a quirky pizzeria that is apparently a clone of the original 'one-flavour' pizza restaurant, a place called Cheeseboard which is a little further from campus. Both places serve just one flavour of (vegetarian) pizza each day and you can order it by the slice. Sadly it was more expensive than all the pizza we ate in Italian but thankfully, just as tasty. One of the freshman (first year undergraduate) students in the group amused me greatly when, after learning I did my undergraduate at Cambridge, he commented that I'd 'really picked up a British accent'!
Gita, one of my project teammates, and I were also able to drive down to the 3D Robotics Berkeley office to meet Brandon, our industrial sponsor. Their office was an exciting place with quadcopters and aircraft hung off most walls and 3D printers taking a central position. One of the highlights for me was meeting Chris Anderson, the founder of 3D Robotics and the former editor of Wired - who is one of my tech idols and favourite authors.
Other than numerous meetings for my capstone project, the rest of the week was filled with preparing for our marketing presentation. While it wasn't as slick as some of our peers, ours was humourous. We had to run market tests for our product, an energy drink which claimed to be easy on the gut. We tested this claim specifically. I found that it was easy on my gut but sadly my teammate did not have the same experience. (Incidentally, that same teammate happens to be one of the worlds' quickest Rubiks cube solvers. Berkeley is pretty awesome, eh?)
At the end of the week, I had been expecting a delivery from Amazon, which never arrived. After calling UPS to check on the package, it looks like they had made an error when transcribing the address and instead of delivering my package to me, they had misread the D as an 0 and had delivered it several hundred houses further up the street. We live on a hill, so that was about 2 miles uphill. The package that I was expecting contained a large kitchen trashcan and I made it clear to Amazon that it wasn't feasible to go collect it, especially not without a car. They promptly sent another and apologised for the inconvenience.
That weekend, I set about realising my dream of having a monitor at eye-level, which I accomplished at Last.fm using an Ikea hack. Whilst I had previously vowed never to return to Ikea, the promise of having enough spare space to host actual speakers was tempting enough. I had planned to pick up the shelf and take the bus back (with my bicycle) but, predictably, I spent longer in the store than was healthy. There were many different shelf options and, not having a tape measure, I had no idea how large my desk was. This was resolved by taking several sized shelves down to the 'desk' showroom and physically comparing them - a test flawed by the fact that my desk is no longer sold by Ikea. Eventually, I settled on a shelf that was about the right size and queued behind all the undergraduates who had just moved in for the semester and were buying furniture.
Having wasted more time than I had imagined - I just missed the hourly bus that runs from San Francisco to the UC Berkeley campus. Initially, I misread the bus times on the 'Transit' app and thought it'd be just 12 minutes but soon realised this was the bus to San Francisco. Oops. The other bus was about 40 minutes away at this point and I was convinced I could walk to its next stop in less time than that and thus avoid waiting around at the crowded bus stop. This didn't really happen though because I walked in the wrong direction. Eventually I loosed my backpack strap, slid the shelf in under my armpit and put the other end to rest on my handlebars. After an awkward and wobbly push off, I was away - cycling with a 6 kilogram shelf and steering with my right arm. The intersections proved to be slightly tricky but I made it through without any major incident. Eventually I made it to the road up to our apartment where I actually managed to catch up with two girls wearing Cal triathlete gear. They were not amused when I said hello to them.
My shelf built, I succumbed to Amazon's will and ordered the Andrew Philips speakers I had been lusting after. Somehow, in the couple of weeks since I first searched for them, their price had been gradually lowering itself. When it got to $75, I had to admit defeat and haven't regretted placing the order since! Just before the speakers arrived however, two large packages arrived. It turns out that the original trashcan we had ordered had made it down correctly. So had the replacement trashcan that Amazon sent. We'd gone from having no trashcans to having two! Amazon requested that I send back the second trashcan but being carless, I asked if they could pick it up. They said it wouldn't be economical to do so and that I may as well just keep it. Winning. This is Anish's birthday present for next year sorted.
The next day my flatmates and I got some nice bonding time when we ran numerous errands and went to brunch (really just lunch IMO) at a Thai temple in Berkeley. This is a very Berkeley establishment - a temple that hosts brunch on Sundays in order to raise funds. The food was tasty, authentic and the atmosphere jovial. I particularly liked the coconut pancakes that were dessert. Nom.
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Time in California is short. Yes, a day here is the same as a day in Europe. It's just that more seems to happen in a day here than in a day back in London. I put that down to the volume of 'things' that happen here.
There's a recurring entry in my 'Weekend' Wunderlist list that says 'Blog Post'. It's been taunting me for the last few weeks as the due date of 'Sun 18 Aug' turned from black to red and stayed that way, glaring angrily at me everytime I practiced David Allen's GTD weekly list review.
I'll go back in time to the two weeks of bootcamp in the next post but for now I'm going to concentrate on the time after that.
Semester started on Thursday the 29th of August. I had previously thought this was just an artefact of the strange way Cambridge schedules its terms but it seems that this habit was carried over the Atlantic too. The beginning of that week was ostensibly empty for returning grad students but spent in hours of orientation for us newly enrolled students.
EECS orientation was moderately interesting, although clearly geared more towards the research focussed PhD and Master's students. Still, some interesting facts were revealed - including that the EECS MEng students (i.e. people like me) in years past often used to spend most of their weekends working (unlike other engineering disciplines). I was also able to find out more detailed selectivity numbers - while our program was less selective than the MS/PhD program (which has an acceptance rate of 6%), it still had a respectable 15% acceptance rate, and about a 5% enrolment rate (i.e. 20 enrolled out of 420 applicants).
EECS is a big discipline here at Berkeley, no doubt due to Cal's heritage in the area. Notable alumni include Steve Wozniak, Bill Joy (one of the founders of Sun Microsystems) and Eric Schmidt. The introductory computer science class supposedly has 1100 undergraduates enrolled in it this year. Astonishing. We also have a lounge lovingly named 'The Woz' and a sponsored 'Vodafone' lab.
After orientation, Gita, Yong and I set to work putting the finishing touches on two drones - an EasyStar foam fixed wing aircraft and a 3D Robotics hexacopter. After spending a day getting them up and running, we took them down to the Berkeley Marina on Wednesday evening. I quickly managed to crash the EasyStar resulting in a clean shear in the foam body that went over the wing. Under Yong's control, the Hex had one clean, slightly wobbly flight and made it down again. The second flight however caused it to lose control - and it quickly was picked up by the wind. Despite cutting the throttle, it refused to return to the ground and the wind took it off into the distance over a small hill. After it passed over the hill, it dropped out of the sky and we ran over to where it came down.
Sadly, just beyond the hill was an inland body of water that was an extension of the Bay itself. The drone had actually made it 10 feet over the water before the power cut. By the time we arrived, little was visible of the drone except for bubbles that were escaping to the surface. We thought this was the batteries exploding but it later turns out this was the capacitors on the six ESCs blowing. I found this rather amusing but the gravitas of the situation was clear - we'd just sunk a $1200 drone. I later realised that the autopilot driving the drone was mine, so I was (at least, partially) invested in its death.
Gita, being the absolute hero that he is, later went back at low tide (1 am) with a wet suit and combed the floor of the Bay looking for the drone. Sure enough, he found it. Yong and I woke up in the morning and were concerned that we hadn't heard from Gita - but he eventually resurfaced (online, I mean) and we acquired a new sense of respect for him!
Classes started on Thursday afternoon and were generally extremely crowded. There is no penalty at Berkeley for signing up to multiple classes for the first two weeks. This allows people to sample various classes before deciding what they'd actually like to take for credit. I was part of this group - being undecided between which two of Computer Vision, Introduction to Robotics and Advanced Robotics I'd like to take. In the end I settled on Computer Vision and Advanced Robotics - both of which are fascinating courses and the latter of which is likely to result in an early mathematics-induced retirement to my cremation chamber.
American classes generally tend to have 3 hours a week of lectures - spread over two sessions. In addition, instructors (usually professors and their teaching assistants) hold 'office hours' where you can go and ask them questions about their course content. Finally, each class has homework - considerable exercises or problem sets which typically take two full days of work to finish.
I'm coming to the end of my first batch of homeworks - and they are time consuming and exhausting. Given my generally poor and now rusty knowledge of maths, I'm struggling to remember facts that were once at the front of my mind seven years ago! This has been a stressful experience that I hope will get easier. Additionally, the office hours frustrate me, generally because you have to contend with many other students for the instructor's time. This can be painful, especially when they're asking questions about a part of the homework that you have yet to get to.
On the other hand, the homework for the 'engineering leadership' class I'm taking (which is a mandatory part of my MEng program) has been surprisingly easy. I guess I've always been a glutton for reading and writing though and most of it has been reading and writing based. It is my escape from maths.
The homework situation was compounded by our decision to visit the UAS West conference in San Diego - a industry focussed UAS (unmanned aerial systems) conference to which we gained free admittance. We left Berkeley at about 6pm on Thursday evening, reaching San Diego at sometime after 2am - on the whole a rapid drive down. After sleeping for a few hours at the waterfront flat of an acquaintance's friends in La Jolla (hot tip: it's not pronounced how it sounds, at all), we woke up to attend a morning of talks. The talks were mainly centred around the military and military uses of UAS technology - which were interesting but perhaps not directly relevant to our project to bring drone technology to the civilian market.
That afternoon, we visited the 3D Robotics head office, which was the drone hacker's equivalent of visiting Santa's Workshop. There were large screens, soldering stations and quadcopters everywhere. We chatted to our contacts there for a bit and started the long drive back to Berkeley - trying our best to avoid the Los Angeles rush hour.
Sadly, in a misguided attempt to beat the rush hour traffic, we ended up a long way off track. After we recovered back onto the I5 interstate, we ended up back off track when we sleepily took a wrong turn. These detours added a good two hours to our trip - arriving back to Berkeley at 2:30am, a full 11.5 hours later. On the plus side, we stopped at an excellent sushi restaurant in Bakersfield called Sushiko. Paraphrasing Gita, 'it's surprising to find good sushi in Bakersfield, out of all places'.
Despite all the driving, we made it back to Berkeley with a full Saturday to spare. The fatigue had hit us both though and it took the weekend to recover. The homework wasn't waiting though and I spent the rest of the weekend (and most of the week) diving headfirst into the wonderful world of MatLab.
There's a recurring entry in my 'Weekend' Wunderlist list that says 'Blog Post'. It's been taunting me for the last few weeks as the due date of 'Sun 18 Aug' turned from black to red and stayed that way, glaring angrily at me everytime I practiced David Allen's GTD weekly list review.
I'll go back in time to the two weeks of bootcamp in the next post but for now I'm going to concentrate on the time after that.
Semester started on Thursday the 29th of August. I had previously thought this was just an artefact of the strange way Cambridge schedules its terms but it seems that this habit was carried over the Atlantic too. The beginning of that week was ostensibly empty for returning grad students but spent in hours of orientation for us newly enrolled students.
EECS orientation was moderately interesting, although clearly geared more towards the research focussed PhD and Master's students. Still, some interesting facts were revealed - including that the EECS MEng students (i.e. people like me) in years past often used to spend most of their weekends working (unlike other engineering disciplines). I was also able to find out more detailed selectivity numbers - while our program was less selective than the MS/PhD program (which has an acceptance rate of 6%), it still had a respectable 15% acceptance rate, and about a 5% enrolment rate (i.e. 20 enrolled out of 420 applicants).
EECS is a big discipline here at Berkeley, no doubt due to Cal's heritage in the area. Notable alumni include Steve Wozniak, Bill Joy (one of the founders of Sun Microsystems) and Eric Schmidt. The introductory computer science class supposedly has 1100 undergraduates enrolled in it this year. Astonishing. We also have a lounge lovingly named 'The Woz' and a sponsored 'Vodafone' lab.
After orientation, Gita, Yong and I set to work putting the finishing touches on two drones - an EasyStar foam fixed wing aircraft and a 3D Robotics hexacopter. After spending a day getting them up and running, we took them down to the Berkeley Marina on Wednesday evening. I quickly managed to crash the EasyStar resulting in a clean shear in the foam body that went over the wing. Under Yong's control, the Hex had one clean, slightly wobbly flight and made it down again. The second flight however caused it to lose control - and it quickly was picked up by the wind. Despite cutting the throttle, it refused to return to the ground and the wind took it off into the distance over a small hill. After it passed over the hill, it dropped out of the sky and we ran over to where it came down.
Sadly, just beyond the hill was an inland body of water that was an extension of the Bay itself. The drone had actually made it 10 feet over the water before the power cut. By the time we arrived, little was visible of the drone except for bubbles that were escaping to the surface. We thought this was the batteries exploding but it later turns out this was the capacitors on the six ESCs blowing. I found this rather amusing but the gravitas of the situation was clear - we'd just sunk a $1200 drone. I later realised that the autopilot driving the drone was mine, so I was (at least, partially) invested in its death.
Gita, being the absolute hero that he is, later went back at low tide (1 am) with a wet suit and combed the floor of the Bay looking for the drone. Sure enough, he found it. Yong and I woke up in the morning and were concerned that we hadn't heard from Gita - but he eventually resurfaced (online, I mean) and we acquired a new sense of respect for him!
Classes started on Thursday afternoon and were generally extremely crowded. There is no penalty at Berkeley for signing up to multiple classes for the first two weeks. This allows people to sample various classes before deciding what they'd actually like to take for credit. I was part of this group - being undecided between which two of Computer Vision, Introduction to Robotics and Advanced Robotics I'd like to take. In the end I settled on Computer Vision and Advanced Robotics - both of which are fascinating courses and the latter of which is likely to result in an early mathematics-induced retirement to my cremation chamber.
American classes generally tend to have 3 hours a week of lectures - spread over two sessions. In addition, instructors (usually professors and their teaching assistants) hold 'office hours' where you can go and ask them questions about their course content. Finally, each class has homework - considerable exercises or problem sets which typically take two full days of work to finish.
I'm coming to the end of my first batch of homeworks - and they are time consuming and exhausting. Given my generally poor and now rusty knowledge of maths, I'm struggling to remember facts that were once at the front of my mind seven years ago! This has been a stressful experience that I hope will get easier. Additionally, the office hours frustrate me, generally because you have to contend with many other students for the instructor's time. This can be painful, especially when they're asking questions about a part of the homework that you have yet to get to.
On the other hand, the homework for the 'engineering leadership' class I'm taking (which is a mandatory part of my MEng program) has been surprisingly easy. I guess I've always been a glutton for reading and writing though and most of it has been reading and writing based. It is my escape from maths.
The homework situation was compounded by our decision to visit the UAS West conference in San Diego - a industry focussed UAS (unmanned aerial systems) conference to which we gained free admittance. We left Berkeley at about 6pm on Thursday evening, reaching San Diego at sometime after 2am - on the whole a rapid drive down. After sleeping for a few hours at the waterfront flat of an acquaintance's friends in La Jolla (hot tip: it's not pronounced how it sounds, at all), we woke up to attend a morning of talks. The talks were mainly centred around the military and military uses of UAS technology - which were interesting but perhaps not directly relevant to our project to bring drone technology to the civilian market.
That afternoon, we visited the 3D Robotics head office, which was the drone hacker's equivalent of visiting Santa's Workshop. There were large screens, soldering stations and quadcopters everywhere. We chatted to our contacts there for a bit and started the long drive back to Berkeley - trying our best to avoid the Los Angeles rush hour.
Sadly, in a misguided attempt to beat the rush hour traffic, we ended up a long way off track. After we recovered back onto the I5 interstate, we ended up back off track when we sleepily took a wrong turn. These detours added a good two hours to our trip - arriving back to Berkeley at 2:30am, a full 11.5 hours later. On the plus side, we stopped at an excellent sushi restaurant in Bakersfield called Sushiko. Paraphrasing Gita, 'it's surprising to find good sushi in Bakersfield, out of all places'.
Despite all the driving, we made it back to Berkeley with a full Saturday to spare. The fatigue had hit us both though and it took the weekend to recover. The homework wasn't waiting though and I spent the rest of the weekend (and most of the week) diving headfirst into the wonderful world of MatLab.
sung wrote at 8:29 pm on Mon 16th Sep -
loving the blogs mate, keep updating us!
The next few days I had a moderate amount of unpacking to do, but lacking a laptop (I ordered a custom specification MacBook Air to the Berkeley Apple Store, not wanting to spent top dollar for the most expensive model but wanting something with more memory and a faster processor than the models they stock in store), I had a fair amount of free time.
On Thursday I met up with some of my classmates from India who I had spoken with previously online. We had lunch at Subway - which I suppose I had to experience once, but will try not to visit again (not when there are so many independent awesome little restaurants and cafes around campus). Around campus are basically all of the foods I love to eat back home with my friends - including many Asian (Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese restaurants), several bubble tea cafes that all serve matcha and a Chinese bakery!
Studying here also seems to be primarily done either on the grass on campus (where I am sitting now) or in coffee shops with a laptop out and headphones in. This is very different to my undergraduate experience at Cambridge - although they had recently opened a coffee shop in college when I left. Perhaps this is due to the lack of electric kettles in most American households, students need to get their caffeine fix externally.
In general, the Berkeley campus, although being a well ranked university, in the top five globally and the best public university in the world, appears to lack much of the pretentiousness that Cambridge has. While I enjoyed dressing up in a suit and acting like high society at Fitz, I do admire the casual but super intelligent attitude that students here have. While buildings here aren't nearly as old as at Cambridge, they are remarkably impressive. The campus isn't huge but is quite dense - with notable buildings around every corner. (Most of these buildings seem to house coffee shops too. There are also two very large libraries that are connected by an underground tunnel. I've not found a reason to use these yet though.)
It's busy at the moment but I'm told it will get considerably busier in a couple of weeks as all the undergraduates return. Supposedly to the point where it becomes impossible to ride your bike through certain parts of campus (and this is a rule enforced by the police).
On Friday I hitched a ride with Ryan into San Francisco via Berkeley Bowl. Berkeley lacks many chain supermarkets like Walmart (although there is one about 30 minutes drive away). They do have this wonderful independent supermarket called Berkeley Bowl - which has two branches here. It's more expensive than most chain supermarkets but they stock an amazing variety of what Americans call 'produce' (what we know as fruit and vegetables). This section literally spans a good third of their floor space and could itself be as large as most 'supermarkets'. What's more amazing is how well stocked this is - with fruit piled up to chest height. Ryan informs me that these stock levels are basically maintained all the time - so it wasn't just a case of arriving after the fruit had been delivered.
Arriving to San Francisco, I hopped into a cafe to take our weekly CPCC call where I had some lovely oolong green tea which almost certainly pushed me into a hyperthyroid state (dangerous!). After this, I visited Mission Bikes - a bike shop I've often admired online. It was considerably smaller than I was expecting, but was full of many cool bicycle accessories which were mostly the result of Kickstarter campaigns (such as a Blink / Steady and RevoLights).
Having made plans to go for lunch with my friend Alex from both HABS and Cambridge at his office, I had some time to kill, so stumbled into another coffee shop with a bizarrely heavyset door. This was my first warning and the sarcastically passive aggressive but amusing signs ('You'll find that it is preferable to take your call outside') were another. I ordered a rooibos tea and a wonderful peanut butter cookie and sat down to read my Kindle in near silence. Like with the coffee shop studying culture on campus, it seems like coffee shops in San Francisco are where developers go to work on their Macs. It felt like most libraries and I was very self conscious as I chewed on my cookie and tried to sip my tea as quietly as possible.
Lunch at Asana, where Alex works, was excellent and I enjoyed meeting his zany but fun tech colleagues. I was a little puzzled by the government sticker on the front door that warned of 'cancer causing chemicals' being present in the building but supposedly this is standard in most buildings in the mission. The top floor where their office is located has fantastic views of the city and on one side, it looks as if the Earth is folding up into the building a la Inception. I later realised this was a hill.
After wandering around Best Buy and trying out some of the Andrew Jones designed Pioneer speakers (which are excellent by the way), I took the BART back to Berkeley and napped a little before heading out to a party hosted by the East Bay Burners that Natalie invited us to.
The East Bay Burners is a group of Burning Man enthusiasts who fundraise, build displays and organise a trip to the hippie festival every year. This was one of their final parties before the actual event in a couple of weeks and we got to hang out in 'NIMBY', a warehouse space where they build the exhibits they take with them. The dress code was 'dress to impress' which I suspected would be the only chance I will get to dress formally in the next few months. Wearing a suede jacket, shirt and tie, I was put to shame by a trio of Natalie's friend's friends who were wearing full formal wear (including a three piece suit) lined with luminescent wire. We met some truly wacky characters there including one guy was wearing a black bin bag and was just completely crazy - words cannot describe him.
On Saturday I met up with TDA Sam, who is finishing off his undergraduate degree at Berkeley ahead of law school, which was great. That afternoon I met up with Alex to ride across the Golden Gate Bridge - which was manageable but hard work on my fixie (the Ti bike is still in pieces). In the evening, I went to meet a subset of my MEng class at a cool pool bar called 'Thalassa' in Downtown Berkeley. It was amusing to see some of the international students struggle with their beer.
I spent Sunday doing some final preparation ahead of the start of MEng bootcamp on Monday and visiting Alex's garden party in San Francisco. It's amusing how easy it is to find developers who work for well known technology companies - I met engineers at Twitter and Facebook there, and nearly everyone else worked in technology. That evening I went out with Ryan and his girlfriend, to a pizza restaurant called Jupiter. I was sceptical, having spent two weeks in Italy so recently but it was tasty, tasty pizza.
With that, my brief period of unemployment came to an end.
On Thursday I met up with some of my classmates from India who I had spoken with previously online. We had lunch at Subway - which I suppose I had to experience once, but will try not to visit again (not when there are so many independent awesome little restaurants and cafes around campus). Around campus are basically all of the foods I love to eat back home with my friends - including many Asian (Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese restaurants), several bubble tea cafes that all serve matcha and a Chinese bakery!
Studying here also seems to be primarily done either on the grass on campus (where I am sitting now) or in coffee shops with a laptop out and headphones in. This is very different to my undergraduate experience at Cambridge - although they had recently opened a coffee shop in college when I left. Perhaps this is due to the lack of electric kettles in most American households, students need to get their caffeine fix externally.
In general, the Berkeley campus, although being a well ranked university, in the top five globally and the best public university in the world, appears to lack much of the pretentiousness that Cambridge has. While I enjoyed dressing up in a suit and acting like high society at Fitz, I do admire the casual but super intelligent attitude that students here have. While buildings here aren't nearly as old as at Cambridge, they are remarkably impressive. The campus isn't huge but is quite dense - with notable buildings around every corner. (Most of these buildings seem to house coffee shops too. There are also two very large libraries that are connected by an underground tunnel. I've not found a reason to use these yet though.)
It's busy at the moment but I'm told it will get considerably busier in a couple of weeks as all the undergraduates return. Supposedly to the point where it becomes impossible to ride your bike through certain parts of campus (and this is a rule enforced by the police).
On Friday I hitched a ride with Ryan into San Francisco via Berkeley Bowl. Berkeley lacks many chain supermarkets like Walmart (although there is one about 30 minutes drive away). They do have this wonderful independent supermarket called Berkeley Bowl - which has two branches here. It's more expensive than most chain supermarkets but they stock an amazing variety of what Americans call 'produce' (what we know as fruit and vegetables). This section literally spans a good third of their floor space and could itself be as large as most 'supermarkets'. What's more amazing is how well stocked this is - with fruit piled up to chest height. Ryan informs me that these stock levels are basically maintained all the time - so it wasn't just a case of arriving after the fruit had been delivered.
Arriving to San Francisco, I hopped into a cafe to take our weekly CPCC call where I had some lovely oolong green tea which almost certainly pushed me into a hyperthyroid state (dangerous!). After this, I visited Mission Bikes - a bike shop I've often admired online. It was considerably smaller than I was expecting, but was full of many cool bicycle accessories which were mostly the result of Kickstarter campaigns (such as a Blink / Steady and RevoLights).
Having made plans to go for lunch with my friend Alex from both HABS and Cambridge at his office, I had some time to kill, so stumbled into another coffee shop with a bizarrely heavyset door. This was my first warning and the sarcastically passive aggressive but amusing signs ('You'll find that it is preferable to take your call outside') were another. I ordered a rooibos tea and a wonderful peanut butter cookie and sat down to read my Kindle in near silence. Like with the coffee shop studying culture on campus, it seems like coffee shops in San Francisco are where developers go to work on their Macs. It felt like most libraries and I was very self conscious as I chewed on my cookie and tried to sip my tea as quietly as possible.
Lunch at Asana, where Alex works, was excellent and I enjoyed meeting his zany but fun tech colleagues. I was a little puzzled by the government sticker on the front door that warned of 'cancer causing chemicals' being present in the building but supposedly this is standard in most buildings in the mission. The top floor where their office is located has fantastic views of the city and on one side, it looks as if the Earth is folding up into the building a la Inception. I later realised this was a hill.
After wandering around Best Buy and trying out some of the Andrew Jones designed Pioneer speakers (which are excellent by the way), I took the BART back to Berkeley and napped a little before heading out to a party hosted by the East Bay Burners that Natalie invited us to.
The East Bay Burners is a group of Burning Man enthusiasts who fundraise, build displays and organise a trip to the hippie festival every year. This was one of their final parties before the actual event in a couple of weeks and we got to hang out in 'NIMBY', a warehouse space where they build the exhibits they take with them. The dress code was 'dress to impress' which I suspected would be the only chance I will get to dress formally in the next few months. Wearing a suede jacket, shirt and tie, I was put to shame by a trio of Natalie's friend's friends who were wearing full formal wear (including a three piece suit) lined with luminescent wire. We met some truly wacky characters there including one guy was wearing a black bin bag and was just completely crazy - words cannot describe him.
On Saturday I met up with TDA Sam, who is finishing off his undergraduate degree at Berkeley ahead of law school, which was great. That afternoon I met up with Alex to ride across the Golden Gate Bridge - which was manageable but hard work on my fixie (the Ti bike is still in pieces). In the evening, I went to meet a subset of my MEng class at a cool pool bar called 'Thalassa' in Downtown Berkeley. It was amusing to see some of the international students struggle with their beer.
I spent Sunday doing some final preparation ahead of the start of MEng bootcamp on Monday and visiting Alex's garden party in San Francisco. It's amusing how easy it is to find developers who work for well known technology companies - I met engineers at Twitter and Facebook there, and nearly everyone else worked in technology. That evening I went out with Ryan and his girlfriend, to a pizza restaurant called Jupiter. I was sceptical, having spent two weeks in Italy so recently but it was tasty, tasty pizza.
With that, my brief period of unemployment came to an end.
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On Wednesday, while I still had the rental car, I tried to knock off as many things on my 'to-do' list as possible. The first task was to pick up a 'Markus' IKEA chair that I bought second hand from Craigslist for half the price it cost new. This is the same chair I have at home, although sadly in black instead of orange. Following this, I went to set up my bank account, pick up a student card and get myself a local sim card.
Setting up the bank account with Citi was, luckily, painless - I've heard stories of my peers being asked to keep a minimum monthly balance of $1,500 in their accounts which is absolutely absurd.
I also found it amazing that there is a whole office on campus whose sole purpose is just to administer student cards, but looking at the statistics on Wikipedia, I see that UC Berkeley has approximately double the number of students that Cambridge had (at 36,000). There are apparently larger universities around, my flatmate Natalie mentioned that the University of Florida has 50,000 odd students. That sort of scale is unbelievable.
Soon after, I had bought a local sim card on a MVNO called Ultra Mobile. This gave me a fantastic feeling of mobility. While OsmAnd+ is fantastic, Google Maps provides a much slicker navigation app and this really helped me out. The network in the Bay Area seems considerably quicker than back home too and pages load faster. (Ultra Mobile uses T-Mobile's network which supposedly has poor coverage in the area. I haven't found it a problem at all yet though.) Ultra Mobile also includes $20 worth of international calling credit each month which has proven very useful - I can call home at just 5c a minute.
Sadly I then had to return to IKEA for a third time to pick up curtains and a curtain rail. I later went back a fourth time to change the curtain rail for thinner rail that actually fit the hooks in my room. I also stopped at Trader Joes to pick up an inital lot of groceries (while I had the car) and Wholefoods to pick up cleaning materials and shampoo.
The groceries are sold in much larger packs here than in Europe. On average, at least at these two shops, they're more costly than at the places we usually shop at back home. You do, however, get larger quantities of everything, so perhaps it's not actually much more expensive. It's also probably not fair to compare these to normal supermarkets but more to, say, M&S and Waitrose. Food also lasts longer in my fridge. It's unclear whether this is because of the sheer size of the fridge or because of all the preservatives used in the food.
In the end, I was able to buy 32 ounces of shampoo for $6 (admittedly the most budget shampoo they sold) - this should be enough to last me until graduation... Another thing I learnt though was that when they sell shampoo as 'odour-free' here, it actually means it smells like cigarette ash when wet (but is hopefully odour-free when dry). I'll see how this affects my romantic prospects!
The groceries on the whole are quite exciting. Generally American supermarkets seem to be quite heavily filled with sweet and sugary food but they do also offer many of the products I love - which are considered niche back home. For instance, a good friend of mine introduced to an Eastern European drink called 'kefir', a fermented yoghurt drink. This is normally only found in Polish shops back home but is available in several supermarkets here. I also drink a considerable amount of almond milk - primarily for the taste. This has only just been introduced back home but is available in multiple brands and flavours here. Finally, the cottage cheese is as good as the cottage cheese you can buy in Switzerland which, up until now, was the best I'd tried. (Oh, there's also SO MUCH tofu available.)
After the fourth trip to IKEA, I returned the car to Hertz, carrying my fixie in the back. I had to fill the car up with fuel (or 'gas') before returning it. This was a hilarious exercise involving two trips to the cashier since, by this point, Halifax had blocked my credit card. Apparently buying furniture in America is considerably more suspicious than buying pizza in Italy, as I had done just a few weeks ago.
It was unclear whether, when asking for $20 of gas, I'd get any money back if the final amount came to less than $20. The cashier was terribly confused too and so I decided to pay for fuel in $10 chunks so as to minimise any potential downside. When, after the first $10, the gas tank still wasn't showing full, I went back again with another $10 and thankfully managed to fill the tank and get a refund for the $1.88 that was unused. Thus continued the slow journey towards naturalisation.
I cycled back to the flat without a problem, struggling up the final hill. The campus is built on a hill and this makes it nearly all downhill in the morning and almost entirely uphill on the return journey. It's particularly hard work on my fixie with an 18 tooth cog which is perfectly suited for flat roads but less so for steep hills! It requires basically spinning at 100% effort just to keep moving else there's a risk of falling off or veering into a parked car (as I've done once already). By the time I reach home my shirt is usually soaked with sweat. I'm hoping this will get easier with time.
I met my second flatmate that evening, Natalie, who recently finished a spell working for the Peace Corps in Panama. I plugged my Cowon into Ryan's set of Logitech speakers and spent the rest of the evening unpacking and using the replacement screwdriver I picked up to finish off the bed.
Continued.
Setting up the bank account with Citi was, luckily, painless - I've heard stories of my peers being asked to keep a minimum monthly balance of $1,500 in their accounts which is absolutely absurd.
I also found it amazing that there is a whole office on campus whose sole purpose is just to administer student cards, but looking at the statistics on Wikipedia, I see that UC Berkeley has approximately double the number of students that Cambridge had (at 36,000). There are apparently larger universities around, my flatmate Natalie mentioned that the University of Florida has 50,000 odd students. That sort of scale is unbelievable.
Soon after, I had bought a local sim card on a MVNO called Ultra Mobile. This gave me a fantastic feeling of mobility. While OsmAnd+ is fantastic, Google Maps provides a much slicker navigation app and this really helped me out. The network in the Bay Area seems considerably quicker than back home too and pages load faster. (Ultra Mobile uses T-Mobile's network which supposedly has poor coverage in the area. I haven't found it a problem at all yet though.) Ultra Mobile also includes $20 worth of international calling credit each month which has proven very useful - I can call home at just 5c a minute.
Sadly I then had to return to IKEA for a third time to pick up curtains and a curtain rail. I later went back a fourth time to change the curtain rail for thinner rail that actually fit the hooks in my room. I also stopped at Trader Joes to pick up an inital lot of groceries (while I had the car) and Wholefoods to pick up cleaning materials and shampoo.
The groceries are sold in much larger packs here than in Europe. On average, at least at these two shops, they're more costly than at the places we usually shop at back home. You do, however, get larger quantities of everything, so perhaps it's not actually much more expensive. It's also probably not fair to compare these to normal supermarkets but more to, say, M&S and Waitrose. Food also lasts longer in my fridge. It's unclear whether this is because of the sheer size of the fridge or because of all the preservatives used in the food.
In the end, I was able to buy 32 ounces of shampoo for $6 (admittedly the most budget shampoo they sold) - this should be enough to last me until graduation... Another thing I learnt though was that when they sell shampoo as 'odour-free' here, it actually means it smells like cigarette ash when wet (but is hopefully odour-free when dry). I'll see how this affects my romantic prospects!
The groceries on the whole are quite exciting. Generally American supermarkets seem to be quite heavily filled with sweet and sugary food but they do also offer many of the products I love - which are considered niche back home. For instance, a good friend of mine introduced to an Eastern European drink called 'kefir', a fermented yoghurt drink. This is normally only found in Polish shops back home but is available in several supermarkets here. I also drink a considerable amount of almond milk - primarily for the taste. This has only just been introduced back home but is available in multiple brands and flavours here. Finally, the cottage cheese is as good as the cottage cheese you can buy in Switzerland which, up until now, was the best I'd tried. (Oh, there's also SO MUCH tofu available.)
After the fourth trip to IKEA, I returned the car to Hertz, carrying my fixie in the back. I had to fill the car up with fuel (or 'gas') before returning it. This was a hilarious exercise involving two trips to the cashier since, by this point, Halifax had blocked my credit card. Apparently buying furniture in America is considerably more suspicious than buying pizza in Italy, as I had done just a few weeks ago.
It was unclear whether, when asking for $20 of gas, I'd get any money back if the final amount came to less than $20. The cashier was terribly confused too and so I decided to pay for fuel in $10 chunks so as to minimise any potential downside. When, after the first $10, the gas tank still wasn't showing full, I went back again with another $10 and thankfully managed to fill the tank and get a refund for the $1.88 that was unused. Thus continued the slow journey towards naturalisation.
I cycled back to the flat without a problem, struggling up the final hill. The campus is built on a hill and this makes it nearly all downhill in the morning and almost entirely uphill on the return journey. It's particularly hard work on my fixie with an 18 tooth cog which is perfectly suited for flat roads but less so for steep hills! It requires basically spinning at 100% effort just to keep moving else there's a risk of falling off or veering into a parked car (as I've done once already). By the time I reach home my shirt is usually soaked with sweat. I'm hoping this will get easier with time.
I met my second flatmate that evening, Natalie, who recently finished a spell working for the Peace Corps in Panama. I plugged my Cowon into Ryan's set of Logitech speakers and spent the rest of the evening unpacking and using the replacement screwdriver I picked up to finish off the bed.
Continued.
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The minivan I'd rented was a fully automatic Dodge Caravan, which, even with all of my 'stuff' in it, still had space for five adults to sit comfortably. It was huge. Equipped with handwritten directions from the Hertz check-in lady, who was either called 'Trainee' or was new to the job, and my phone running OsmAnd+, I rolled out into San Francisco amidst their Tuesday evening rush hour.
This wasn't too bad, thankfully and I crossed Bay Bridge relatively quickly, with only the occasional nervous moment as I used the dominating size of the Dodge to effortlessly change lanes. As I neared Berkeley, I saw IKEA and, with some vague notion of efficiency in my mind, took the ramp off the highway and spent a third of an hour trying to find the entrance. Eventually I made it to the parking lot and was about to go in but realised I should probably check the dimensions of my room before buying furniture. With that in mind, I navigated towards Panoramic Way.
Thankfully it was just a short drive (a drive I'd do several more times) and I quickly found Panoramic Way, my home for the next 10 months. Despite 'walking' down the street using StreetView and reading the surprisingly extensive Wikipedia page about Panoramic Way, I was still shocked by how narrow and windy it was. It was nothing like any other street I've ever driven down in North America. This turned out to be a pain to navigate, particularly with my large minivan. After finding a steep but wide part of the street to turn around in, I eventually located our flat at 7:30pm.
There had been some confusion in the email exchange between Ryan, the current leaseholder and primary 'flatmate', and I. I had thought he was leaving a spare key for me at the flat and he thought I was collecting it from his office in San Francisco. After discovering that the flat was empty, I called him up and, working hard at his new job, he wouldn't be back to Berkeley until past 9pm. I thus decided to go back to IKEA.
This time, after parking, I actually went into the store and proceeded to buy a full-size (or double) bed (having arranged a desk and chair on Craigslist). This was a complete headache, particularly in my tired state of mind, and I eventually settled on a combination that was one above the cheapest but looked relatively easy to assemble and came with a reasonably firm mattress. To my dismay, the bed itself was preassembled and was far too large to fit into even this minivan. Not wanting to trek back through the store, I used the help computers to try and figure out what alternatives I had and eventually settled on a double bed with slats that required more assembly but would fit inside the car. This was a good workout for my lacking upper body - the mattress alone weighed more than 25 kilograms.
On my way back I stopped off at one of the Craiglist vendor's house to pick up an IKEA desk which he was selling for $70. I can't work out if this was a good deal or not since they no longer sell this desk but it seems to do the job, if being a little wobbly (as IKEA desks eventually become). In my sleep deprived state, I managed to park in a red zone, where the curb is painted red and where it is illegal to park. This would probably have been OK if two fire engines hadn't then tried to navigate the corner and I was politely warned by one of them that I was parked in a red zone. I quickly moved the Dodge.
Returning to Panoramic Way at 10pm, Ryan had been held up at work and was still on his way back so I decided to start unloading my car. This was exhausting - particularly because our flat is at the top of an extended flight of stairs. I managed this eventually though and when Ryan arrived a short while later, he helped me take everything into the flat.
I was pleasantly surprised with the size of the flat. Expecting something smaller and more akin to the narrow English flats, it was a small relief to see wider staircases and a corridor wide enough to fit a couch. The kitchen and living room are also more than adequate and my room, although small, has enough space for me, my computer, dhol, clothes and a bike. (And a bed and desk of course.)
The furniture mostly worked out OK - although the bed was about 2 inches too large to slot nicely into the narrower portion of the room, so I had to put it against one of the two longer walls. Building the bed was a pain and I felt guilty at the amount of noise (and subsequent cursing) I produced in the process. I also managed to strip the screwdriver that Ryan had kindly lent me, which made it increasingly tough to screw everything in tightly enough (and I have a nice blister on my palm as a result). Eventually it would go no further and I left a couple of diagonal slats out, put my mattress down and nodded off to sleep after a 27 hour waking day.
Continued.
This wasn't too bad, thankfully and I crossed Bay Bridge relatively quickly, with only the occasional nervous moment as I used the dominating size of the Dodge to effortlessly change lanes. As I neared Berkeley, I saw IKEA and, with some vague notion of efficiency in my mind, took the ramp off the highway and spent a third of an hour trying to find the entrance. Eventually I made it to the parking lot and was about to go in but realised I should probably check the dimensions of my room before buying furniture. With that in mind, I navigated towards Panoramic Way.
Thankfully it was just a short drive (a drive I'd do several more times) and I quickly found Panoramic Way, my home for the next 10 months. Despite 'walking' down the street using StreetView and reading the surprisingly extensive Wikipedia page about Panoramic Way, I was still shocked by how narrow and windy it was. It was nothing like any other street I've ever driven down in North America. This turned out to be a pain to navigate, particularly with my large minivan. After finding a steep but wide part of the street to turn around in, I eventually located our flat at 7:30pm.
There had been some confusion in the email exchange between Ryan, the current leaseholder and primary 'flatmate', and I. I had thought he was leaving a spare key for me at the flat and he thought I was collecting it from his office in San Francisco. After discovering that the flat was empty, I called him up and, working hard at his new job, he wouldn't be back to Berkeley until past 9pm. I thus decided to go back to IKEA.
This time, after parking, I actually went into the store and proceeded to buy a full-size (or double) bed (having arranged a desk and chair on Craigslist). This was a complete headache, particularly in my tired state of mind, and I eventually settled on a combination that was one above the cheapest but looked relatively easy to assemble and came with a reasonably firm mattress. To my dismay, the bed itself was preassembled and was far too large to fit into even this minivan. Not wanting to trek back through the store, I used the help computers to try and figure out what alternatives I had and eventually settled on a double bed with slats that required more assembly but would fit inside the car. This was a good workout for my lacking upper body - the mattress alone weighed more than 25 kilograms.
On my way back I stopped off at one of the Craiglist vendor's house to pick up an IKEA desk which he was selling for $70. I can't work out if this was a good deal or not since they no longer sell this desk but it seems to do the job, if being a little wobbly (as IKEA desks eventually become). In my sleep deprived state, I managed to park in a red zone, where the curb is painted red and where it is illegal to park. This would probably have been OK if two fire engines hadn't then tried to navigate the corner and I was politely warned by one of them that I was parked in a red zone. I quickly moved the Dodge.
Returning to Panoramic Way at 10pm, Ryan had been held up at work and was still on his way back so I decided to start unloading my car. This was exhausting - particularly because our flat is at the top of an extended flight of stairs. I managed this eventually though and when Ryan arrived a short while later, he helped me take everything into the flat.
I was pleasantly surprised with the size of the flat. Expecting something smaller and more akin to the narrow English flats, it was a small relief to see wider staircases and a corridor wide enough to fit a couch. The kitchen and living room are also more than adequate and my room, although small, has enough space for me, my computer, dhol, clothes and a bike. (And a bed and desk of course.)
The furniture mostly worked out OK - although the bed was about 2 inches too large to slot nicely into the narrower portion of the room, so I had to put it against one of the two longer walls. Building the bed was a pain and I felt guilty at the amount of noise (and subsequent cursing) I produced in the process. I also managed to strip the screwdriver that Ryan had kindly lent me, which made it increasingly tough to screw everything in tightly enough (and I have a nice blister on my palm as a result). Eventually it would go no further and I left a couple of diagonal slats out, put my mattress down and nodded off to sleep after a 27 hour waking day.
Continued.
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It's been almost exactly two weeks since I landed at San Francisco International airport and I feel an update is long overdue! The main excuse for not getting this up sooner is that I've only just received my laptop and the thought alone of writing all of this up on my mobile (or mobul/cell) phone was enough to dissuade me from doing so. (Despite ordering the laptop over two weeks ago, it was held up by my credit card getting blocked, but more about that later.)
My departure from London was uneventful, albeit a little hurried - but when is it not? Luckily I'd had several months to prepare for my departure but there were still many things that I struggled or failed to finish in time. As Monday evening drew close, I'd had several days without much sleep (and with plentiful alcohol consumption) so my pace of 'getting things done' was slower than normal. One of the tasks I failed to complete was building the USS Enterprise, possibly one of the most thoughtful gifts I've been given in my life, so I feel especially guilty. That's a goal to complete as soon as I land back in England next year.
Packing all of my possessions down was surprisingly manageable. As I've previously mentioned, the last few months have been an endless process of selling or otherwise disposing of extraneous possessions. Packing was aided by the fact the conniving woman at the music shop in Ilford sold me a dhol case that was clearly too big (despite her assurances to the otherwise). This worked to my advantage - I was able to pack all 27 of my colourful t-shirts and socks around the perimeter of the my dhol and still had space for all my trousers and underwear! There was a small amount of rebalancing required when packing all the textbooks in one bag resulted in it weighing near to 30 kilograms. I took one of these in my hand luggage (which later resulted in a Heathrow security worker exclaiming their surprise at the thickness of the book I was carrying onto the flight) and moved the rest to another bag.
In total I had 5 items of checked luggage, including 2 bicycles (my fixie and the Ti bike), my dhol and two bags which were primarily full of alcohol, food and clothes. These weren't such a problem at Heathrow since I had my dear cousin to help me wheel the trolleys to the checkin desk and the Virgin Atlantic staff were very helpful (even more so when an Indian check-in worker recognised it as a dhol).
The flight itself was uneventful. I had somehow managed to get the last possible seat on the plane - 66G. I don't know how this happened. It seemed like a curse to start with, but wasn't actually so bad since I was sitting near an open space near the rearmost emergency exit which let me get up and stretch frequently without a problem. The only caveat was that it was major waiting area for fellow passengers queueing for the toilets and, when trying to nap, they'd periodically open the blinds to look out and not shut them. Inconsiderate fellow humans.
My neighbour for the flight was a young girl (perhaps around 10 years old) who was travelling with her mother and her younger still sister. She was a relatively pleasant neighbour although, despite her miniature stature, she did have a surprising tendancy to stick her elbows out on the arm rests. Give her short height, this put her elbows at roughly the level of my ribs which tickled initially and then hurt later. Trying to play the mature adult, I didn't let this bother me and this patience paid off when she let me have her uneaten sandwich at tea time (I'm in student-poverty now, so it's acceptable to take food from children).
On the approach into San Francisco I had a lovely conversation with a tall Virgin Atlantic air hostess who was dressed in a rather fetching red suit and strapped into the jump seat filling the space adjacent to the emergency exit. It seems that, like anything, their trips abroad become less exotic the more times they travel, and their primary ambition for their free time in other countries now is to find a cheap wine bar to spend a day in.
The real adventure started when reclaiming all of my luggage. Luckily they have porters at the airport who helped me take my luggage onto the airport 'AirTrain'. (This included a luggage screening where the sceptical customs agent queried the sheer amount of luggage I have. Another customs agent was very excited by the fact I was starting at Cal and another, Indian, agent showed muted respect for the fact I was carrying a dhol.) Sadly, the porter was unable to come further and I had to push my two carts (or trolleys) along in this amusing shuffle. This would have worked a lot better if my fixie, in a soft bike bag, was able to stack nicely, and if my dhol case didn't keep slipping off the same trolley. There was a moment of panic when the fixie fell off as I was getting off the train and I had to block the doors briefly while I tried to move everything off the train. After a brief wait, I had to do the same again when picking up my rental car in parking space 199 in a huge parking garage. A suited American man with a look of mild irritation made the wrong decision and decided to share the lift with me. As I faffed about trying to get my trolleys into a now full lift, he asked me if I could have more 'stuff'. I told him that I didn't, really. Having abandoned a trolley in my attempt to fit in the lift, I then had to shuffle back and forth with one trolley, a bagged bike and the dhol case (which, thankfully, has wheels).
Eventually I made it to the car, feeling extremely exhausted, and promptly devoured some of the strongly smelling Indian flatbread my mother had packed. My eyes were bloodshot and I was really thirsty - but it didn't matter, the hardest part was (hopefully) over. My possessions were in a safe place and I had a nice comfy seat to sit in.
Continued.
My departure from London was uneventful, albeit a little hurried - but when is it not? Luckily I'd had several months to prepare for my departure but there were still many things that I struggled or failed to finish in time. As Monday evening drew close, I'd had several days without much sleep (and with plentiful alcohol consumption) so my pace of 'getting things done' was slower than normal. One of the tasks I failed to complete was building the USS Enterprise, possibly one of the most thoughtful gifts I've been given in my life, so I feel especially guilty. That's a goal to complete as soon as I land back in England next year.
Packing all of my possessions down was surprisingly manageable. As I've previously mentioned, the last few months have been an endless process of selling or otherwise disposing of extraneous possessions. Packing was aided by the fact the conniving woman at the music shop in Ilford sold me a dhol case that was clearly too big (despite her assurances to the otherwise). This worked to my advantage - I was able to pack all 27 of my colourful t-shirts and socks around the perimeter of the my dhol and still had space for all my trousers and underwear! There was a small amount of rebalancing required when packing all the textbooks in one bag resulted in it weighing near to 30 kilograms. I took one of these in my hand luggage (which later resulted in a Heathrow security worker exclaiming their surprise at the thickness of the book I was carrying onto the flight) and moved the rest to another bag.
In total I had 5 items of checked luggage, including 2 bicycles (my fixie and the Ti bike), my dhol and two bags which were primarily full of alcohol, food and clothes. These weren't such a problem at Heathrow since I had my dear cousin to help me wheel the trolleys to the checkin desk and the Virgin Atlantic staff were very helpful (even more so when an Indian check-in worker recognised it as a dhol).
The flight itself was uneventful. I had somehow managed to get the last possible seat on the plane - 66G. I don't know how this happened. It seemed like a curse to start with, but wasn't actually so bad since I was sitting near an open space near the rearmost emergency exit which let me get up and stretch frequently without a problem. The only caveat was that it was major waiting area for fellow passengers queueing for the toilets and, when trying to nap, they'd periodically open the blinds to look out and not shut them. Inconsiderate fellow humans.
My neighbour for the flight was a young girl (perhaps around 10 years old) who was travelling with her mother and her younger still sister. She was a relatively pleasant neighbour although, despite her miniature stature, she did have a surprising tendancy to stick her elbows out on the arm rests. Give her short height, this put her elbows at roughly the level of my ribs which tickled initially and then hurt later. Trying to play the mature adult, I didn't let this bother me and this patience paid off when she let me have her uneaten sandwich at tea time (I'm in student-poverty now, so it's acceptable to take food from children).
On the approach into San Francisco I had a lovely conversation with a tall Virgin Atlantic air hostess who was dressed in a rather fetching red suit and strapped into the jump seat filling the space adjacent to the emergency exit. It seems that, like anything, their trips abroad become less exotic the more times they travel, and their primary ambition for their free time in other countries now is to find a cheap wine bar to spend a day in.
The real adventure started when reclaiming all of my luggage. Luckily they have porters at the airport who helped me take my luggage onto the airport 'AirTrain'. (This included a luggage screening where the sceptical customs agent queried the sheer amount of luggage I have. Another customs agent was very excited by the fact I was starting at Cal and another, Indian, agent showed muted respect for the fact I was carrying a dhol.) Sadly, the porter was unable to come further and I had to push my two carts (or trolleys) along in this amusing shuffle. This would have worked a lot better if my fixie, in a soft bike bag, was able to stack nicely, and if my dhol case didn't keep slipping off the same trolley. There was a moment of panic when the fixie fell off as I was getting off the train and I had to block the doors briefly while I tried to move everything off the train. After a brief wait, I had to do the same again when picking up my rental car in parking space 199 in a huge parking garage. A suited American man with a look of mild irritation made the wrong decision and decided to share the lift with me. As I faffed about trying to get my trolleys into a now full lift, he asked me if I could have more 'stuff'. I told him that I didn't, really. Having abandoned a trolley in my attempt to fit in the lift, I then had to shuffle back and forth with one trolley, a bagged bike and the dhol case (which, thankfully, has wheels).
Eventually I made it to the car, feeling extremely exhausted, and promptly devoured some of the strongly smelling Indian flatbread my mother had packed. My eyes were bloodshot and I was really thirsty - but it didn't matter, the hardest part was (hopefully) over. My possessions were in a safe place and I had a nice comfy seat to sit in.
Continued.
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This is going to be a quick final post for the Paris to Brindisi ride. We're now coming to the end of our short stay in Brindisi, a pleasant and moderately prosperous coastal town. We're staying in a very esoteric bed and breakfast where we have a oddly shaped ground floor apartment to ourselves where the shower is by one of the doors onto the street (separate to the rest of the bathroom). The street itself is a typical small Italian street where an elderly woman has been shouting at (presumably in some sort of conversation) passer-bys constantly from her balcony. There's a bakery at one end of the street which fills the narrow passage with the smell of warm bread and yeast for most of the morning. At the other end is a shop selling just fruit and vegetables and next to it, a supermarket.
For our first dinner we made full use of our apartment to cook pasta with white sauce and to indulge my watermelon lust. We bought a local pasta that was very dense (almost tasting undercooked) and caused me a moderate amount of stomach pain the next day!
Since Bologna, we've been seeing small Piaggio trucks parked on intersections with piles of watermelons being sold. Lacking culinary facilities and a way to store and carry an entire watermelon, we abstained. Here, however, it becomes much more feasible - and for a whole €1.60, we bought 5 kilograms worth of delicious watermelon. There was no knife in our apartment though, so we had to butcher the watermelon with a spatula. This worked surprisingly well, no doubt due to the sheet metal like thickness (or lack of) of the spatula.
The ride into Bari from Pescara was surprisingly quick thanks to a wondrous tailwind which pushed our average speed up to 17.7 mph, over 5.52.12 hours and 96.01 miles. We made fantastic time into Foggia which allowed us time to stop at a gelateria /caffe for an espresso (Phil) and hot chocolate (me). It was a bit of a gruelling ride after that and our accommodation in Bari (at the B&B La Finestra Sul Centro) was depressingly unlike the advertised room. The en-suite was actually just guaranteed sole use of a bathroom and many of the promised furnishings were not present. Still, they had air conditioning and wifi so things were ok! They also didn't take payment by card as they had advertised...
In Bari itself we spent some time looking for a barber to get rid of my wonderful beard (and to see if people still thought I was Greek after that, they were amusingly confused by my ethnicity - having been asked three times that day). After some fun we found a place that said they did it but operated a bizarre queueing system where, despite waiting for longer, I was served after 2 other customers. Still, eventually I was served and although there was a moment of concern as the barber apparently tried to stop my face from bleeding, it was a smooth shave and I came out €5 poorer and looking ten years younger. In this time Phil managed to get his hair cut at one of the hair dressers (but not a barber) that we had come across in our search for a barber.
After this, we wandered into the Bari old town which was a delightful assortment of tiny streets, ancient buildings interspersed with many bars and restaurants. Motorcycles and scooters rocketed up the narrow streets with such speed that I can only imagine the honed reflexes their riders must have. We stopped at a bar in one of the streets that also happened to be a lottery outlet, selling a wide variety of scratchcards. It was doing good business. After this we went to the sea front and saw locals (although probably just tourists like us) patronising a stall selling what appeared to be fried cheese. Curious, Phil and I bought a bag for 2 Euros. The rectangular slabs were doused in salt and were initially palatable but we quickly felt ill after a handful. We threw half of the bag away in the end and marvelled at how this was even an economically feasible business.
Feeling quite hungry, we managed to get swept into a pizzeria with terrible service that lined one of the tiny side streets. Several times our waiter was almost bowled over by a buzzing scooter coming down the street at pace. Spotting several groups of teenagers walking towards the sea with gelato, our after dinner mission was made clear. The piazza they were coming from was absolutely humming with activity making a pleasant contrast to the apparently deserted town we had ridden into.
The final ride into Brindisi was equally rapid and we managed the 73.41 miles in 4.24.21 hours, an average of 16.6 mph. There was some confusion finding our route out of Bari at first and we accidentally rode illegally down a highway for a couple of miles. We soon realised that actually it was taking us down a parallel single lane road that was much less trafficked and where bicycles were legally permitted!
This single lane road became parts of the old Roman Road after a while, which was beautiful and somewhat technically challenging to cycling down. Most of it has been re paved but as is typical of Italian roads, it was heavily potholed. The road took us amongst some pleasant lime groves and then further amongst some other (unknown) fruit farms. Occasionally our route took us along the coast and I found a wondrously stark piece of rocky beach which was devoid of sunbathing Italians.
We soon arrived to Brindisi, alarmed a little at the sheer number of used pregnancy tests that lined the base of the Brindisi town sign. We've been taking it pretty easy here, it's a small enough town centre to walk around in a day. We spent most of half a day looking for packing materials (eventually settling on bits of cardboard), cleaning and then packing our bikes. Our B&B owner was a little concerned at the size of the bikes when packaged, since he was providing us with transport to the airport. I half suspected he would turn up in a Fiat Panda or a similar tiny hatchback. Thankfully he had some sort of MPV which fit our bikes horizontally.
For our last meal in Brindisi, we visited a busy restaurant on the waterfront where I had my LAST Italian pizza which, thankfully, was as excellent as always. (I'm not looking forward to the relatively doughy American pizzas.) After dinner, I tried grappa, a brandy like spirit which is served in all the restaurants here. Phil had warned me that it was foul stuff but I didn't think it could be that bad. It was as terrible as he had suggested and I could not finish it. Lesson learned.
This morning we had an uneventful check in at the Brindisi airport although they did come find us twice after we had passed security - once to rescan our pannier bags which we were carrying onto the plan and again to ask us to deflate our tyres. Extensive online discussion suggests that this isn't strictly necessary but most airport staff wrongly seem to think it has to be done.
On the Ryanair flight back to London, that truly concludes this tour. I'll post one further writeup of the tools we used to plan the trip since this took some trial and error. It's been great fun and passing through fairly small places, we were able to truly experience both Italy and France - and not just the most heavily trafficked tourist cities. France was somewhat awkward (albeit with excellent pastries) and Italy has been superb. I think it is now my all-round favourite country in Europe.
I'm also relieved that my bike and body were able to cope, three years and three surgeries on from the Tour D'Afrique. The next challenge, now that I can hold my right arm above my head and therefore can actually swim again, is to attempt a triathlon.
For our first dinner we made full use of our apartment to cook pasta with white sauce and to indulge my watermelon lust. We bought a local pasta that was very dense (almost tasting undercooked) and caused me a moderate amount of stomach pain the next day!
Since Bologna, we've been seeing small Piaggio trucks parked on intersections with piles of watermelons being sold. Lacking culinary facilities and a way to store and carry an entire watermelon, we abstained. Here, however, it becomes much more feasible - and for a whole €1.60, we bought 5 kilograms worth of delicious watermelon. There was no knife in our apartment though, so we had to butcher the watermelon with a spatula. This worked surprisingly well, no doubt due to the sheet metal like thickness (or lack of) of the spatula.
The ride into Bari from Pescara was surprisingly quick thanks to a wondrous tailwind which pushed our average speed up to 17.7 mph, over 5.52.12 hours and 96.01 miles. We made fantastic time into Foggia which allowed us time to stop at a gelateria /caffe for an espresso (Phil) and hot chocolate (me). It was a bit of a gruelling ride after that and our accommodation in Bari (at the B&B La Finestra Sul Centro) was depressingly unlike the advertised room. The en-suite was actually just guaranteed sole use of a bathroom and many of the promised furnishings were not present. Still, they had air conditioning and wifi so things were ok! They also didn't take payment by card as they had advertised...
In Bari itself we spent some time looking for a barber to get rid of my wonderful beard (and to see if people still thought I was Greek after that, they were amusingly confused by my ethnicity - having been asked three times that day). After some fun we found a place that said they did it but operated a bizarre queueing system where, despite waiting for longer, I was served after 2 other customers. Still, eventually I was served and although there was a moment of concern as the barber apparently tried to stop my face from bleeding, it was a smooth shave and I came out €5 poorer and looking ten years younger. In this time Phil managed to get his hair cut at one of the hair dressers (but not a barber) that we had come across in our search for a barber.
After this, we wandered into the Bari old town which was a delightful assortment of tiny streets, ancient buildings interspersed with many bars and restaurants. Motorcycles and scooters rocketed up the narrow streets with such speed that I can only imagine the honed reflexes their riders must have. We stopped at a bar in one of the streets that also happened to be a lottery outlet, selling a wide variety of scratchcards. It was doing good business. After this we went to the sea front and saw locals (although probably just tourists like us) patronising a stall selling what appeared to be fried cheese. Curious, Phil and I bought a bag for 2 Euros. The rectangular slabs were doused in salt and were initially palatable but we quickly felt ill after a handful. We threw half of the bag away in the end and marvelled at how this was even an economically feasible business.
Feeling quite hungry, we managed to get swept into a pizzeria with terrible service that lined one of the tiny side streets. Several times our waiter was almost bowled over by a buzzing scooter coming down the street at pace. Spotting several groups of teenagers walking towards the sea with gelato, our after dinner mission was made clear. The piazza they were coming from was absolutely humming with activity making a pleasant contrast to the apparently deserted town we had ridden into.
The final ride into Brindisi was equally rapid and we managed the 73.41 miles in 4.24.21 hours, an average of 16.6 mph. There was some confusion finding our route out of Bari at first and we accidentally rode illegally down a highway for a couple of miles. We soon realised that actually it was taking us down a parallel single lane road that was much less trafficked and where bicycles were legally permitted!
This single lane road became parts of the old Roman Road after a while, which was beautiful and somewhat technically challenging to cycling down. Most of it has been re paved but as is typical of Italian roads, it was heavily potholed. The road took us amongst some pleasant lime groves and then further amongst some other (unknown) fruit farms. Occasionally our route took us along the coast and I found a wondrously stark piece of rocky beach which was devoid of sunbathing Italians.
We soon arrived to Brindisi, alarmed a little at the sheer number of used pregnancy tests that lined the base of the Brindisi town sign. We've been taking it pretty easy here, it's a small enough town centre to walk around in a day. We spent most of half a day looking for packing materials (eventually settling on bits of cardboard), cleaning and then packing our bikes. Our B&B owner was a little concerned at the size of the bikes when packaged, since he was providing us with transport to the airport. I half suspected he would turn up in a Fiat Panda or a similar tiny hatchback. Thankfully he had some sort of MPV which fit our bikes horizontally.
For our last meal in Brindisi, we visited a busy restaurant on the waterfront where I had my LAST Italian pizza which, thankfully, was as excellent as always. (I'm not looking forward to the relatively doughy American pizzas.) After dinner, I tried grappa, a brandy like spirit which is served in all the restaurants here. Phil had warned me that it was foul stuff but I didn't think it could be that bad. It was as terrible as he had suggested and I could not finish it. Lesson learned.
This morning we had an uneventful check in at the Brindisi airport although they did come find us twice after we had passed security - once to rescan our pannier bags which we were carrying onto the plan and again to ask us to deflate our tyres. Extensive online discussion suggests that this isn't strictly necessary but most airport staff wrongly seem to think it has to be done.
On the Ryanair flight back to London, that truly concludes this tour. I'll post one further writeup of the tools we used to plan the trip since this took some trial and error. It's been great fun and passing through fairly small places, we were able to truly experience both Italy and France - and not just the most heavily trafficked tourist cities. France was somewhat awkward (albeit with excellent pastries) and Italy has been superb. I think it is now my all-round favourite country in Europe.
I'm also relieved that my bike and body were able to cope, three years and three surgeries on from the Tour D'Afrique. The next challenge, now that I can hold my right arm above my head and therefore can actually swim again, is to attempt a triathlon.
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We're in San Severo tonight, a town that can be considered proper south Italy. Things are very different here, people are on average older and fatter and speak with a harder to understand accent. They also use another greeting instead of the 'ciao' to which we've been accustomed. No doubt we must look strange to them - we've received many curious stares as we walked around town, and it doesn't help that the entrance to accommodation is right in front of some city wide snooker tournament. This evening, before and (particularly) after, we noticed many families just sitting in the street outside the entrance to their homes, just talking. Given the high temperature of 38°, it's not unimaginable that it was probably too warm indoors. It is striking however that this pastime was pervasive over the entire city.
Today's ride was a 95.50 mile long and hot ride over several rolling hills Very, taking 5.57.41 hours (an average of 16.0mph). It was mainly down the SS16 again and aside from a particularly terrifying incident (where a barking dog managed to leap free of his enclosure and actually chased us down the road) was pretty uneventful. The scenery in the hills south of Pescara was as pretty as Wikitravel suggested and the road became much quieter, at least until we hit Vasto. After Vasto, it picked up considerably - perhaps explaining the prevalence of scantily clad prostitutes lining that part of the highway.
I thought I'd share some of my strategies for getting through days like today. Often long days on the bike can be fun, when through scenic landscapes or over technically interesting terrain. However, others can be mentally harder, particularly when you're not feeling up to it or there is little to keep you interested in the ride. Today was one of those days. It was essentially nearly a hundred miles down a busy highway in the scorching heat. This is the third riding day in a row so our legs are starting to feel it too.
1) When the going gets tough, don't stop going.
Stopping while you are heading up a hill or into a headwind is a terrible idea. Don't do it. It's not actually that much harder to get started but the psychological toll of trying to push forwards from a standing start is enough to actually make the ride seem much harder than it actually is.
2) Take lunch at 50% effort, not 50% distance.
Each mile is harder than the last. As you reach the end of the day it takes more effort to keep going. Taking lunch at the halfway point by distance means that you'll actually have a longer second half of the day, particularly when you're starting to feel sleepy as your body digests your food and the temperature heats up. If you go halfway by effort (anywhere between 50% of the distance to 80%, depending on the terrain), then the second half will be much less arduous.
3) Stop as little as possible.
This is similar to 1). The more breaks you take, the more mentally significant each period of riding becomes. If you're feeling rough then this can add to your general perception of riding 'slowly' and cause you to actually ride slower than you could. Plus, stopping allows lactic acid to make its way into your legs... (or so I've been told) and getting going again is harder each time.
4) Give yourself continual and realistic goals.
Everyone needs something to aim for and trying to do the whole day in one go is admirable but difficult. I normally like knocking down the distance in 5 or 10 kilometre or mile increments, depending on how fast I'm going. If you're feeling mathematical, you can knock down percentages at a time too. This gives me something to aim for and a small dopamine boost everything we knock down a milestone.
5) Continually assess your progress.
This goes hand in hand with 4). Perhaps it's a little obsessive but my analytical mind loves to keep track of where we are, what's coming next and how much effort will be required for the rest of the day. It means you'll hopefully have no surprises later on and you'll know how to pace yourself.
6) Think positive, or rather - don't think negative.
Everyone has bad days. It's important to reasonably ignore these feelings (with an ear to any 'warnings' from your body, of course). Bad vibes can be infectious and affect your psyche for the day and possibly even the next. I normally try never to consider anything as bad. It's part of the survivor mentality - if you treat any hardship as part of the adventure, it makes it easier to react rationally to it and it will therefore pass more easily. I also often ignore or live with niggling issues in the spirit of getting on with the journey (e.g. Insect bites, weary legs, the odd bicycle creak). Obviously deal with these when you can but trying not to let them wear you down mentally helps keep you going.
7) Distract yourself.
I always thought that a long cycle ride like the TDA would have been the ideal place to come up with a killer business idea but sadly I was so concerned with the ride itself that it wasn't really possible. Concentrating on not getting flattened by east African lorries is a full time job in itself! It can be useful however to have music to help time pass quicker and today I made full use of the music stored on my phone to distract me from the constant sweaty grind toward the south.
Today's ride was a 95.50 mile long and hot ride over several rolling hills Very, taking 5.57.41 hours (an average of 16.0mph). It was mainly down the SS16 again and aside from a particularly terrifying incident (where a barking dog managed to leap free of his enclosure and actually chased us down the road) was pretty uneventful. The scenery in the hills south of Pescara was as pretty as Wikitravel suggested and the road became much quieter, at least until we hit Vasto. After Vasto, it picked up considerably - perhaps explaining the prevalence of scantily clad prostitutes lining that part of the highway.
I thought I'd share some of my strategies for getting through days like today. Often long days on the bike can be fun, when through scenic landscapes or over technically interesting terrain. However, others can be mentally harder, particularly when you're not feeling up to it or there is little to keep you interested in the ride. Today was one of those days. It was essentially nearly a hundred miles down a busy highway in the scorching heat. This is the third riding day in a row so our legs are starting to feel it too.
1) When the going gets tough, don't stop going.
Stopping while you are heading up a hill or into a headwind is a terrible idea. Don't do it. It's not actually that much harder to get started but the psychological toll of trying to push forwards from a standing start is enough to actually make the ride seem much harder than it actually is.
2) Take lunch at 50% effort, not 50% distance.
Each mile is harder than the last. As you reach the end of the day it takes more effort to keep going. Taking lunch at the halfway point by distance means that you'll actually have a longer second half of the day, particularly when you're starting to feel sleepy as your body digests your food and the temperature heats up. If you go halfway by effort (anywhere between 50% of the distance to 80%, depending on the terrain), then the second half will be much less arduous.
3) Stop as little as possible.
This is similar to 1). The more breaks you take, the more mentally significant each period of riding becomes. If you're feeling rough then this can add to your general perception of riding 'slowly' and cause you to actually ride slower than you could. Plus, stopping allows lactic acid to make its way into your legs... (or so I've been told) and getting going again is harder each time.
4) Give yourself continual and realistic goals.
Everyone needs something to aim for and trying to do the whole day in one go is admirable but difficult. I normally like knocking down the distance in 5 or 10 kilometre or mile increments, depending on how fast I'm going. If you're feeling mathematical, you can knock down percentages at a time too. This gives me something to aim for and a small dopamine boost everything we knock down a milestone.
5) Continually assess your progress.
This goes hand in hand with 4). Perhaps it's a little obsessive but my analytical mind loves to keep track of where we are, what's coming next and how much effort will be required for the rest of the day. It means you'll hopefully have no surprises later on and you'll know how to pace yourself.
6) Think positive, or rather - don't think negative.
Everyone has bad days. It's important to reasonably ignore these feelings (with an ear to any 'warnings' from your body, of course). Bad vibes can be infectious and affect your psyche for the day and possibly even the next. I normally try never to consider anything as bad. It's part of the survivor mentality - if you treat any hardship as part of the adventure, it makes it easier to react rationally to it and it will therefore pass more easily. I also often ignore or live with niggling issues in the spirit of getting on with the journey (e.g. Insect bites, weary legs, the odd bicycle creak). Obviously deal with these when you can but trying not to let them wear you down mentally helps keep you going.
7) Distract yourself.
I always thought that a long cycle ride like the TDA would have been the ideal place to come up with a killer business idea but sadly I was so concerned with the ride itself that it wasn't really possible. Concentrating on not getting flattened by east African lorries is a full time job in itself! It can be useful however to have music to help time pass quicker and today I made full use of the music stored on my phone to distract me from the constant sweaty grind toward the south.
starz wrote at 9:55 am on Tue 30th Jul -
go for it, some brilliant ideas, and could use your motivational ideas during a normal day as well
Today's ride has been a bit of a slog down the SS-16 (super strada - literally super street), the coastal road that we are mostly following for the last part of this tour. It's been baking hot, pushing 34°C, and the only breeze was a slight headwind.Â
Being a Sunday, we encountered very many locals who headed to the beaches - parking to the west of the SS-16 and crossing to the beach on the other side. Additionally, the local roadies were out in force in the morning, giving us plenty of cheers as they came past in the opposite direction. What was surprisingly was how easily we caught up to several riders. The first rider, a mustachioed Italian man who looked very much like Mario (of Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers), overtook us with a couple of other riders who quickly turned off to the right. As soon as he lost their draft, he slowed down significantly and we rapidly decided to overtake him. Phil, being the polite English cyclist that he is, took it slowly to allow him to draft us, but we lost him soon after I took over.Â
After this, a tall Italian rider cut in front of us, and tried to accelerate away into the headwind. Sadly for him, I was happy to try and keep up and despite a couple of sprints, he was unable to shake us. Eventually he turned off to the right to leave us to fend for ourselves.
Soon after this, we caught up with a pair of middle aged riders who were riding alongside one another. They weren't very quick and their riding etiquette made the normally erratic car drivers look good in comparison! We overtook then once but they came flying past as we stopped at a traffic light and they decided that they were too good for that inconvenience. Never fear though, we soon overtook them again, never to see them again.
The afternoon got warmer still and we suffered in heat. Stopping at a supermarket, we picked up snacks - Phil buying many litres of water and fresh cut coconut. I bought some outwardly plain looking fresh chocolate cookies and a litre of milk, wondering if I had paid too much for the free cookies over the cheaper factory made cookies. I was in heaven later though when I discovered the insides of the cookies were filled with a Nutella-like chocolatey substance. After drinking most of the litre of milk, we headed on, albeit a little slower.
The only deviation from the SS-16 today was a small climb that took us parallel for some time, past a rather scenic view of the coastline and a less scenic flytipping site.
We stopped at a small restaurant at a beach hotel for lunch where the waitor spoke excellent English and warned me that the penne arrabbiata would be spicy. I laughed down this fact and, after verifying that there was no meat in the sauce, ordered the pasta. This was excellent, and having eaten relatively spiceless European food for the last two weeks, it was great to have something a little bit chilli...
We pushed on, slowly at first as the sheer volume of pasta digested and then quicker. However, the headwind prevented us from pushing much above 18 mph, often travelling at a speed closer to 16 mph. As we got closer to Pescara, the road was cordoned off and several police officers stood guard. Despite this, pedestrians and cyclists were freely moving through the area so we took their lead and cycled through. We almost made it through the second inflatable arch on the road before realising it was the finishing line of a local road race - Trofeo Matteoti, a race in its 67th year. Given we had seen many team vans and cars on the road earlier, it made sense when we learned that it was an international race frequented by semi professional riders. Total distance for the day was 84.05 miles, at an average of 15.4 mph over 5.26.07.
Pescara itself is a large city and we're staying in a rather nice Best Western hotel called the Duca D'Aosti. Nearly everything around the hotel is shut but in our quest for gelato, we found an excellent 'modern' coffee shop where I had an iced chocolate called a 'Make-Mou'. Walking further, a board directed us to a bar where Phil had some sort of excellent bitter (beer) and I had a sangria rosso. The very amusing bar owner (who had lived in Bermondsey and spoke excellent English) directed us to the gelato shop - just two shopfronts down the road. My highlight of the conversation was when he asked Phil what football team he supported. Phil replied 'Liverpool, to please my girlfriend' and our barkeep mentioned that he ha other ways to please his girlfriend. Hah.
This gelateria was amazing and, like the coffee shops we'd seen so far, quite unconventional. They served many flavours of machine dispensed frozen yoghurt as well as several gelatos which were all made without milk. We elected for the latter and, true to the owner's claim, it was the best dark chocolate ice cream I've had. To top it off, he gave us free t-shirts, which we will covet after two weeks of wearing our increasingly odorous home brought shirts.
Being a Sunday, we encountered very many locals who headed to the beaches - parking to the west of the SS-16 and crossing to the beach on the other side. Additionally, the local roadies were out in force in the morning, giving us plenty of cheers as they came past in the opposite direction. What was surprisingly was how easily we caught up to several riders. The first rider, a mustachioed Italian man who looked very much like Mario (of Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers), overtook us with a couple of other riders who quickly turned off to the right. As soon as he lost their draft, he slowed down significantly and we rapidly decided to overtake him. Phil, being the polite English cyclist that he is, took it slowly to allow him to draft us, but we lost him soon after I took over.Â
After this, a tall Italian rider cut in front of us, and tried to accelerate away into the headwind. Sadly for him, I was happy to try and keep up and despite a couple of sprints, he was unable to shake us. Eventually he turned off to the right to leave us to fend for ourselves.
Soon after this, we caught up with a pair of middle aged riders who were riding alongside one another. They weren't very quick and their riding etiquette made the normally erratic car drivers look good in comparison! We overtook then once but they came flying past as we stopped at a traffic light and they decided that they were too good for that inconvenience. Never fear though, we soon overtook them again, never to see them again.
The afternoon got warmer still and we suffered in heat. Stopping at a supermarket, we picked up snacks - Phil buying many litres of water and fresh cut coconut. I bought some outwardly plain looking fresh chocolate cookies and a litre of milk, wondering if I had paid too much for the free cookies over the cheaper factory made cookies. I was in heaven later though when I discovered the insides of the cookies were filled with a Nutella-like chocolatey substance. After drinking most of the litre of milk, we headed on, albeit a little slower.
The only deviation from the SS-16 today was a small climb that took us parallel for some time, past a rather scenic view of the coastline and a less scenic flytipping site.
We stopped at a small restaurant at a beach hotel for lunch where the waitor spoke excellent English and warned me that the penne arrabbiata would be spicy. I laughed down this fact and, after verifying that there was no meat in the sauce, ordered the pasta. This was excellent, and having eaten relatively spiceless European food for the last two weeks, it was great to have something a little bit chilli...
We pushed on, slowly at first as the sheer volume of pasta digested and then quicker. However, the headwind prevented us from pushing much above 18 mph, often travelling at a speed closer to 16 mph. As we got closer to Pescara, the road was cordoned off and several police officers stood guard. Despite this, pedestrians and cyclists were freely moving through the area so we took their lead and cycled through. We almost made it through the second inflatable arch on the road before realising it was the finishing line of a local road race - Trofeo Matteoti, a race in its 67th year. Given we had seen many team vans and cars on the road earlier, it made sense when we learned that it was an international race frequented by semi professional riders. Total distance for the day was 84.05 miles, at an average of 15.4 mph over 5.26.07.
Pescara itself is a large city and we're staying in a rather nice Best Western hotel called the Duca D'Aosti. Nearly everything around the hotel is shut but in our quest for gelato, we found an excellent 'modern' coffee shop where I had an iced chocolate called a 'Make-Mou'. Walking further, a board directed us to a bar where Phil had some sort of excellent bitter (beer) and I had a sangria rosso. The very amusing bar owner (who had lived in Bermondsey and spoke excellent English) directed us to the gelato shop - just two shopfronts down the road. My highlight of the conversation was when he asked Phil what football team he supported. Phil replied 'Liverpool, to please my girlfriend' and our barkeep mentioned that he ha other ways to please his girlfriend. Hah.
This gelateria was amazing and, like the coffee shops we'd seen so far, quite unconventional. They served many flavours of machine dispensed frozen yoghurt as well as several gelatos which were all made without milk. We elected for the latter and, true to the owner's claim, it was the best dark chocolate ice cream I've had. To top it off, he gave us free t-shirts, which we will covet after two weeks of wearing our increasingly odorous home brought shirts.
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We spent our second planned / third overall rest day in (or rather near) San Marino, an amazing citadel built upon a pretty damn tall and steep hill.
Our hostel was a little way out from town but our effusive hostel owner assured us we could walk there in 20 minutes. She told us to take the quieter road behind the hostel instead of the more direct dual carriageway since it was more pleasant.
It was a good thing that Phil and I stopped for water, kefir and wafer biscuits at the nearby supermarket because 20 minutes was only enough to take us about a fifth of the way to our eventual destination. No doubt we'd not taken the optimal route and, in some state of confusion as to what the actual town was and where, we pushed on in its approximate direction. After almost an hour, we reached the start of what looked like a very long stone staircase down which other tourists were coming. We started up it. The temperature was (I'm not sure of the exact value) hot - at least 33 degrees and probably higher.
We made it to an empty part of the city, passing a sign asking us to respect the silence and whispered to each other that it was abnormally bereft of tourists. Each street we passed was equally empty and while all the buildings had official plaques listing their importance and purposes they all looked unoccupied. Very odd.
We were extremely hungry at this point, after the 80 something miles we'd cycled in from Bologna, and also fairly dehydrated after the 75 minutes of walk up to the town. Thinking that the actual town was just down below this ghostly perfected preserved relic of a city, we elected to continue round to what looked like a staircase down to a car park.
However, we pushed on a little further in order to get pictures of the sky blue flags. It was there that we spotted an actual street full of real, moving people and filled with open shops. Sadly, the shops are a fixture of much of San Marino. As a republic, governed separately to Italy itself, it has no taxes on much of the consumer junk that people aspire to buy: perfumes, handbags, lighters, Swiss army knives, giant waving owls and other touristy wares. I'm used to seeing maybe a parade or two of these shops in the big cities I've passed through so far but San Marino must have had several hundred of these, throughout the entire city.
What was quite cool though was the medieval market that is being held just this week, there were many swords and crossbows being sold. I can't quite think of many situations where these might be useful (although several altercations during my morning Jubilee line commute did come to mknd).
In between the many shops there were several banks, small hotels and restaurants. Essentially an entire city, distributed over dozens of tiny steep streets, on top of a massive hill.
Of course, I haven't yet described what the beauty of San Marino is although it is fairly obvious. Being so very old and on top of a hill, it has the most picturesque views over the surrounding landscape. Looking out in one direction you can see the sea. In another, rolling fields that meet a blue-grey summer haze. The others show the rest of the country of San Marino - many red topped houses and all the busy, windy roads up to the hill (and further still to parts of actual Italy). The stone built city itself is in pristine condition, and although all the touristy shops somewhat marr photos of the city structures, generally it is quite pretty.
We took our dinner at the highest altitude restaurant with a good view that we could find called Nido del Falco. The food was average, the service lacking and the fellow diners noisy but the view more than made up for it.
On our way out, we stopped for a quick glance at a show that was being put on by a local professional ballet group (amongst other acts). Surprisingly this was possibly only the second ballet performance I had seen, the first being The Nutcracker about 15 years ago. I quite enjoyed it, particularly for the excellent choice of music - although a live orchestra would have helped tremendously!
We also discovered a cable car that would take us down to at least the beginning of the steps. Without hesitation we paid the €2.80 fare. A shortcut back to the hotel helped us get back in about 20 minutes - albeit not using the 'more pleasant' road.
The next day we woke up just in time for breakfast. I thought we'd missed the good stuff because, besides some basic cornflakes and some melba toast, there was a tray with crumbs on it that looked like it once contained pastries. (It turns out this was just white bread this morning, so I don't feel like I lost out much...)
After a marathon morning of blogging, we headed back to the city via the New York Bakery, an Italian American style bakery. I needed something to take with my medication and they had some giant brownies on display so I asked for two to takeaway (Phil also wanted one). The lady pointed to a large poster on the wall showing an icecream scoop on top of a brownie covered in chocolate sauce and said "if you eat them here we serve them like that". That was good enough to get us to stay for a short while!
Taking the cable car up into the city, we toured one of the towers, a couple of museums, had a piadina (a famous local sandwich) and went looking for San Marino minted Euros. The piadina is, as far as I can work out, just a wrap but sliced and folded half-ways instead of rolled up. Still, it was simple and delicious, with soft cheese and rocket. We had fries too, which was a mistake but helped bump up our carb intake.
We visited two museums, one which was paid for - the Museo de San Francesco, and the free Museo di Stati. The Museo de San Francesco was fairly uninteresting, containing mainly biblical paintings of the saint. I normally get quite bored in overly religious museums. The Museo di Stati was better - containing many artifacts and other 'old things'. I found their collection of pots and vases quite amusing - will bored teenagers be trudging around museums looking at perfectly preserved Tupperware in a few hundred years?
I was also convinced that there was a way to get a rare San Marino minted Euro coin without paying the outrageous prices that the souvenir shops asked. After all, an officially minted coin should exchange at 1 to 1, especially if minted this year! I first attempted to ask a local bank and after some fun going through an elaborate circular security scanner, they told me that they didn't have any but to try an office nearby. Sure enough, the office nearby was the official dispenser of San Marino stamps and coins and two very bored looking employees glanced up at me when I entered. After trying and failing to work out what my options were from the display, I asked them and they said for €11 I could get an entire set of the 2013 coins. Still not content, I asked if it was possible to get just one coin and she nodded, pulling out a bag full of San Marino 1 and 2 Euro coins. I broke an ordinary €5 note and went on my way.
A brief gelato later (this was surprisingly difficult to find - most ice cream sold in San Marino appears to be of the more pedestrian factory made variety), we headed back down in the cable car to avoid the incoming thunderstorm. (My cycling shoes are just about ok to walk in but I can imagine a slippery demise lay ahead of any attempt to walk down wet San Marino avenues.)
I managed to redo my bar tape quickly before rushing upstairs to take a call with the CPCC group at Berkeley who I'm doing my Master's capstone project with. Sadly the wifi was down and the staff member there refused to accept it was broken because her computer (connected by a cable) was still working. She told us to ask the bar staff in ten minutes after her shift ended...useless. Phil and I waited for her to leave and then snuck into reception to power cycle the router, which thankfully fixed the connection.
Dinner was at a bizarrely formal hotel restaurant across the dual carriageway from our hostel. We sat down on the white silk covered chairs and we're surrounded by couples and groups of couples. Somewhat out of place in our sweaty off-the-bike wear, we placated ourselves by considering the alternatives - a kebab shop that operated out of the bar underneath our hostel or a McDonald's.
After ordering, they gave us a glass of sparkling wine each and some sort of strange fish and cheese pre-starter dish which I sadly had to decline. We didn't get charged for these. I elected for a gnocchi and vegetable dish which was both tasty and amazingly filling (although not enough to stop me finishing a pack of Ringo biscuits back at the hostel later).
This morning we managed to get to breakfast early enough to get some toast. The descent out of San Marino was a little slow - plenty of traffic lights and other vehicles trying to overtake meant it was too dangerous to take it at the same pace as the Alps. Pretty soon though we hit the coastal road which was very potholed and full of cars pulling out, turning in and trying to overtake. Soon though it got quieter as we passed a lengthy stretch of road alongside the beach where maybe a thousand cars were parked.
The coastal road was fairly quick and we made it to Falconara Marottima for lunch in good time. Besides picking up new brake shoes for Phil's rear brake to replace the wood screw currently holding in, overtaking a little Piaggio motor rickshaw and having a close call with an idiot Toyota Yaris driver, the ride was uneventful.
Lunch was a phenomenal amount of spaghetti with tomato sauce followed by a small gelato. This was probably not optimal riding food because I had the taste of both along with some sour bile at the back of my mouth as we started the climb out of Ancona and over the hills to Numana where we are staying with night.
The climb revealing some worrying noises coming from my bike when under heavy pedalling load. A consistent creak with each pedal stroke suggest either the bottom bracket, pedals or cranks are worn. I need to investigate this further.
Still, we arrived quickly to Numana, after 82.60 miles at an average of 16.1 mph over 5.06.30 hours.
With plenty of time in Numana, we've been enjoying the beach along with the other thousand Italians who are here. I suspect most are here just for the weekend - certainly this is the single most expensive hotel we are staying in. Tomorrow we cycle to Pescara for more beach and sun!
Our hostel was a little way out from town but our effusive hostel owner assured us we could walk there in 20 minutes. She told us to take the quieter road behind the hostel instead of the more direct dual carriageway since it was more pleasant.
It was a good thing that Phil and I stopped for water, kefir and wafer biscuits at the nearby supermarket because 20 minutes was only enough to take us about a fifth of the way to our eventual destination. No doubt we'd not taken the optimal route and, in some state of confusion as to what the actual town was and where, we pushed on in its approximate direction. After almost an hour, we reached the start of what looked like a very long stone staircase down which other tourists were coming. We started up it. The temperature was (I'm not sure of the exact value) hot - at least 33 degrees and probably higher.
We made it to an empty part of the city, passing a sign asking us to respect the silence and whispered to each other that it was abnormally bereft of tourists. Each street we passed was equally empty and while all the buildings had official plaques listing their importance and purposes they all looked unoccupied. Very odd.
We were extremely hungry at this point, after the 80 something miles we'd cycled in from Bologna, and also fairly dehydrated after the 75 minutes of walk up to the town. Thinking that the actual town was just down below this ghostly perfected preserved relic of a city, we elected to continue round to what looked like a staircase down to a car park.
However, we pushed on a little further in order to get pictures of the sky blue flags. It was there that we spotted an actual street full of real, moving people and filled with open shops. Sadly, the shops are a fixture of much of San Marino. As a republic, governed separately to Italy itself, it has no taxes on much of the consumer junk that people aspire to buy: perfumes, handbags, lighters, Swiss army knives, giant waving owls and other touristy wares. I'm used to seeing maybe a parade or two of these shops in the big cities I've passed through so far but San Marino must have had several hundred of these, throughout the entire city.
What was quite cool though was the medieval market that is being held just this week, there were many swords and crossbows being sold. I can't quite think of many situations where these might be useful (although several altercations during my morning Jubilee line commute did come to mknd).
In between the many shops there were several banks, small hotels and restaurants. Essentially an entire city, distributed over dozens of tiny steep streets, on top of a massive hill.
Of course, I haven't yet described what the beauty of San Marino is although it is fairly obvious. Being so very old and on top of a hill, it has the most picturesque views over the surrounding landscape. Looking out in one direction you can see the sea. In another, rolling fields that meet a blue-grey summer haze. The others show the rest of the country of San Marino - many red topped houses and all the busy, windy roads up to the hill (and further still to parts of actual Italy). The stone built city itself is in pristine condition, and although all the touristy shops somewhat marr photos of the city structures, generally it is quite pretty.
We took our dinner at the highest altitude restaurant with a good view that we could find called Nido del Falco. The food was average, the service lacking and the fellow diners noisy but the view more than made up for it.
On our way out, we stopped for a quick glance at a show that was being put on by a local professional ballet group (amongst other acts). Surprisingly this was possibly only the second ballet performance I had seen, the first being The Nutcracker about 15 years ago. I quite enjoyed it, particularly for the excellent choice of music - although a live orchestra would have helped tremendously!
We also discovered a cable car that would take us down to at least the beginning of the steps. Without hesitation we paid the €2.80 fare. A shortcut back to the hotel helped us get back in about 20 minutes - albeit not using the 'more pleasant' road.
The next day we woke up just in time for breakfast. I thought we'd missed the good stuff because, besides some basic cornflakes and some melba toast, there was a tray with crumbs on it that looked like it once contained pastries. (It turns out this was just white bread this morning, so I don't feel like I lost out much...)
After a marathon morning of blogging, we headed back to the city via the New York Bakery, an Italian American style bakery. I needed something to take with my medication and they had some giant brownies on display so I asked for two to takeaway (Phil also wanted one). The lady pointed to a large poster on the wall showing an icecream scoop on top of a brownie covered in chocolate sauce and said "if you eat them here we serve them like that". That was good enough to get us to stay for a short while!
Taking the cable car up into the city, we toured one of the towers, a couple of museums, had a piadina (a famous local sandwich) and went looking for San Marino minted Euros. The piadina is, as far as I can work out, just a wrap but sliced and folded half-ways instead of rolled up. Still, it was simple and delicious, with soft cheese and rocket. We had fries too, which was a mistake but helped bump up our carb intake.
We visited two museums, one which was paid for - the Museo de San Francesco, and the free Museo di Stati. The Museo de San Francesco was fairly uninteresting, containing mainly biblical paintings of the saint. I normally get quite bored in overly religious museums. The Museo di Stati was better - containing many artifacts and other 'old things'. I found their collection of pots and vases quite amusing - will bored teenagers be trudging around museums looking at perfectly preserved Tupperware in a few hundred years?
I was also convinced that there was a way to get a rare San Marino minted Euro coin without paying the outrageous prices that the souvenir shops asked. After all, an officially minted coin should exchange at 1 to 1, especially if minted this year! I first attempted to ask a local bank and after some fun going through an elaborate circular security scanner, they told me that they didn't have any but to try an office nearby. Sure enough, the office nearby was the official dispenser of San Marino stamps and coins and two very bored looking employees glanced up at me when I entered. After trying and failing to work out what my options were from the display, I asked them and they said for €11 I could get an entire set of the 2013 coins. Still not content, I asked if it was possible to get just one coin and she nodded, pulling out a bag full of San Marino 1 and 2 Euro coins. I broke an ordinary €5 note and went on my way.
A brief gelato later (this was surprisingly difficult to find - most ice cream sold in San Marino appears to be of the more pedestrian factory made variety), we headed back down in the cable car to avoid the incoming thunderstorm. (My cycling shoes are just about ok to walk in but I can imagine a slippery demise lay ahead of any attempt to walk down wet San Marino avenues.)
I managed to redo my bar tape quickly before rushing upstairs to take a call with the CPCC group at Berkeley who I'm doing my Master's capstone project with. Sadly the wifi was down and the staff member there refused to accept it was broken because her computer (connected by a cable) was still working. She told us to ask the bar staff in ten minutes after her shift ended...useless. Phil and I waited for her to leave and then snuck into reception to power cycle the router, which thankfully fixed the connection.
Dinner was at a bizarrely formal hotel restaurant across the dual carriageway from our hostel. We sat down on the white silk covered chairs and we're surrounded by couples and groups of couples. Somewhat out of place in our sweaty off-the-bike wear, we placated ourselves by considering the alternatives - a kebab shop that operated out of the bar underneath our hostel or a McDonald's.
After ordering, they gave us a glass of sparkling wine each and some sort of strange fish and cheese pre-starter dish which I sadly had to decline. We didn't get charged for these. I elected for a gnocchi and vegetable dish which was both tasty and amazingly filling (although not enough to stop me finishing a pack of Ringo biscuits back at the hostel later).
This morning we managed to get to breakfast early enough to get some toast. The descent out of San Marino was a little slow - plenty of traffic lights and other vehicles trying to overtake meant it was too dangerous to take it at the same pace as the Alps. Pretty soon though we hit the coastal road which was very potholed and full of cars pulling out, turning in and trying to overtake. Soon though it got quieter as we passed a lengthy stretch of road alongside the beach where maybe a thousand cars were parked.
The coastal road was fairly quick and we made it to Falconara Marottima for lunch in good time. Besides picking up new brake shoes for Phil's rear brake to replace the wood screw currently holding in, overtaking a little Piaggio motor rickshaw and having a close call with an idiot Toyota Yaris driver, the ride was uneventful.
Lunch was a phenomenal amount of spaghetti with tomato sauce followed by a small gelato. This was probably not optimal riding food because I had the taste of both along with some sour bile at the back of my mouth as we started the climb out of Ancona and over the hills to Numana where we are staying with night.
The climb revealing some worrying noises coming from my bike when under heavy pedalling load. A consistent creak with each pedal stroke suggest either the bottom bracket, pedals or cranks are worn. I need to investigate this further.
Still, we arrived quickly to Numana, after 82.60 miles at an average of 16.1 mph over 5.06.30 hours.
With plenty of time in Numana, we've been enjoying the beach along with the other thousand Italians who are here. I suspect most are here just for the weekend - certainly this is the single most expensive hotel we are staying in. Tomorrow we cycle to Pescara for more beach and sun!
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This is a bit of a bumper update. The last four days have been extremely busy! We're now in Hostel San Marino, a rather good hostel which is close to but not in San Marino. This is probably the cheapest accommodation we've booked this trip - for 25 euros each, we have our own room (with four beds, hah), bathroom and air conditioning! They even include breakfast, although this was meagre - cornflakes and melba toast. Phil is out searching for an actual coffee as I write this.
We left Susa late on Monday. Italians famously operate on a later schedule to much of Europe and breakfast only opened at 8am. (The smell of fresh bread at 7:15 suggested that we could probably have gone down earlier.) After some faff, we hit the road at just before 9 for our first full day in Italy.
The condition of Italian roads vary from smooth as butter to worse than most African roads. I thought the A5 was bad but these could be so much worse. With the heavy traffic (both in terms of volume and in physical size - many many lorries), there is often no room to manoeuvre around the potholes that seem to line the bicycle line of the lane. These bumps are uncomfortable sure, but the main problem is that they cause my Garmin to turn off sporadically. Only particular bumps seem to cause it to turn off and I can't work out why. This is a little hairy when we're riding into a roundabout and the GPS turns off - I have to switch it back on with one band, brake with the other and then indicate before pressing another button to change the display to the one we use for navigation. Thankfully Phil's unit seems a little more robust (and has a proper basemap) so we're covered if mine stops working altogether.
Italian drivers also drive in a very similar fashion to how I drive normally - that is, heavy on both the accelerator and the brake pedals. This is nerve wracking as a cyclist. Drivers approach T junctions at full speed and brake to a halt only at the last minute, all whilst looking straight ahead and giving no indication that they have seen us approaching on the main road they are joining. There's nothing we can really do except stay as visible as possible and prepare to take evasive action if they do actually come out.
That morning, we cycled in Turin. Phil appeared to be against this detour but I hadn't realised this until we were navigating the busy dual carriageways feeding the city - by which point it was too late to turn around. After reaching the nominal city centre and Phil decrying it as the Italian equivalent of Birmingham, we eventually caught sight of the famous tower, the Mole Antonelliana, a structure which I recognised from the Civilisation video game and from a liquor called the 'Chocolate Turin' which comes in a bottle shaped like the building. We cycled towards it as best we could and eventually ended up in the historic centre of Turin, which was beautiful - full of impressive buildings, statues and huge piazzas.
Eventually we came to the Mole Antonelliana and Phil's wheel decide to puncture as we approached it. After taking our photos of the building, we retired to a cafe nearby to fix the puncture and drink ice cream and coffee/hot chocolate.
As we passed a market on our way out of Turin, a lady shouted out what is the equivalent of 'nice thighs'. This was reassuring because the marginally shorter route out that I picked (to avoid yet more dual carriageway cycling) took us over a couple of pretty serious climbs.
That afternoon, we kept going towards Alessandria, intending to have lunch in Asti, a town some distance away. Phil's wheel punctured again when we were about five miles away and then again less than a mile down the road. At this point it had just hit 2pm and the day was as hot as it would get. Phil was suffering in the heat, and I was pretty dehydrated myself. We retired under a tree to fix the first puncture and then just another tree outside the large garden of a local home for the subsequent punctures. His patches were failing to stick in the heat and we ended up replacing the tubes. By the time we got to Asti it was 4:30pm and I was starving (it's unclear whether Phil gets hungry, normally coffee alone sustains him for lengthy periods of time!). Another amazing pizza later, Phil's tyre went flat again and we asked the cafe operators if they could point us to a bike shop. We were in luck - there was one just a short walk away.
Sadly, Italy being Italy, the shop was shut in Mondays. Phil pulled into a driveway to fix his puncture and I patronised the gelato shop that was conveniently right next door. After getting many curious looks from bystanders as he sat cross legged in the middle of the driveway repairing his tubes (and attracting brief police attention), we were ready to go again.
We had further punctures about 10 miles out of Alessandria, and pulled into a lay by next to an industrial estate to repair them. A nice man in a white van saw us and turned around to offer assistance! We were shocked but gratefully turned his offer down - intent on riding all the way.
We reached Alessandria just before 8pm, to the nicest (on paper) hotel we would be staying in - with a proudly advertised 4* rating. It didn't however have a restaurant, which prompted us to look up how ratings are assigned. It turns out that each country does this differently and Italian ratings are presumably more generous.
We went for dinner to a great little pizzeria where I had a quatro formaggio and panna cotta for dessert. Yum. Upon returning to the hotel, I tried figuring out why someone had built a nice hotel in this seemingly uninteresting destinations. The receptionist suggested the Cathedral might be nice to see. I was unconvinced.
The hotel was amusing. It had lovely furnishings, soft fluffy towels and a huge bathroom. This was topped off with a grey 14" CRT television.
Despite the fast wifi, I was so exhausted after the hours of delay that I went straight to bed. Although our riding time was just 5.56.18, we'd been on the hot road for 11 hours. We cycled 91.78 miles, with a 15.4 mph average speed.
On Tuesday we cycled from Alessandria to Fiorenzuola D'arda, a town not far from Parma (the famous ham and cheese place).
The day was very hot. Despite leaving earlier (our 4 star hotel offered breakfast from 6:30am), the heat had carried over from the previous day and it was near 30 degrees from the mid morning. Our adventurous routing took us over some fairly steep hills which were the foothills of the Apenine mountain range. Sadly the same routing also assumed we could ride on footpaths and so the actual mileage ended up being more as we routed around it. Thankfully, we had stopped at a supermarket that was the Italian equivalent of Waitrose, and I had picked up half a kilogram of some amazing chocolate oat biscuits. By the end of the day I had less than half of these left...
We stopped for lunch in a wonderfully air conditioned cafe just after the climbing was mostly over where they made me a panini with many, many vegetables in.
At just before 3pm, we stopped for a gelato in a little town called Niviano. The shop was advertised to open at 3pm but predictably opened late. While we were waiting, Phil's tube punctured again in the heat. We were fresh out of inner tubes at this point and our repairs failed. Phil managed to ascertain that there was a bicycle shop 3 or 4 kilometres away and while he tried to repair his tube again, I cycled off in search of the shop. (It's worth noting that we did eventually get our ice cream.)
I cycled off in the direction of the bicycle shop and spotted a road cyclist wearing red lycra who I was certain would know the location of the shop. He was going considerably quicker than me though, so it took some effort to catch him with my pannier. When I came along side, Itried asking him for help and motioning towards my wheel. He refused to even try and understand, instead shouting 'no parlano Anglaisi, no parlano' and accelerating away from me. So much for cyclist on cyclist support. I wish many punctures upon his wheels.
After asking a very helpful gentleman at a supermarket who gave me excellent directions, sadly all in Italian, I pulled into a car garage and asked for inner tubes. They laughed and said they only stocked tyres for cars but got on the phone and soon wrote down the address of what they assured me was a bicycle shop.
I finally reached the bicycle shop, a curious place which was a mess of spare parts and oily used parts and appeared to service anything with two wheels. The bike shop owner was out when I arrived but he soon pulled up in a large jeep. After explaining our predicament, he pulled out two inner tubes and some rim tape, I took a celebratory photo with him and pedalled back to Phil.
Our puncture problems behind us for the day we continued on to Fiorenzuola. Our route took us over some lovely gravelly 'roads'. Phil's confidence on these roads had been slowly increasing (at the beginning of the trip her was flatly against unpaved surfaces) and he was amused when the road took us over a river. Thankfully this had dried up, but my shoes still were soaked as we walked over the riverbed.
I was pretty exhausted coming into the town, having cycled 98.67 miles, the route for the day plus the additional running around looking for the bike shop. This was 6.52.22 hours of cycling with a respectable 14.3 mph average. My skin was covered with salt, something I had never really noticed before (having always assumed it was road grit). Overall this was an 11.5 hour day on the bike.
As we walked around the town looking for food, we disappointed the proprietor of an empty bar when after some discussion, the only vegetarian meal he could offer was a salad. Eventually we went for apertivi at a cocktail bar called Cafe Suavato where a 3.50 euro spend gained you access to a buffet of food. After this we went to a small restaurant where I had my first pasta in Italy - which was good but nowhere near as much better than home as the pizzas here are. Dessert was a semifreddo, which was nice - a little nutty and essentially a slice of ice cream.
The next day we left later again (after a cold shower and after Phil was told off for attempting to use the espresso machine to make a cappuccino). Luckily we had a tail wind to Bologna, and although we stopped briefly in Parma for a snack, we made excellent progress, reaching the outskirts of Modena at about 11:30. Our route took us past the Auto Drome Modena, a race track where we stopped for 20 minutes to watch a party on a track day get briefed. I also snuck into the pits to admire the Formula1-esque cars they were going to be racing.
On our way into the city centre, Phil had another flat next to a supermarket. He tried repairing this, which failed, and then replaced it with the other spare tube which also failed - it seemingly already had a hole in it! Eventually he managed to get it fixed up and we made it to a bike shop called Sportissimo. Alas, it shut for lunch at 1 and we arrived at 1:15. Lunch breaks in Italy are long and they wouldn't open again until 3...
Standing outside the front entrance, we tried to figure out what to do next. The owner, locking up, saw us and asked us if we were ok. Phil explained the problem to him and he told us to come around to the side entrance.
They were happy to help and replaced the rim tape, tube and gave us some free tubes. They even offered us water and coffee for Phil. We spoke to the owner while one of his mechanics fixed the wheel - his shop was one of the largest in Modena, and he'd been running it for 23 years. He thought we were Dutch initially (possibly due to Phil's build and orange jersey) and was happy to hear we were from London. After the puncture was fixed, and the rim tape replaced (again), he refused to let us pay. What an absolute legend!
We stopped for lunch briefly at a strange smelling cafe under a walkway where I had a salad in the hope it would expedite our lunch stop. This was a mistake though since I burned through the 200 calories the salad supplied in about 20 minutes and was hungry for the rest of the day.
The tail wind that had carried us in the morning stopped and turned around as we neared Bologna, becoming a fierce headwind. Additionally, dark grey clouds ahead looked as if they were about to soak us. We pulled over to waterproof our panniers and continued on down a rather unpleasant dual carriageway that was heavily trafficked and lined with prostitutes. Very odd. Although we had missed the scheduled Ducati factory tour at 3.30pm that I had hoped to catch, we decided to visit the museum anyway and their very friendly representative managed to book us on a later tour. It was amusing touring a motorcycle factory in cycling lycra and the other tourists found the way we parked our bikes quite astonishing (in the absence of a bike rack, we had hung them from a railing). The museum itself was interesting but I found the factory more fascinating. They turn out between 300 and 400 bikes a day and the factory is manned 20 hours a day.
We left the factory at the same time as the shift change and battled some epic traffic into Bologna where we met Adrian for an evening of so much food. All in all, 89.20 miles, a 16.4mph average over 5.25.36 hours.
The restaurant he took us to offer an amazing starter where the food just kept coming. They would remove half eaten plates from the table to make room for new ones. My favourite was pecorino with jam/chutney, although the buffalo mozzarella was also excellent. We had a bottle of local sangiovese to accompany our meal - my main course was risotto with gorgonzola and pears. A strange but delicious combination. The meal was topped off with a delicious gelato.
The next morning Adrian treated us to a wonderful quantity of cereal and then took us to a breakfast bar where I had the most amazing layered custard pastry called a 'Diplomatica'. He accidentally ordered three coffees and so I was treated to my first ever espresso - an excellent Italian one at that.
This helped contribute to a quick ride that morning. Phil's puncture woes looked as if they were mostly over. Aside from a quick stop for iced tea and espresso in Imola, we stopped in Cesena for lunch from a bizarre cafe. The owner was very impressed by Phil's Italian and even more impressed by our proposed route. When he asked about what vegetarian vegetarian meals she had, she pulled out several frozen ready meals to show us... D'oh. So much for fresh Italian food. A quick gelato later (where the lady was amused by my pronunciation of 'stracciatella'), we hit the road.
The climb into San Marino was fierce but short and we arrived at the hostel at 3:30pm after 80.16 miles, an average of 15.7 mph over 4.47.49. I went looking for the hostel operator to rent a towel but she was away, so I decided to go get a cold drink from the supermarket nearby. I didn't manage to find this but did manage to find an outdoor shop where I picked up another t-shirt. (Only having 1 makes impossible to wash... Lesson learned.)
We left Susa late on Monday. Italians famously operate on a later schedule to much of Europe and breakfast only opened at 8am. (The smell of fresh bread at 7:15 suggested that we could probably have gone down earlier.) After some faff, we hit the road at just before 9 for our first full day in Italy.
The condition of Italian roads vary from smooth as butter to worse than most African roads. I thought the A5 was bad but these could be so much worse. With the heavy traffic (both in terms of volume and in physical size - many many lorries), there is often no room to manoeuvre around the potholes that seem to line the bicycle line of the lane. These bumps are uncomfortable sure, but the main problem is that they cause my Garmin to turn off sporadically. Only particular bumps seem to cause it to turn off and I can't work out why. This is a little hairy when we're riding into a roundabout and the GPS turns off - I have to switch it back on with one band, brake with the other and then indicate before pressing another button to change the display to the one we use for navigation. Thankfully Phil's unit seems a little more robust (and has a proper basemap) so we're covered if mine stops working altogether.
Italian drivers also drive in a very similar fashion to how I drive normally - that is, heavy on both the accelerator and the brake pedals. This is nerve wracking as a cyclist. Drivers approach T junctions at full speed and brake to a halt only at the last minute, all whilst looking straight ahead and giving no indication that they have seen us approaching on the main road they are joining. There's nothing we can really do except stay as visible as possible and prepare to take evasive action if they do actually come out.
That morning, we cycled in Turin. Phil appeared to be against this detour but I hadn't realised this until we were navigating the busy dual carriageways feeding the city - by which point it was too late to turn around. After reaching the nominal city centre and Phil decrying it as the Italian equivalent of Birmingham, we eventually caught sight of the famous tower, the Mole Antonelliana, a structure which I recognised from the Civilisation video game and from a liquor called the 'Chocolate Turin' which comes in a bottle shaped like the building. We cycled towards it as best we could and eventually ended up in the historic centre of Turin, which was beautiful - full of impressive buildings, statues and huge piazzas.
Eventually we came to the Mole Antonelliana and Phil's wheel decide to puncture as we approached it. After taking our photos of the building, we retired to a cafe nearby to fix the puncture and drink ice cream and coffee/hot chocolate.
As we passed a market on our way out of Turin, a lady shouted out what is the equivalent of 'nice thighs'. This was reassuring because the marginally shorter route out that I picked (to avoid yet more dual carriageway cycling) took us over a couple of pretty serious climbs.
That afternoon, we kept going towards Alessandria, intending to have lunch in Asti, a town some distance away. Phil's wheel punctured again when we were about five miles away and then again less than a mile down the road. At this point it had just hit 2pm and the day was as hot as it would get. Phil was suffering in the heat, and I was pretty dehydrated myself. We retired under a tree to fix the first puncture and then just another tree outside the large garden of a local home for the subsequent punctures. His patches were failing to stick in the heat and we ended up replacing the tubes. By the time we got to Asti it was 4:30pm and I was starving (it's unclear whether Phil gets hungry, normally coffee alone sustains him for lengthy periods of time!). Another amazing pizza later, Phil's tyre went flat again and we asked the cafe operators if they could point us to a bike shop. We were in luck - there was one just a short walk away.
Sadly, Italy being Italy, the shop was shut in Mondays. Phil pulled into a driveway to fix his puncture and I patronised the gelato shop that was conveniently right next door. After getting many curious looks from bystanders as he sat cross legged in the middle of the driveway repairing his tubes (and attracting brief police attention), we were ready to go again.
We had further punctures about 10 miles out of Alessandria, and pulled into a lay by next to an industrial estate to repair them. A nice man in a white van saw us and turned around to offer assistance! We were shocked but gratefully turned his offer down - intent on riding all the way.
We reached Alessandria just before 8pm, to the nicest (on paper) hotel we would be staying in - with a proudly advertised 4* rating. It didn't however have a restaurant, which prompted us to look up how ratings are assigned. It turns out that each country does this differently and Italian ratings are presumably more generous.
We went for dinner to a great little pizzeria where I had a quatro formaggio and panna cotta for dessert. Yum. Upon returning to the hotel, I tried figuring out why someone had built a nice hotel in this seemingly uninteresting destinations. The receptionist suggested the Cathedral might be nice to see. I was unconvinced.
The hotel was amusing. It had lovely furnishings, soft fluffy towels and a huge bathroom. This was topped off with a grey 14" CRT television.
Despite the fast wifi, I was so exhausted after the hours of delay that I went straight to bed. Although our riding time was just 5.56.18, we'd been on the hot road for 11 hours. We cycled 91.78 miles, with a 15.4 mph average speed.
On Tuesday we cycled from Alessandria to Fiorenzuola D'arda, a town not far from Parma (the famous ham and cheese place).
The day was very hot. Despite leaving earlier (our 4 star hotel offered breakfast from 6:30am), the heat had carried over from the previous day and it was near 30 degrees from the mid morning. Our adventurous routing took us over some fairly steep hills which were the foothills of the Apenine mountain range. Sadly the same routing also assumed we could ride on footpaths and so the actual mileage ended up being more as we routed around it. Thankfully, we had stopped at a supermarket that was the Italian equivalent of Waitrose, and I had picked up half a kilogram of some amazing chocolate oat biscuits. By the end of the day I had less than half of these left...
We stopped for lunch in a wonderfully air conditioned cafe just after the climbing was mostly over where they made me a panini with many, many vegetables in.
At just before 3pm, we stopped for a gelato in a little town called Niviano. The shop was advertised to open at 3pm but predictably opened late. While we were waiting, Phil's tube punctured again in the heat. We were fresh out of inner tubes at this point and our repairs failed. Phil managed to ascertain that there was a bicycle shop 3 or 4 kilometres away and while he tried to repair his tube again, I cycled off in search of the shop. (It's worth noting that we did eventually get our ice cream.)
I cycled off in the direction of the bicycle shop and spotted a road cyclist wearing red lycra who I was certain would know the location of the shop. He was going considerably quicker than me though, so it took some effort to catch him with my pannier. When I came along side, Itried asking him for help and motioning towards my wheel. He refused to even try and understand, instead shouting 'no parlano Anglaisi, no parlano' and accelerating away from me. So much for cyclist on cyclist support. I wish many punctures upon his wheels.
After asking a very helpful gentleman at a supermarket who gave me excellent directions, sadly all in Italian, I pulled into a car garage and asked for inner tubes. They laughed and said they only stocked tyres for cars but got on the phone and soon wrote down the address of what they assured me was a bicycle shop.
I finally reached the bicycle shop, a curious place which was a mess of spare parts and oily used parts and appeared to service anything with two wheels. The bike shop owner was out when I arrived but he soon pulled up in a large jeep. After explaining our predicament, he pulled out two inner tubes and some rim tape, I took a celebratory photo with him and pedalled back to Phil.
Our puncture problems behind us for the day we continued on to Fiorenzuola. Our route took us over some lovely gravelly 'roads'. Phil's confidence on these roads had been slowly increasing (at the beginning of the trip her was flatly against unpaved surfaces) and he was amused when the road took us over a river. Thankfully this had dried up, but my shoes still were soaked as we walked over the riverbed.
I was pretty exhausted coming into the town, having cycled 98.67 miles, the route for the day plus the additional running around looking for the bike shop. This was 6.52.22 hours of cycling with a respectable 14.3 mph average. My skin was covered with salt, something I had never really noticed before (having always assumed it was road grit). Overall this was an 11.5 hour day on the bike.
As we walked around the town looking for food, we disappointed the proprietor of an empty bar when after some discussion, the only vegetarian meal he could offer was a salad. Eventually we went for apertivi at a cocktail bar called Cafe Suavato where a 3.50 euro spend gained you access to a buffet of food. After this we went to a small restaurant where I had my first pasta in Italy - which was good but nowhere near as much better than home as the pizzas here are. Dessert was a semifreddo, which was nice - a little nutty and essentially a slice of ice cream.
The next day we left later again (after a cold shower and after Phil was told off for attempting to use the espresso machine to make a cappuccino). Luckily we had a tail wind to Bologna, and although we stopped briefly in Parma for a snack, we made excellent progress, reaching the outskirts of Modena at about 11:30. Our route took us past the Auto Drome Modena, a race track where we stopped for 20 minutes to watch a party on a track day get briefed. I also snuck into the pits to admire the Formula1-esque cars they were going to be racing.
On our way into the city centre, Phil had another flat next to a supermarket. He tried repairing this, which failed, and then replaced it with the other spare tube which also failed - it seemingly already had a hole in it! Eventually he managed to get it fixed up and we made it to a bike shop called Sportissimo. Alas, it shut for lunch at 1 and we arrived at 1:15. Lunch breaks in Italy are long and they wouldn't open again until 3...
Standing outside the front entrance, we tried to figure out what to do next. The owner, locking up, saw us and asked us if we were ok. Phil explained the problem to him and he told us to come around to the side entrance.
They were happy to help and replaced the rim tape, tube and gave us some free tubes. They even offered us water and coffee for Phil. We spoke to the owner while one of his mechanics fixed the wheel - his shop was one of the largest in Modena, and he'd been running it for 23 years. He thought we were Dutch initially (possibly due to Phil's build and orange jersey) and was happy to hear we were from London. After the puncture was fixed, and the rim tape replaced (again), he refused to let us pay. What an absolute legend!
We stopped for lunch briefly at a strange smelling cafe under a walkway where I had a salad in the hope it would expedite our lunch stop. This was a mistake though since I burned through the 200 calories the salad supplied in about 20 minutes and was hungry for the rest of the day.
The tail wind that had carried us in the morning stopped and turned around as we neared Bologna, becoming a fierce headwind. Additionally, dark grey clouds ahead looked as if they were about to soak us. We pulled over to waterproof our panniers and continued on down a rather unpleasant dual carriageway that was heavily trafficked and lined with prostitutes. Very odd. Although we had missed the scheduled Ducati factory tour at 3.30pm that I had hoped to catch, we decided to visit the museum anyway and their very friendly representative managed to book us on a later tour. It was amusing touring a motorcycle factory in cycling lycra and the other tourists found the way we parked our bikes quite astonishing (in the absence of a bike rack, we had hung them from a railing). The museum itself was interesting but I found the factory more fascinating. They turn out between 300 and 400 bikes a day and the factory is manned 20 hours a day.
We left the factory at the same time as the shift change and battled some epic traffic into Bologna where we met Adrian for an evening of so much food. All in all, 89.20 miles, a 16.4mph average over 5.25.36 hours.
The restaurant he took us to offer an amazing starter where the food just kept coming. They would remove half eaten plates from the table to make room for new ones. My favourite was pecorino with jam/chutney, although the buffalo mozzarella was also excellent. We had a bottle of local sangiovese to accompany our meal - my main course was risotto with gorgonzola and pears. A strange but delicious combination. The meal was topped off with a delicious gelato.
The next morning Adrian treated us to a wonderful quantity of cereal and then took us to a breakfast bar where I had the most amazing layered custard pastry called a 'Diplomatica'. He accidentally ordered three coffees and so I was treated to my first ever espresso - an excellent Italian one at that.
This helped contribute to a quick ride that morning. Phil's puncture woes looked as if they were mostly over. Aside from a quick stop for iced tea and espresso in Imola, we stopped in Cesena for lunch from a bizarre cafe. The owner was very impressed by Phil's Italian and even more impressed by our proposed route. When he asked about what vegetarian vegetarian meals she had, she pulled out several frozen ready meals to show us... D'oh. So much for fresh Italian food. A quick gelato later (where the lady was amused by my pronunciation of 'stracciatella'), we hit the road.
The climb into San Marino was fierce but short and we arrived at the hostel at 3:30pm after 80.16 miles, an average of 15.7 mph over 4.47.49. I went looking for the hostel operator to rent a towel but she was away, so I decided to go get a cold drink from the supermarket nearby. I didn't manage to find this but did manage to find an outdoor shop where I picked up another t-shirt. (Only having 1 makes impossible to wash... Lesson learned.)
John & Jean wrote at 2:17 pm on Fri 26th Jul -
What a fantastic write-up of an equally fantastic ride. Enjoy the final week!
We took yesterday as an impromptu rest day after doubling up on Friday. That was nice since my parents had just driven up to the Alps for the weekend in a heroic effort by my father - they left Watford at 10am nand reached St. Jean de Maurienne at 1:15am. We spent the whole day mainly carb loading on cake and fondue and relaxing in their rented chalet in Valfrejeurs, a ski resort just a short distance (but 700m above) where we were staying in Modane.
Today we set off early after a couple of pain raisins (each), preparing for an epic climb into Italy. Our quieter alternate route to the infamous D1009 took us nearly half a kilometre higher but then took us back down again as it rejoined the D road. When we hit the D road, we turned off towards Turing and took our 'optimised' route which took us over a footpath which was sort of cycleable but definitely not with our load and bike setup. It was basically a semi-steep grass hillside which cut the loop off the highway. It almost certainly took us longer than the road route but was a fun element of variety to an otherwise entirely paved tour.
Soon after we hit the road again, we turned right onto a road over the Col de Mont Cenis, a hill (mountain even?) that sat between us and Italy. It was a long climb up on which we were beleaguered by a merciless and slowly growing entourage of midges. This climb took us by a thousand feet to 2015m, over what must have been around 10 miles. We saw very few cyclists travelling in the same direction (although we were overtaken by a couple of unladen roadies near the top) but many coming the opposite way at a surprisingly slow speed.
The other interest fact was that the traffic was primarily into France from Italy, perhaps a reflection more of the time of day than of each country's relative economic situations. Motorcyclists seemed to love this road and I've made a mental note to come back one day with a motorcycle.
We reached the top without stopping at all, possibly a little reckless but once I found my pace, I was anxious not to lose it. There were some stunning views out over the valley we had just climbed out of but the persistence of the midges, the traffic passing at speed and the sheer grind of trying to climb meant that we were primarily looking at either our front wheels or the road just in front of them.
When we reached the top (after passing a farm selling home made cheese - what a location!), we stopped for a snack - Casino value cereal bars and Intermarche budget cookies. Both of these didn't taste so great, predictably, but they were good enough to get the faint taste of sweat and blood out of my mouth. After helping a trio of motorcyclists take a photo with the sign at the top of the hill, I put some arm warmers on and we headed downhill, all the way to Italy.
Not more than a hundred metres from the summit of the hill the beautifully blue coloured water of the Lac du Mont Cenis came into view. A few kilometres further, we encountered the most magnificent traffic jam, filled with motorcyclists, caravans and many many cars. After trying to work out why there were so many people parked here, we asked an Italian runner (wearing matching running shorts and a sleeveless top) who explained that there was a big running and mountain bike race that had use finished. Despite having just run 15km, he seemed impressed that we were cycling to Brindisi. I'm not sure I could run 15km, so the feeling of respect was mutual.
This became clear as we continued on down the road to pass the finishing straight and the occasional pair of runners with numbers beyond that. At this point the descending really began and it was just amazing.
It took me a little while to warm up but I was comfortable on these roads quickly, with their smooth and dry surface, relatively light traffic and with plenty of space for both lanes of traffic. I soon got to grips with how my bike handles under heavy braking and the sorts of lines I could take through corners. With the new carbon fork, steering is a lot more aggressive and I really started to get into the corners. Traffic in our direction was light but motorcycles coming the other way were overtaking adventurously and veering out into our lane while doing so, it took some quick reactions to get out of their way in time.
After what didn't seem like very long but was actually several miles, we saw our first sign indicating that we had crossed into Italy! There was no real border as such so we took our photo opportunity there and continued on down the wonderful descent where we almost managed to get to 70kmph. Sadly a slow moving RV decided to overtake us on a corner and we were stuck behind him for some time until Phil got another mysterious puncture on the inside of his tube. Once he had replaced his tube (and we had marvelled at how warm our rims had become from all the braking), we finished the last couple of miles to arrive in Susa just after noon. It was quite a short day at just 41 75 miles over 3.21.40 (an average of 12.4) and we could probably have pushed onto Turin but it is hard to know these things when planning the route on a computer so far from the actual terrain!
As we arrived in Susa, the main throughway in town was shut and all we could hear was a drumming sound. As we filtered to the front of traffic, we noticed a procession of men, women and children wearing ornate old fashioned robes, interleaved with drummers wearing similar uniform. There were 6 different colours in all, representing what we guessed were their districts in town. Our hotel manager explained that today was a festival of sorts celebrating the history of Susa and we spent most of the afternoon in a Roman amphitheatre watching friendly games where the various factions (or Borghis) competed against each other. First up was archery, which was extremely boring for the latter 5 of the 6 rounds they decided were necessary. Next was jousting, which was quite amusing and a little worrying as the rambunctious horses looked as if they might through their riders off. Finally about 10 men from each faction competed in a tug of war competition against each other team.
After all this competition, we headed to a pizzeria where the food came quicker than the amount of time it took to initially place an order. Anish was right in saying that Italy is considerably better for vegetarians, not only did they have a vegetariano pizza but many of their other options were also without meat. I had a 'Popeye' pizza with ricotta and spinach (and without tomato sauce) which was fantastically delicious. Nom.
Tomorrow is a long day to Alessandria but there should be three positives. Firstly, our hotel includes breakfast (as most Italian hotels seem to), so I am optimistic for something a little more substantial than a pastry. Secondly, we're hoping to pass through Turin for lunch, which should be very scenic. Finally, the elevation profile for the day looks like a descending staircase - hopefully making the 92 miles less arduous.
Today we set off early after a couple of pain raisins (each), preparing for an epic climb into Italy. Our quieter alternate route to the infamous D1009 took us nearly half a kilometre higher but then took us back down again as it rejoined the D road. When we hit the D road, we turned off towards Turing and took our 'optimised' route which took us over a footpath which was sort of cycleable but definitely not with our load and bike setup. It was basically a semi-steep grass hillside which cut the loop off the highway. It almost certainly took us longer than the road route but was a fun element of variety to an otherwise entirely paved tour.
Soon after we hit the road again, we turned right onto a road over the Col de Mont Cenis, a hill (mountain even?) that sat between us and Italy. It was a long climb up on which we were beleaguered by a merciless and slowly growing entourage of midges. This climb took us by a thousand feet to 2015m, over what must have been around 10 miles. We saw very few cyclists travelling in the same direction (although we were overtaken by a couple of unladen roadies near the top) but many coming the opposite way at a surprisingly slow speed.
The other interest fact was that the traffic was primarily into France from Italy, perhaps a reflection more of the time of day than of each country's relative economic situations. Motorcyclists seemed to love this road and I've made a mental note to come back one day with a motorcycle.
We reached the top without stopping at all, possibly a little reckless but once I found my pace, I was anxious not to lose it. There were some stunning views out over the valley we had just climbed out of but the persistence of the midges, the traffic passing at speed and the sheer grind of trying to climb meant that we were primarily looking at either our front wheels or the road just in front of them.
When we reached the top (after passing a farm selling home made cheese - what a location!), we stopped for a snack - Casino value cereal bars and Intermarche budget cookies. Both of these didn't taste so great, predictably, but they were good enough to get the faint taste of sweat and blood out of my mouth. After helping a trio of motorcyclists take a photo with the sign at the top of the hill, I put some arm warmers on and we headed downhill, all the way to Italy.
Not more than a hundred metres from the summit of the hill the beautifully blue coloured water of the Lac du Mont Cenis came into view. A few kilometres further, we encountered the most magnificent traffic jam, filled with motorcyclists, caravans and many many cars. After trying to work out why there were so many people parked here, we asked an Italian runner (wearing matching running shorts and a sleeveless top) who explained that there was a big running and mountain bike race that had use finished. Despite having just run 15km, he seemed impressed that we were cycling to Brindisi. I'm not sure I could run 15km, so the feeling of respect was mutual.
This became clear as we continued on down the road to pass the finishing straight and the occasional pair of runners with numbers beyond that. At this point the descending really began and it was just amazing.
It took me a little while to warm up but I was comfortable on these roads quickly, with their smooth and dry surface, relatively light traffic and with plenty of space for both lanes of traffic. I soon got to grips with how my bike handles under heavy braking and the sorts of lines I could take through corners. With the new carbon fork, steering is a lot more aggressive and I really started to get into the corners. Traffic in our direction was light but motorcycles coming the other way were overtaking adventurously and veering out into our lane while doing so, it took some quick reactions to get out of their way in time.
After what didn't seem like very long but was actually several miles, we saw our first sign indicating that we had crossed into Italy! There was no real border as such so we took our photo opportunity there and continued on down the wonderful descent where we almost managed to get to 70kmph. Sadly a slow moving RV decided to overtake us on a corner and we were stuck behind him for some time until Phil got another mysterious puncture on the inside of his tube. Once he had replaced his tube (and we had marvelled at how warm our rims had become from all the braking), we finished the last couple of miles to arrive in Susa just after noon. It was quite a short day at just 41 75 miles over 3.21.40 (an average of 12.4) and we could probably have pushed onto Turin but it is hard to know these things when planning the route on a computer so far from the actual terrain!
As we arrived in Susa, the main throughway in town was shut and all we could hear was a drumming sound. As we filtered to the front of traffic, we noticed a procession of men, women and children wearing ornate old fashioned robes, interleaved with drummers wearing similar uniform. There were 6 different colours in all, representing what we guessed were their districts in town. Our hotel manager explained that today was a festival of sorts celebrating the history of Susa and we spent most of the afternoon in a Roman amphitheatre watching friendly games where the various factions (or Borghis) competed against each other. First up was archery, which was extremely boring for the latter 5 of the 6 rounds they decided were necessary. Next was jousting, which was quite amusing and a little worrying as the rambunctious horses looked as if they might through their riders off. Finally about 10 men from each faction competed in a tug of war competition against each other team.
After all this competition, we headed to a pizzeria where the food came quicker than the amount of time it took to initially place an order. Anish was right in saying that Italy is considerably better for vegetarians, not only did they have a vegetariano pizza but many of their other options were also without meat. I had a 'Popeye' pizza with ricotta and spinach (and without tomato sauce) which was fantastically delicious. Nom.
Tomorrow is a long day to Alessandria but there should be three positives. Firstly, our hotel includes breakfast (as most Italian hotels seem to), so I am optimistic for something a little more substantial than a pastry. Secondly, we're hoping to pass through Turin for lunch, which should be very scenic. Finally, the elevation profile for the day looks like a descending staircase - hopefully making the 92 miles less arduous.
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We left Aix-les-Bains early, trying to avoid getting caught in the imminent thunderstorm that was lurking above the mountains to the west of our hotel. Breakfast was at least a thousand calories chocolate muesli croustillant (basically granola) eaten out of a plastic plate. As you can imagine, it took several helpings to get a satisfactory amount of cereal in my stomach. I actually preferred this to the usual French patisserie for breakfast, it kept me fuller for longer and was a far denser form of energy. While I'm still unable to eat porridge (after daily over consumption of it during the TDA), I will definitely note that cereal is the ideal touring breakfast.
We head off in the direction of the storm, i.e. Chambery. The road wasn't overtly uphill but, like the general trend of the day, was a gruelling slog along moderately busy D roads. Our optimistic routing again tried to take us off into several footpaths but we elected not to cut the corner and actually made it through the centre of Chambery very quickly with a slight tailwind and a short descent.
This tailwind helped us for the rest of the day but, as we're passing through the Alps, it was generally uphill all the way, despite the D1009 which we took essentially following a river all the way. It is a surreal road too, running alongside a major motorway (the A14) and never really looking like an uphill road. Phil and I speculate that this is because of how wide and relatively straight it is (compared to normal windy mountain roads) and the fact that it is bordered by tall mountains, both of which mask its true incline.
We reached our original destination of St. Etienne de Cuines pretty quickly, at just after 11am over approximately 46 miles. As we were getting close to the village, we saw a large convoy of yellow vehicles blaring Daft Punk come past on an adjacent road. When we got to the village, the road was shut - for the Tour de France nonetheless! We saw the commercial convoy go past (they threw free samples of some, 'sirop' concentrated drink at us and sprayed us with Vittel water) and struck a conversation with a well informed tour follower from the Netherlands who had been trying to catch the riders at certain points on his motorcycle this week. After an hour of the occasional motorbike and team car coming through, the helicopters flew closer and eventually the riders came past at incredible pace. Besides the obvious physical challenge of the Tour, I can imagine it must be extremely tedious cycling amongst so many vehicles, especially if you become separated from the main peloton. Still, it was enjoyable to see.
After they'd all come through, it was only 1pm, so we went to our hotel to see if we could possible cancel our reservation and head on to the next hotel a say early. A couple of ladies smoking outside of the closed reception said it was possible if we cancelled before 2pm. Unfortunately reception was shut until 2pm. We called the booking office where I spent far too much of my phone credit speaking to a nice Indian call centre worker who eventually redirected me to the hotel (whose phone I could hear ringing). A lady eventually picked up and, having passed the phone to Phil since she didn't speak English, told us abruptly that reception was shut until 2pm and that she would not help. We went to pick up some food from the nearby Intermarche supermarket to fill the remaining time.
Inside the market, I ran into a rather sour looking cyclist who, Phil later informed me, was British. He seemed extremely pissed off at something. I can only imagine he must have had severe saddle sores. Either that or he was a Tour competitor on a budget who was having to buy his own water refills from the supermarket.
Today's lunch followed the usual pattern but I went a little more budget than usual. The baguette and brie were absolutely fine but buying cheap American style chocolate chip cookies in France was an error I will never forget.
At 2:05pm we began to panic because there was no one at reception and our boundary condition had obviously been breached since it was well after 2pm now. Phil had already secured an extra night's stay at our hotel in Modane and all we needed now was to cancel our stay at this hotel and get going.
A couple eventually turned up at 2:15pm and spent sometime trying to unlock the front door to the hotel. We thought they were just guests who were locked out but eventually the man with a moustache set himself up behind the reception desk. After double checking that we were absolutely sure that the reservation would be cancelled, he made it so. It remains unclear whether this cancellation incurred a cost to us in the end. I hope not.
The 24 miles to Modane we had eventually planned a separate day for because of the 6,000 feet of climbing. However, our actual hotel is located in the lower part of Modane, which saves us about 2,000 feet. With at least 5 hours of sunlight left, we were confident we could handle the 24 miles.
This turned out to be true but it was as misleadingly difficult as the first half of the day. Despite the road seeming flat, we were actually climbing throughout. We also passed an abnormal number of cyclists, many of whom had beautiful kit and bikes but were surprisingly slow! We were also overtaken by many cars and caravans with bike racks, most likely following the tour.
When we reached Modane after 72.79 miles on the road over 4.53.05 hours (an average of 14.8mph), we were pretty tired. Luckily we've bought ourselves an additional rest day tomorrow - which should help get us ready ahead of the planned 8,000 feet of climbing on Sunday. Additionally, my parents are coming to spend the weekend here with us to celebrate my mother's birthday - so there will be lots of cake!
Dinner this evening was a duet of crepes (technically one was a galette) accompanied by a glass of kir. It's hard to describe these well so I suggest you check out the photos that may eventually upload.
We head off in the direction of the storm, i.e. Chambery. The road wasn't overtly uphill but, like the general trend of the day, was a gruelling slog along moderately busy D roads. Our optimistic routing again tried to take us off into several footpaths but we elected not to cut the corner and actually made it through the centre of Chambery very quickly with a slight tailwind and a short descent.
This tailwind helped us for the rest of the day but, as we're passing through the Alps, it was generally uphill all the way, despite the D1009 which we took essentially following a river all the way. It is a surreal road too, running alongside a major motorway (the A14) and never really looking like an uphill road. Phil and I speculate that this is because of how wide and relatively straight it is (compared to normal windy mountain roads) and the fact that it is bordered by tall mountains, both of which mask its true incline.
We reached our original destination of St. Etienne de Cuines pretty quickly, at just after 11am over approximately 46 miles. As we were getting close to the village, we saw a large convoy of yellow vehicles blaring Daft Punk come past on an adjacent road. When we got to the village, the road was shut - for the Tour de France nonetheless! We saw the commercial convoy go past (they threw free samples of some, 'sirop' concentrated drink at us and sprayed us with Vittel water) and struck a conversation with a well informed tour follower from the Netherlands who had been trying to catch the riders at certain points on his motorcycle this week. After an hour of the occasional motorbike and team car coming through, the helicopters flew closer and eventually the riders came past at incredible pace. Besides the obvious physical challenge of the Tour, I can imagine it must be extremely tedious cycling amongst so many vehicles, especially if you become separated from the main peloton. Still, it was enjoyable to see.
After they'd all come through, it was only 1pm, so we went to our hotel to see if we could possible cancel our reservation and head on to the next hotel a say early. A couple of ladies smoking outside of the closed reception said it was possible if we cancelled before 2pm. Unfortunately reception was shut until 2pm. We called the booking office where I spent far too much of my phone credit speaking to a nice Indian call centre worker who eventually redirected me to the hotel (whose phone I could hear ringing). A lady eventually picked up and, having passed the phone to Phil since she didn't speak English, told us abruptly that reception was shut until 2pm and that she would not help. We went to pick up some food from the nearby Intermarche supermarket to fill the remaining time.
Inside the market, I ran into a rather sour looking cyclist who, Phil later informed me, was British. He seemed extremely pissed off at something. I can only imagine he must have had severe saddle sores. Either that or he was a Tour competitor on a budget who was having to buy his own water refills from the supermarket.
Today's lunch followed the usual pattern but I went a little more budget than usual. The baguette and brie were absolutely fine but buying cheap American style chocolate chip cookies in France was an error I will never forget.
At 2:05pm we began to panic because there was no one at reception and our boundary condition had obviously been breached since it was well after 2pm now. Phil had already secured an extra night's stay at our hotel in Modane and all we needed now was to cancel our stay at this hotel and get going.
A couple eventually turned up at 2:15pm and spent sometime trying to unlock the front door to the hotel. We thought they were just guests who were locked out but eventually the man with a moustache set himself up behind the reception desk. After double checking that we were absolutely sure that the reservation would be cancelled, he made it so. It remains unclear whether this cancellation incurred a cost to us in the end. I hope not.
The 24 miles to Modane we had eventually planned a separate day for because of the 6,000 feet of climbing. However, our actual hotel is located in the lower part of Modane, which saves us about 2,000 feet. With at least 5 hours of sunlight left, we were confident we could handle the 24 miles.
This turned out to be true but it was as misleadingly difficult as the first half of the day. Despite the road seeming flat, we were actually climbing throughout. We also passed an abnormal number of cyclists, many of whom had beautiful kit and bikes but were surprisingly slow! We were also overtaken by many cars and caravans with bike racks, most likely following the tour.
When we reached Modane after 72.79 miles on the road over 4.53.05 hours (an average of 14.8mph), we were pretty tired. Luckily we've bought ourselves an additional rest day tomorrow - which should help get us ready ahead of the planned 8,000 feet of climbing on Sunday. Additionally, my parents are coming to spend the weekend here with us to celebrate my mother's birthday - so there will be lots of cake!
Dinner this evening was a duet of crepes (technically one was a galette) accompanied by a glass of kir. It's hard to describe these well so I suggest you check out the photos that may eventually upload.
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We're coming to the end of our rest day in Aix-les-Bains. It's been a very laidback day, filled with copious amounts of sleep, not one but TWO hot chocolates (the first was awful, the second was much better), some great pastries and a waffle with a caramel butter and salt sauce. Generally gastronomically great.
For the last two dinners we've been patronising the local 'Geant Casino', a hypermarket which is rather like the Asda to Carrrefour, France's version of Tesco. Each time as we've walked back from the store along the 'hippodrome' (a local athletics / recreational area) to our hotel, we've experienced the opening salvos of a series of impressive thunderstorms. Carrying a bag full of bread, cheese and miscellaneous salads and desserts, we were unlucky to get a good soaking yesterday - Phil was quite depressed by the soggy bread. Today's baguette (a campagne - i.e.brown bread from the countryside, a novelty) survived much better and Phil was much happier.
Yesterday's ride was deliberately short - being the last of our first section - intended as a warm down. What was meant to be just 34 miles ended up being over 40 as we decided to follow our planned route accurately instead of sticking to the direct road into Aix-les-Bains. This proved to be our folly though when all the planned elevation gain that had yet to appear that day suddenly appears in a steep ascent up a mountain to the left of Aix-les-Bains. It's a little tricky to make out the exact nature of the road on our Garmin units and we didn't notice until we arrived there that half of the section of the route which lies parallel to the road going into Aix was actually a footpath. Unwilling to attempt a steep off-road descent with 23c tyres and a touring load, we elected to go around the hill, a nice fast descent and then quick bash down another D road.
Hotel Campanile, where we are staying, is a motel without any pretenses of being anything greater. It borders a golf course, which gives a pleasant backdrop and the rooms are comfortable. Our room is one of the few ground floor rooms that has a table with two chairs outside the front entrance. We made extensive use of these - for making various adjustments our breaks ahead of our section across the Alps, to sit somewhere within wi-fi range and for eating our huge Casino dinners
Aix-les-Bains itself is a quiet town that appears to be a gateway down to the Alps. It is also on the shores of the stunningly blue Lac du Bour and is a popular summer holiday destination for French tourists.
While yesterday was consumed with the chores of laundry, we walked down to the shore of the lake today and down to the main port. At this point an incoming thunderstorm made itself known and we fast walked up to town where numerous restaurants rejected our custom for lunch because it was past 2pm. I also visited a pharmacy and, in a groundbreaking acceptance of the fact that I probably do actually suffer from hayfever, purchased some antihistamines. I later connected to the matronly head waitress at a waffle restaurant when she admitted to using the same medicine (which I had left out on our table)
We're hoping to head off early tomorrow morning. The rain and thunder is forecast at 2pm and we calculate that we should be able to escape that. However, given the geography of this area, I suspect we might find the next microclimate doesn't respect the forecast we are relying on. Oh well, all part of the adventure
In other news, my 'technology stack' here is starting to annoy me intensely. Perhaps it will teach me for buying a cheap keyboard but it is struggling with my rapid typing speed. I have to type at a maximum speed of 2 characters per second or it will skip characters or insert duplicates. Highly frustrating. Additionally, turning Bluetooth on seems to interfere with my phone's ability to hold a connection to a weak wireless network. The lack of a reliable wi-fi connection is also limiting the speed at which things can be done on this smartphone and I have yet to find good way of managing photos locally and being able to upload them to both Facebook and Google+ in a way that can handle dropped connections. I may just wait until I get back home.
I've been trying to debug my knee pain. The main culprits look like either my saddle height or my cleat positioning, both of which I've tweaked. Let's see how it does going into some tough climbing.
Onwards over the mountains to Italy!
For the last two dinners we've been patronising the local 'Geant Casino', a hypermarket which is rather like the Asda to Carrrefour, France's version of Tesco. Each time as we've walked back from the store along the 'hippodrome' (a local athletics / recreational area) to our hotel, we've experienced the opening salvos of a series of impressive thunderstorms. Carrying a bag full of bread, cheese and miscellaneous salads and desserts, we were unlucky to get a good soaking yesterday - Phil was quite depressed by the soggy bread. Today's baguette (a campagne - i.e.brown bread from the countryside, a novelty) survived much better and Phil was much happier.
Yesterday's ride was deliberately short - being the last of our first section - intended as a warm down. What was meant to be just 34 miles ended up being over 40 as we decided to follow our planned route accurately instead of sticking to the direct road into Aix-les-Bains. This proved to be our folly though when all the planned elevation gain that had yet to appear that day suddenly appears in a steep ascent up a mountain to the left of Aix-les-Bains. It's a little tricky to make out the exact nature of the road on our Garmin units and we didn't notice until we arrived there that half of the section of the route which lies parallel to the road going into Aix was actually a footpath. Unwilling to attempt a steep off-road descent with 23c tyres and a touring load, we elected to go around the hill, a nice fast descent and then quick bash down another D road.
Hotel Campanile, where we are staying, is a motel without any pretenses of being anything greater. It borders a golf course, which gives a pleasant backdrop and the rooms are comfortable. Our room is one of the few ground floor rooms that has a table with two chairs outside the front entrance. We made extensive use of these - for making various adjustments our breaks ahead of our section across the Alps, to sit somewhere within wi-fi range and for eating our huge Casino dinners
Aix-les-Bains itself is a quiet town that appears to be a gateway down to the Alps. It is also on the shores of the stunningly blue Lac du Bour and is a popular summer holiday destination for French tourists.
While yesterday was consumed with the chores of laundry, we walked down to the shore of the lake today and down to the main port. At this point an incoming thunderstorm made itself known and we fast walked up to town where numerous restaurants rejected our custom for lunch because it was past 2pm. I also visited a pharmacy and, in a groundbreaking acceptance of the fact that I probably do actually suffer from hayfever, purchased some antihistamines. I later connected to the matronly head waitress at a waffle restaurant when she admitted to using the same medicine (which I had left out on our table)
We're hoping to head off early tomorrow morning. The rain and thunder is forecast at 2pm and we calculate that we should be able to escape that. However, given the geography of this area, I suspect we might find the next microclimate doesn't respect the forecast we are relying on. Oh well, all part of the adventure
In other news, my 'technology stack' here is starting to annoy me intensely. Perhaps it will teach me for buying a cheap keyboard but it is struggling with my rapid typing speed. I have to type at a maximum speed of 2 characters per second or it will skip characters or insert duplicates. Highly frustrating. Additionally, turning Bluetooth on seems to interfere with my phone's ability to hold a connection to a weak wireless network. The lack of a reliable wi-fi connection is also limiting the speed at which things can be done on this smartphone and I have yet to find good way of managing photos locally and being able to upload them to both Facebook and Google+ in a way that can handle dropped connections. I may just wait until I get back home.
I've been trying to debug my knee pain. The main culprits look like either my saddle height or my cleat positioning, both of which I've tweaked. Let's see how it does going into some tough climbing.
Onwards over the mountains to Italy!
Anish wrote at 1:23 am on Fri 19th Jul -
Nice work - these blog posts are surprisingly entertaining! Was the bad hot chocolate just powder in hot water? Shambles.
The last couple of days have been pretty tough going, partially due to the lack of promised internet access (both hotels have had 'technical issues'). Phil managed to track down the wireless router at the first and reboot it but it didn't seem to help. I suspect that sheer overloading was responsible for it being so unresponsive. (It used WEP encryption which suggests that the router was outdated at best and delinquent at worst.) Luckily today we managed to get online at lunchtime at an awesome sandwicherie in Bourg en Bresse. Besides the proprietor being (readily) willing to speak to us in English, she also had a vegetarian option and super fast wi-fi. Sadly I'm writing this post retrospectively so unless the Wi-Fi at this hotel fixes itself, it might be a while before you see it!
We intended to wake up at 6:30 and leave Nitry at 7 to make the most of the cooler morning but a combination of latent fatigue and a late previous night meant that we didn't get on the road until just after 8. Our first priority was to find breakfast (Nitry was small enough to not have a boulangerie but surprisingly sported a rather nice restaurant). The first one we found about 5 miles down the road was shut. Supposedly being open on Sunday means they are shut on Monday. France being France though, we soon found another after 3 miles and I bought two pain-au-chocolat.
Riding on further, around 20 miles in, we came across a bike shop - which, despite every sign suggesting it should be open, was shut. By this point my knee was consistently giving me issue and, convinced that there were no other variables that could be a problem, I decided to look at my cleats. It turns out that the cleat on my right shoe was pointing inwards slightly which would have caused my cycling position to be slightly 'off'.   My bike gave me almost no ergonomic problems since Africa (aside from considerable saddle issues) and I had since only changed the saddle and my shoes. I fixed the cleat and we were off again but the knee pain was still there - a twinge just above my right knee which made it extremely painful to put any weight on it.
Phil had another couple of punctures in the next 10 miles which slowed us down and by the time we hit the road again, it was 11:40 and we had only managed 30 miles of the intended 85 miles. The rest of the day was tough going, lots of 'rolling hills' down long, straight 'D' roads. These are the French analogues of Britain's A roads. Most of the time these are single carriageways, but occasionally the road would widen to accommodate three lanes and the middle lane would alternate as an overtaking lane for each direction of traffic. This was both a blessing and curse for us - it gave vehicles more space to overtake but near the point of alternation, they would overtake at much greater speed, no doubt feeling rushed by the lane suddenly coming to a close.
The D road we were on appeared to be a major freight road for France and there were a substantial number of lorries overtaking us. Luckily French lorry drivers are very courteous to cyclists and often pulled well out so as to minimise the impact of their draft on us. This must have been nervewracking for drivers coming the other way - especially on the single carriageways!
Additionally, there was a fair amount of resurfacing work going on where the holes had been 'repaired' by filling them with loose gravel. This led to quite a few small stones getting flicked in our direction by passing vehicles - painfully bouncing off our torsos and heads.
Our optimistic routing took us off-road yet again and feeling adventurous, I suggested to Phil that we take it. He grudgingly went along with it for a few hundred metres after which it became apparent that we would have absolutely no traction going uphill on the loose rocky surface. One of his reasons against taking it was that we would probably get a puncture and sure enough on our way back to the road I picked up a pinch puncture in my rear wheel, much to Phil's chagrin. On the plus side, both of my tyres are fully inflated now!
Lunch was a soporific many many calorie combination of bread, cheese, salad and these desserts called 'Paris Brest's which are named after the PBP ride Phil completed. They were seriously sticky but so awesome. I also picked up these chocolate butter biscuits and have slowly been working my way through them...I intend to try as many types of biscuit as possible before we leave France.
Not long after lunch, Phil suffered another puncture. Luckily we had picked up new inner tubes at the Atac supermarket we bought lunch at and it was an easy fix by the entrance to the quarry. I took the opportunity to catch some sleep perched upon two rocks and using my helmet as a pillow.
We hit the road again and after a few stops to fiddle with my saddle position, reached Chalone-sur-Saone (there's a little hat accent missing somewhere there - sorry) at about 6:45 after 6:39:27 hours of riding. We decided to visit the local Decathlon and Phil finally managed to pick up some genuine 'good' inner tubes and patches. I bought myself a bottle cage.
All in all it was a long day - 96.31 miles with an average of 14.4 mph. Chalon is a lovely town and we ended up eating at a pizzeria just behind the 'Cafe Piccadilly Pub'. The (South Indian?) owner spoke good English and made me a calzone with the ham swapped out for mushrooms. It was good and was followed by a creme brulee - my favourite dessert. A good day.
This morning we actually managed to wake up at 6:30 (as painful as it was). Chalon being a bigger town than the last two, we were able to pick up breakfast before leaving and I had a lovely almond pastry called a 'Jesuit' with a hot chocolate. Phil finally managed to get his morning coffee - something which he hadn't imagined would be so difficult to find in France!
We left Chalon at about 7am with a tough day ahead of us. Luckily there were no punctures today! (Ironic too, given that we are currently better prepared for punctures than we ever have been.) Most of the day was the same sort of straight D roads over rolling hills and sadly many lorries. These were relatively quick though and took us through some lovely farmland and the occasional section lined with evenly planted trees. At about 55 miles we entered a forest and then it became clear the terrain was changing as we turned into a road that switchbacked straight up hill. We had just entered the 'Rhone-Alpes', the French county that, I believe, includes the Alps themselves.
Climbing was hard work and I was worried how my knee would hold up, given its aversion to putting the hammer down. My Ti bike was overgeared for the hills in Ethiopia but I hadn't learnt my lesson and it is still running the same gearing - albeit with 10 kilos of additional load. Basically - tough going.
My knee survived though - there was no significant pain as long as I stayed seated. Soon enough my other knee started aching from the strain and it was much easier to ignore the original painful knee! This flattened off slightly but soon became steeper as we climbed up onto the plateau where Hauteville-Lompnes was. We pushed on though at a steady speed (usually between 5 and 7 mph) and soon reached 'Corlier', a hamlet at the beginning of the flat-ish plateau. Feeling pretty thirsty, we looked for water at a campsite there but no operator was in sight. Eventually we snuck into a kitchen block and filled our bottles, hoping that no one would mind.
The last 10 miles were reasonably flat, having climbed 1500 feet to get up to the plateau in just over 15 miles. We reached Hauteville-Lompnes after 80.69 miles at 4:30pm, ridden over 6:04:37 hours - with a respectable average of 13.2 mph. Amusingly, the hotel was shut when we arrived with a note saying that reception will be open at 6pm. Phil acquiesced and cleaned himself up with some wet wipes and changed into his non cycling gear. After my Tour D'Afrique adventures, I was more content staying in my (sweaty) cycling gear until a proper shower could be had.
While waiting for the hotel to open, we raided the local Carrefour and picked up some fruit (surprisingly lacking from our diet here). I took my biscuit experimentation further with some chocolate florentines and a litre of 'demi-creme' milk. We gorged on these on the tables outside our hotel and I managed to polish off all of the biscuits and a fair chunk of the milk -- almost a thousand calories worth! (It probably doesn't need saying but I am a big fan of these biscuits, light, crispy and with the perfect amount of chocolate - they were sublime.)
For dinner we wandered around looking for the restaurant most able to serve a vegetarian meal, settling on a brasserie near the middle of the town. Amusingly, for me at least, there was some confusion when Phil ordered a meal for me and we both received vegetarian salads! Poor Phil.
Tonight will be an early night ahead of another early start tomorrow as we descend into Aix-les-Bains where we will spend a rest day.
We intended to wake up at 6:30 and leave Nitry at 7 to make the most of the cooler morning but a combination of latent fatigue and a late previous night meant that we didn't get on the road until just after 8. Our first priority was to find breakfast (Nitry was small enough to not have a boulangerie but surprisingly sported a rather nice restaurant). The first one we found about 5 miles down the road was shut. Supposedly being open on Sunday means they are shut on Monday. France being France though, we soon found another after 3 miles and I bought two pain-au-chocolat.
Riding on further, around 20 miles in, we came across a bike shop - which, despite every sign suggesting it should be open, was shut. By this point my knee was consistently giving me issue and, convinced that there were no other variables that could be a problem, I decided to look at my cleats. It turns out that the cleat on my right shoe was pointing inwards slightly which would have caused my cycling position to be slightly 'off'.   My bike gave me almost no ergonomic problems since Africa (aside from considerable saddle issues) and I had since only changed the saddle and my shoes. I fixed the cleat and we were off again but the knee pain was still there - a twinge just above my right knee which made it extremely painful to put any weight on it.
Phil had another couple of punctures in the next 10 miles which slowed us down and by the time we hit the road again, it was 11:40 and we had only managed 30 miles of the intended 85 miles. The rest of the day was tough going, lots of 'rolling hills' down long, straight 'D' roads. These are the French analogues of Britain's A roads. Most of the time these are single carriageways, but occasionally the road would widen to accommodate three lanes and the middle lane would alternate as an overtaking lane for each direction of traffic. This was both a blessing and curse for us - it gave vehicles more space to overtake but near the point of alternation, they would overtake at much greater speed, no doubt feeling rushed by the lane suddenly coming to a close.
The D road we were on appeared to be a major freight road for France and there were a substantial number of lorries overtaking us. Luckily French lorry drivers are very courteous to cyclists and often pulled well out so as to minimise the impact of their draft on us. This must have been nervewracking for drivers coming the other way - especially on the single carriageways!
Additionally, there was a fair amount of resurfacing work going on where the holes had been 'repaired' by filling them with loose gravel. This led to quite a few small stones getting flicked in our direction by passing vehicles - painfully bouncing off our torsos and heads.
Our optimistic routing took us off-road yet again and feeling adventurous, I suggested to Phil that we take it. He grudgingly went along with it for a few hundred metres after which it became apparent that we would have absolutely no traction going uphill on the loose rocky surface. One of his reasons against taking it was that we would probably get a puncture and sure enough on our way back to the road I picked up a pinch puncture in my rear wheel, much to Phil's chagrin. On the plus side, both of my tyres are fully inflated now!
Lunch was a soporific many many calorie combination of bread, cheese, salad and these desserts called 'Paris Brest's which are named after the PBP ride Phil completed. They were seriously sticky but so awesome. I also picked up these chocolate butter biscuits and have slowly been working my way through them...I intend to try as many types of biscuit as possible before we leave France.
Not long after lunch, Phil suffered another puncture. Luckily we had picked up new inner tubes at the Atac supermarket we bought lunch at and it was an easy fix by the entrance to the quarry. I took the opportunity to catch some sleep perched upon two rocks and using my helmet as a pillow.
We hit the road again and after a few stops to fiddle with my saddle position, reached Chalone-sur-Saone (there's a little hat accent missing somewhere there - sorry) at about 6:45 after 6:39:27 hours of riding. We decided to visit the local Decathlon and Phil finally managed to pick up some genuine 'good' inner tubes and patches. I bought myself a bottle cage.
All in all it was a long day - 96.31 miles with an average of 14.4 mph. Chalon is a lovely town and we ended up eating at a pizzeria just behind the 'Cafe Piccadilly Pub'. The (South Indian?) owner spoke good English and made me a calzone with the ham swapped out for mushrooms. It was good and was followed by a creme brulee - my favourite dessert. A good day.
This morning we actually managed to wake up at 6:30 (as painful as it was). Chalon being a bigger town than the last two, we were able to pick up breakfast before leaving and I had a lovely almond pastry called a 'Jesuit' with a hot chocolate. Phil finally managed to get his morning coffee - something which he hadn't imagined would be so difficult to find in France!
We left Chalon at about 7am with a tough day ahead of us. Luckily there were no punctures today! (Ironic too, given that we are currently better prepared for punctures than we ever have been.) Most of the day was the same sort of straight D roads over rolling hills and sadly many lorries. These were relatively quick though and took us through some lovely farmland and the occasional section lined with evenly planted trees. At about 55 miles we entered a forest and then it became clear the terrain was changing as we turned into a road that switchbacked straight up hill. We had just entered the 'Rhone-Alpes', the French county that, I believe, includes the Alps themselves.
Climbing was hard work and I was worried how my knee would hold up, given its aversion to putting the hammer down. My Ti bike was overgeared for the hills in Ethiopia but I hadn't learnt my lesson and it is still running the same gearing - albeit with 10 kilos of additional load. Basically - tough going.
My knee survived though - there was no significant pain as long as I stayed seated. Soon enough my other knee started aching from the strain and it was much easier to ignore the original painful knee! This flattened off slightly but soon became steeper as we climbed up onto the plateau where Hauteville-Lompnes was. We pushed on though at a steady speed (usually between 5 and 7 mph) and soon reached 'Corlier', a hamlet at the beginning of the flat-ish plateau. Feeling pretty thirsty, we looked for water at a campsite there but no operator was in sight. Eventually we snuck into a kitchen block and filled our bottles, hoping that no one would mind.
The last 10 miles were reasonably flat, having climbed 1500 feet to get up to the plateau in just over 15 miles. We reached Hauteville-Lompnes after 80.69 miles at 4:30pm, ridden over 6:04:37 hours - with a respectable average of 13.2 mph. Amusingly, the hotel was shut when we arrived with a note saying that reception will be open at 6pm. Phil acquiesced and cleaned himself up with some wet wipes and changed into his non cycling gear. After my Tour D'Afrique adventures, I was more content staying in my (sweaty) cycling gear until a proper shower could be had.
While waiting for the hotel to open, we raided the local Carrefour and picked up some fruit (surprisingly lacking from our diet here). I took my biscuit experimentation further with some chocolate florentines and a litre of 'demi-creme' milk. We gorged on these on the tables outside our hotel and I managed to polish off all of the biscuits and a fair chunk of the milk -- almost a thousand calories worth! (It probably doesn't need saying but I am a big fan of these biscuits, light, crispy and with the perfect amount of chocolate - they were sublime.)
For dinner we wandered around looking for the restaurant most able to serve a vegetarian meal, settling on a brasserie near the middle of the town. Amusingly, for me at least, there was some confusion when Phil ordered a meal for me and we both received vegetarian salads! Poor Phil.
Tonight will be an early night ahead of another early start tomorrow as we descend into Aix-les-Bains where we will spend a rest day.
Anish wrote at 10:08 pm on Wed 17th Jul -
Don't worry, soon you will be in Italy and the vegetarian food will be EPIC! Enjoy! :-)
John & Jean wrote at 11:10 pm on Wed 17th Jul -
Best of riding to you both. Enjoy your rest day!
Up early on Saturday, I was worried we would miss the train out of Kings Cross. It didn't turn out to be a legitimate concern. We got through the Eurostar security check and the French immigration without much delay and found ourselves waiting in the departure lounge at about 06:55 with at least 3 other tourist groups (one American, one Asian and one French). Boarding was initially delayed as they were cleaning the train and when it was delayed further at 07:30 (the departure time was 07:31) they announced that it was broken and they were replacing it with another train.
We eventually rolled out of London at 08:30 and arrived in Paris after an uneventful journey at 11:30am local time. I managed to get a couple of brief naps on the train - Phil and I had both barely slept that night as we made last minute preparations and tried to load routes onto our GPS devices. Phil's device hadn't quite liked the map though and so I surrendered my SD card to him - his Garmin is considerably more modern than mine and hence we would use it as our primary navigational aid. I also managed to lose my Fitbit on the train, most likely when changing from mufti into cycling lycra. Argh.
After arriving at Gare du Nord, we proceeded to the Geoparts office to pick up our bikes. There was no one in the office outside and an outwardly calm tall English chap with a bike back. When we spoke to him though, it was clear he was panicking somewhat. He had a train in 10 minutes and they refused to let him on with his bike. When the Geoparts employee actually arrived, he was so unwilling to actually perform his job that our poor fellow cyclist was forced to try again. I hope he didn't miss his train!
Luckily our bikes had arrived undamaged and we got moving pretty quickly. It was a beautiful day in Paris and (possibly due to today's Bastille day) there was not much traffic. On the whole I've found French drivers to be surprisingly tolerant of cyclists. Moreso than British drivers - perhaps due to a considerably more prominent and established cycling heritage. Equally the roads are better planned for cyclists and are generally wider and with lower traffic. All this leads to calmer drivers and safer cyclists.
We left Paris pretty quickly and after about 18 miles from the train station, Phil had his first of many punctures in a slightly suspicious looking banlieue. He fixed it without incident and we were off again.
At about 25 miles, we stopped at a boulangerie. It had just gone 1pm and we were a little hungry. Outside the store was a table with a variety of sweets including baklava, and, would you believe it - jalebis! After deciding what we wanted, I committed a faux-pas and severely annoyed the proprietor of the shop by serving myself. (To be fair, she had left everything - paper bags and tongs - out!) I picked some extremely sticky desert that was basically an elongated and less dense baklava that was absolutely dripping in syrup. Phil picked a jalebi and we proceeded down the road to find a place some way away from the angry baker to sit.
As we rolled on, Phil suffered another puncture where the tube split in his front wheel. I took this opportunity to gorge on my lunch-dessert. He repaired this and we left, only to have to stop about 20 metres later when it went flat again! After he had fixed this, he noticed his rear wheel was flat...and was not happy at all. Around about the same time, my body's insulin response had kicked in and I was feeling extremely sleepy. Lying down on the long, unkempt grass in the mid-day heat, I shut my eyes.
I woke a short while later, extremely sweat and feeling a little faint. Phil had fixed both of his tyres and was eager to get going again. It took me a couple of kilometres to wake up but then all was good! We stopped for an actual lunch in a small village at about 40 miles in where Phil had a nice quiche and I bought some cheese and a demi-baguette.
With about 10 miles left to go Phil suffered another couple of punctures. We had hoped to visit the Decathlon in Montereau where we were staying. Phil wanted to pick up some tubes that had slightly better production quality and I wanted to pick up a bottle cage (my last one being a casualty of the Tour D'Afrique). Sadly, the punctures meant we reached Montereau at about 8pm - and Decathlon shut at 7:30pm :-(. Total moving time was 4:25:56 and we cycled 65.82 miles in total, giving us an average of 14.9 mph.
The hotel itself was fairly budget but clean and with the exact 'pod' bathrooms Fitz provided for its undergraduate accommodation - where the shower curtain smothers you while you shower. Hungry and tired, we showered and then went searching for food, initially coming up empty handed. We eventually tracked down a cluster of restaurants actually just behind Decathlon and ended up at a restaurant called 'La Patatarie', an astonishingly popular French chain restaurant that just serves baked potatoes. After some initial confusion ordering a vegetarian meal, I was served an extremely large potato topped with three cheeses. Meanwhile, Phil had a plate which had three types of tartiflette - a gratin dish. Dessert for me was two (not one) delicious profiteroles.
I managed to get into bed by 11pm and we woke at 8am, giving us a reasonable amount of sleep - well received after the exhausting previous night.
Today we cycled considerably further - 80.97 miles over 5:23:39 hours (an average of 15mph). Having left early-ish we arrived in a small village called Nitry at 5:30pm.
The initial plan was to leave at 9am but as we went to leave, Phil noticed his rear wheel was flat. We decided to go to Decathlon (it opened at 9:30am) but upon reaching it, noticed it wasn't open on Sundays! Phil used my spare inner tube and we hit the road shortly later. We stopped 10 miles down the road at a roadside bakery, filled up on brioche and motored down the long, flat and straight roads east and then south.
The weather has been absolutely baking here, approaching 30 degrees at the hottest parts of the day. Lacking a Camelbak (a casualty of the unfortunate struggle against carrying too much weight with me), I found it hard to stay rehydrated and found a headache creeping in pretty early. Despite having water in my bottles, it was much more of an effort to reach down and drink from them - made harder still when riding in a (mini) peloton. Lacking a second bottle cage makes access to all of my water tricky too.
At 30 miles we passed through a 'centre de commerce' called 'Sens'. Our hopes raised by seeing a Decathlon sign, we eventually stumbled across the Carrefour that was, sadly, showing absolutely no life. In our attempt to get back on track, we took a footpath, rode over a grassy bank and thought we were lost. Eventually we took a road that we thought would intersect with our route - and luckily turned out to lead us straight past a Netto supermarket. This is a super budget food and grocery store where we (quite literally) filled our panniers with tasty food and water to get us through the rest of the day. Being a public holiday and a Sunday in France, it was almost guaranteed that nothing would be open in the afternoon. I bought yet more bread and cheese (folding a baguette in half to get it to fit in my pannier), an 850g knock-off Yop yoghurt drink (which I drank all at once) and 12 own brand cereal bars.
We moved on but drinking such a large quantity of yoghurt had put undue pressure on my bowels and I told Phil to keep watch for any toilet facilities en route since Netto didn't provide any. We eventually passed through a small town where there was a public WC - and without going into too much detail, I can say that (as is apparently common for French public toilets) - it shared a LOT in common with the toilets we came across in Africa.
The rest of the day was uneventful. I took my first (pinch) puncture of the trip when our slightly optimistic routing took us over a gravel road and my underinflated tyres rolled over one rock too many. I tried repairing the puncture but failed - most patches are far too large for 23c tubes.
I'm very proud of how fast my bike still is. It just rolls and rolls - which I suppose it has always down. Since bringing it back from Africa, I haven't ridden it an awful lot, being more afraid of theft in England than I was in the whole of Africa. When I brought it back, I refurbished most of it, replacing the wheel bearings and upgrading the bottom bracket to use ceramic bearings. I also replaced the venerable steel Surly Crosscheck fork with a Kinesis Carbon fork that performs absolutely beautifully. I'm running some Continental Ultragator Pros - these are 'reinforced' lightweight racing tyres. Perhaps a bit too fragile for this trip but I'm hoping that the road surfaces will remain good and that it won't be too wet. We'll see.
Phil also kindly rebuilt my front wheel since it was knocked out of true and the spoke nipples had corroded enough to make it impossible to true. Finally, I replaced the cassette with a wider 11-27 range cassette to support the (terrifying) section through the Alps.
My legs are tired today, as expected but on the whole this trip is proving to be quite manageable. The luxury of having hot showers and all the food I could possibly eat (albeit mainly cheese based) is making all these miles more palatable. My right knee worries me slightly - it's probably not used to pushing the load of panniers on top of just the bike and has been feeling ache-y. We'll see how it does in the mountains.
We eventually rolled out of London at 08:30 and arrived in Paris after an uneventful journey at 11:30am local time. I managed to get a couple of brief naps on the train - Phil and I had both barely slept that night as we made last minute preparations and tried to load routes onto our GPS devices. Phil's device hadn't quite liked the map though and so I surrendered my SD card to him - his Garmin is considerably more modern than mine and hence we would use it as our primary navigational aid. I also managed to lose my Fitbit on the train, most likely when changing from mufti into cycling lycra. Argh.
After arriving at Gare du Nord, we proceeded to the Geoparts office to pick up our bikes. There was no one in the office outside and an outwardly calm tall English chap with a bike back. When we spoke to him though, it was clear he was panicking somewhat. He had a train in 10 minutes and they refused to let him on with his bike. When the Geoparts employee actually arrived, he was so unwilling to actually perform his job that our poor fellow cyclist was forced to try again. I hope he didn't miss his train!
Luckily our bikes had arrived undamaged and we got moving pretty quickly. It was a beautiful day in Paris and (possibly due to today's Bastille day) there was not much traffic. On the whole I've found French drivers to be surprisingly tolerant of cyclists. Moreso than British drivers - perhaps due to a considerably more prominent and established cycling heritage. Equally the roads are better planned for cyclists and are generally wider and with lower traffic. All this leads to calmer drivers and safer cyclists.
We left Paris pretty quickly and after about 18 miles from the train station, Phil had his first of many punctures in a slightly suspicious looking banlieue. He fixed it without incident and we were off again.
At about 25 miles, we stopped at a boulangerie. It had just gone 1pm and we were a little hungry. Outside the store was a table with a variety of sweets including baklava, and, would you believe it - jalebis! After deciding what we wanted, I committed a faux-pas and severely annoyed the proprietor of the shop by serving myself. (To be fair, she had left everything - paper bags and tongs - out!) I picked some extremely sticky desert that was basically an elongated and less dense baklava that was absolutely dripping in syrup. Phil picked a jalebi and we proceeded down the road to find a place some way away from the angry baker to sit.
As we rolled on, Phil suffered another puncture where the tube split in his front wheel. I took this opportunity to gorge on my lunch-dessert. He repaired this and we left, only to have to stop about 20 metres later when it went flat again! After he had fixed this, he noticed his rear wheel was flat...and was not happy at all. Around about the same time, my body's insulin response had kicked in and I was feeling extremely sleepy. Lying down on the long, unkempt grass in the mid-day heat, I shut my eyes.
I woke a short while later, extremely sweat and feeling a little faint. Phil had fixed both of his tyres and was eager to get going again. It took me a couple of kilometres to wake up but then all was good! We stopped for an actual lunch in a small village at about 40 miles in where Phil had a nice quiche and I bought some cheese and a demi-baguette.
With about 10 miles left to go Phil suffered another couple of punctures. We had hoped to visit the Decathlon in Montereau where we were staying. Phil wanted to pick up some tubes that had slightly better production quality and I wanted to pick up a bottle cage (my last one being a casualty of the Tour D'Afrique). Sadly, the punctures meant we reached Montereau at about 8pm - and Decathlon shut at 7:30pm :-(. Total moving time was 4:25:56 and we cycled 65.82 miles in total, giving us an average of 14.9 mph.
The hotel itself was fairly budget but clean and with the exact 'pod' bathrooms Fitz provided for its undergraduate accommodation - where the shower curtain smothers you while you shower. Hungry and tired, we showered and then went searching for food, initially coming up empty handed. We eventually tracked down a cluster of restaurants actually just behind Decathlon and ended up at a restaurant called 'La Patatarie', an astonishingly popular French chain restaurant that just serves baked potatoes. After some initial confusion ordering a vegetarian meal, I was served an extremely large potato topped with three cheeses. Meanwhile, Phil had a plate which had three types of tartiflette - a gratin dish. Dessert for me was two (not one) delicious profiteroles.
I managed to get into bed by 11pm and we woke at 8am, giving us a reasonable amount of sleep - well received after the exhausting previous night.
Today we cycled considerably further - 80.97 miles over 5:23:39 hours (an average of 15mph). Having left early-ish we arrived in a small village called Nitry at 5:30pm.
The initial plan was to leave at 9am but as we went to leave, Phil noticed his rear wheel was flat. We decided to go to Decathlon (it opened at 9:30am) but upon reaching it, noticed it wasn't open on Sundays! Phil used my spare inner tube and we hit the road shortly later. We stopped 10 miles down the road at a roadside bakery, filled up on brioche and motored down the long, flat and straight roads east and then south.
The weather has been absolutely baking here, approaching 30 degrees at the hottest parts of the day. Lacking a Camelbak (a casualty of the unfortunate struggle against carrying too much weight with me), I found it hard to stay rehydrated and found a headache creeping in pretty early. Despite having water in my bottles, it was much more of an effort to reach down and drink from them - made harder still when riding in a (mini) peloton. Lacking a second bottle cage makes access to all of my water tricky too.
At 30 miles we passed through a 'centre de commerce' called 'Sens'. Our hopes raised by seeing a Decathlon sign, we eventually stumbled across the Carrefour that was, sadly, showing absolutely no life. In our attempt to get back on track, we took a footpath, rode over a grassy bank and thought we were lost. Eventually we took a road that we thought would intersect with our route - and luckily turned out to lead us straight past a Netto supermarket. This is a super budget food and grocery store where we (quite literally) filled our panniers with tasty food and water to get us through the rest of the day. Being a public holiday and a Sunday in France, it was almost guaranteed that nothing would be open in the afternoon. I bought yet more bread and cheese (folding a baguette in half to get it to fit in my pannier), an 850g knock-off Yop yoghurt drink (which I drank all at once) and 12 own brand cereal bars.
We moved on but drinking such a large quantity of yoghurt had put undue pressure on my bowels and I told Phil to keep watch for any toilet facilities en route since Netto didn't provide any. We eventually passed through a small town where there was a public WC - and without going into too much detail, I can say that (as is apparently common for French public toilets) - it shared a LOT in common with the toilets we came across in Africa.
The rest of the day was uneventful. I took my first (pinch) puncture of the trip when our slightly optimistic routing took us over a gravel road and my underinflated tyres rolled over one rock too many. I tried repairing the puncture but failed - most patches are far too large for 23c tubes.
I'm very proud of how fast my bike still is. It just rolls and rolls - which I suppose it has always down. Since bringing it back from Africa, I haven't ridden it an awful lot, being more afraid of theft in England than I was in the whole of Africa. When I brought it back, I refurbished most of it, replacing the wheel bearings and upgrading the bottom bracket to use ceramic bearings. I also replaced the venerable steel Surly Crosscheck fork with a Kinesis Carbon fork that performs absolutely beautifully. I'm running some Continental Ultragator Pros - these are 'reinforced' lightweight racing tyres. Perhaps a bit too fragile for this trip but I'm hoping that the road surfaces will remain good and that it won't be too wet. We'll see.
Phil also kindly rebuilt my front wheel since it was knocked out of true and the spoke nipples had corroded enough to make it impossible to true. Finally, I replaced the cassette with a wider 11-27 range cassette to support the (terrifying) section through the Alps.
My legs are tired today, as expected but on the whole this trip is proving to be quite manageable. The luxury of having hot showers and all the food I could possibly eat (albeit mainly cheese based) is making all these miles more palatable. My right knee worries me slightly - it's probably not used to pushing the load of panniers on top of just the bike and has been feeling ache-y. We'll see how it does in the mountains.
Nayan wrote at 11:37 pm on Sun 14th Jul -
You lost another Fitbit!?! Enjoy the cheese n bread, cu soon. Nayan
Aamod Mishra wrote at 12:05 am on Mon 15th Jul -
Nice work!
It's been a hectic last few weeks. Besides trying to sell all of my possessions that can't be taken with me to Berkeley (and hold insufficient sentimental value), I spent a considerable amount of time working on another social network analysis paper with my friends from Kings College London, a colleague from Last.fm and two professors from Iran and Korea. Once that was all done and dusted, Phil and I belatedly started planning in depth our proposed short (but actually not that short) cycle tour.
Phil is an accomplished audax rider. Friends of the Geek on a Bicycle will note that he was the person who first motivated me to get cycling and if not for him inspiring me to start cycling to my high school, I'd still be as obese as I was as a teenager. We first got to know each other at the back of the field during a mandatory school cross country run. As plump 11 year olds, we were terrified of the consequences of being lapped by a considerable number of ours peers. Phil's eldest sister was training to be a lawyer at the time and I have fond memories of him threatening to get her involved if we were punished for being too slow!
During sixth form we both commuted by bicycle each morning and evening. In our holidays we would cycle together around Hertfordshire, and into London occasionally. For one week in Easter 2005, we took our bikes to his parents' holiday home in France and spent our days reading books, trying to get a pirated copy of Motorcross Madness to work over between two laptops connected by a crossover cable and, of course, cycling. It was an immense achievement when, on the last day, we cycled a shade over 80 miles on our venerable mountain bikes - Phil riding a maroon red Grisley rigid mountain bike and myself on my (now stolen) Hardrock Pro with front suspension. At the beginning of the week I would struggle to make it up a hill near the cottage called 'Pain-de-Sucre'. This was a hill with a considerable gradient and I'd usually have to get off half way up and walk. By the end of the week I was able to make it all the way up.
As happens, we grew apart during university - him studying classics at Liverpool University, a considerable drive away from Cambridge. We met extremely infrequently since he visited home rather less than I did. During that time we both took our passion for cycling further. I joined the Cambridge University Cycling Club and started racing. Meanwhile, Phil signed up for a series of audaxes, completing the 1200 kilometre Paris-Brest-Paris ride in 2008. While I thought the Tour D'Afrique was hard, Paris-Brest-Paris was in a wholly different league. Phil cycled this distance over just five days, sleeping rough and carrying everything he needed with him. The weather that week was extraordinarily poor and he cycled through rain and wind, sleeping for a handful of hours every night.
After university we both found ourselves in London and working similar careers. While neither of us have done any epic rides since, we were both keen to do something similarly involved. I knew that before I started my Master's course, I wanted to experience as much of Europe as possible and to try and do something meaningful. Phil had similar holiday ambitions and proposed Calais to Brindisi - a historically significant audax route based on an old passenger train that used to take well off Britons out to their summer holidays in continental Europe.
Audax pace, is, I'm told 14 days to cover 2100 kilometres. (Bear in mind this route crosses the Alpes.) We're giving ourselves 20 days and have truncated the uninspiring first two days of the trip from Calais to Paris. Tomorrow morning we'll be on the second Eurostar train of the day to Paris (and at the time of writing, I'm rather hoping that our bikes have already made it there, courtesy of the EuroDespatch centre at St. Pancras).
With a rest day in Aix-les-Bains, again in San Marino and finally in Brindisi, I'm hoping that my body will be able to cope with what will be about 80 miles a day on a fully laden bike. I'm not a particularly strong cyclist in the physical sense of the word - one of the decisions that really helped me a lot in the Tour D'Afrique was taking an exceptionally light (but sturdy) bike. Loading this up with 8.5 kilos of touring load is going to test my limits but I'm hoping I'll emerge stronger at the end of the trip.
The other physical difference (aside from the transient limb injuries that I've undergone various surgeries for) is that since the Tour D'Afrique I've been diagnosed with Hashimoto's thyroiditis. This in itself didn't prove to be a problem during that trip (aside from many amusing photos of me napping on moderately expensive expeditions). Now, three years later, even with treatment, I do find myself unreasonably tired often. Perhaps not enough to negatively impact our progress on the trip but enough to perhaps temper my psyche.
So, perhaps more so than with the Tour D'Afrique, I am cautious of my ability to finish. Having read Eric's and Gerald's (excellent) books on the Tour D'Afrique, I am reminded of the exceptional challenges we faced and how the wrong encounter with a pedestrian or a tropical disease could lead to the tour ending prematurely.
Either way, I'll try my best to keep up with Phil whilst enjoying a large amount of bread and cheese, as vegetarians do in Europe :-).
Finally, this trip presents another challenge - we're carrying our own load. This means no laptop. I'm also forgoing a dedicated camera and MP3 player - with the intention of using my Nexus 4 (plus a Bluetooth keyboard which I am currently using) to replace all three of these gadgets. Let's see how that works out. (Who wants to bet that it will become unusably broken within the first week?)
Our route:
Phil is an accomplished audax rider. Friends of the Geek on a Bicycle will note that he was the person who first motivated me to get cycling and if not for him inspiring me to start cycling to my high school, I'd still be as obese as I was as a teenager. We first got to know each other at the back of the field during a mandatory school cross country run. As plump 11 year olds, we were terrified of the consequences of being lapped by a considerable number of ours peers. Phil's eldest sister was training to be a lawyer at the time and I have fond memories of him threatening to get her involved if we were punished for being too slow!
During sixth form we both commuted by bicycle each morning and evening. In our holidays we would cycle together around Hertfordshire, and into London occasionally. For one week in Easter 2005, we took our bikes to his parents' holiday home in France and spent our days reading books, trying to get a pirated copy of Motorcross Madness to work over between two laptops connected by a crossover cable and, of course, cycling. It was an immense achievement when, on the last day, we cycled a shade over 80 miles on our venerable mountain bikes - Phil riding a maroon red Grisley rigid mountain bike and myself on my (now stolen) Hardrock Pro with front suspension. At the beginning of the week I would struggle to make it up a hill near the cottage called 'Pain-de-Sucre'. This was a hill with a considerable gradient and I'd usually have to get off half way up and walk. By the end of the week I was able to make it all the way up.
As happens, we grew apart during university - him studying classics at Liverpool University, a considerable drive away from Cambridge. We met extremely infrequently since he visited home rather less than I did. During that time we both took our passion for cycling further. I joined the Cambridge University Cycling Club and started racing. Meanwhile, Phil signed up for a series of audaxes, completing the 1200 kilometre Paris-Brest-Paris ride in 2008. While I thought the Tour D'Afrique was hard, Paris-Brest-Paris was in a wholly different league. Phil cycled this distance over just five days, sleeping rough and carrying everything he needed with him. The weather that week was extraordinarily poor and he cycled through rain and wind, sleeping for a handful of hours every night.
After university we both found ourselves in London and working similar careers. While neither of us have done any epic rides since, we were both keen to do something similarly involved. I knew that before I started my Master's course, I wanted to experience as much of Europe as possible and to try and do something meaningful. Phil had similar holiday ambitions and proposed Calais to Brindisi - a historically significant audax route based on an old passenger train that used to take well off Britons out to their summer holidays in continental Europe.
Audax pace, is, I'm told 14 days to cover 2100 kilometres. (Bear in mind this route crosses the Alpes.) We're giving ourselves 20 days and have truncated the uninspiring first two days of the trip from Calais to Paris. Tomorrow morning we'll be on the second Eurostar train of the day to Paris (and at the time of writing, I'm rather hoping that our bikes have already made it there, courtesy of the EuroDespatch centre at St. Pancras).
With a rest day in Aix-les-Bains, again in San Marino and finally in Brindisi, I'm hoping that my body will be able to cope with what will be about 80 miles a day on a fully laden bike. I'm not a particularly strong cyclist in the physical sense of the word - one of the decisions that really helped me a lot in the Tour D'Afrique was taking an exceptionally light (but sturdy) bike. Loading this up with 8.5 kilos of touring load is going to test my limits but I'm hoping I'll emerge stronger at the end of the trip.
The other physical difference (aside from the transient limb injuries that I've undergone various surgeries for) is that since the Tour D'Afrique I've been diagnosed with Hashimoto's thyroiditis. This in itself didn't prove to be a problem during that trip (aside from many amusing photos of me napping on moderately expensive expeditions). Now, three years later, even with treatment, I do find myself unreasonably tired often. Perhaps not enough to negatively impact our progress on the trip but enough to perhaps temper my psyche.
So, perhaps more so than with the Tour D'Afrique, I am cautious of my ability to finish. Having read Eric's and Gerald's (excellent) books on the Tour D'Afrique, I am reminded of the exceptional challenges we faced and how the wrong encounter with a pedestrian or a tropical disease could lead to the tour ending prematurely.
Either way, I'll try my best to keep up with Phil whilst enjoying a large amount of bread and cheese, as vegetarians do in Europe :-).
Finally, this trip presents another challenge - we're carrying our own load. This means no laptop. I'm also forgoing a dedicated camera and MP3 player - with the intention of using my Nexus 4 (plus a Bluetooth keyboard which I am currently using) to replace all three of these gadgets. Let's see how that works out. (Who wants to bet that it will become unusably broken within the first week?)
Our route:
No comments yet!
In preparation for the big move to Berkeley in very slightly over two months time, I've been busy trying to minimise my 'working set' of possessions down to that which would fit in two bags. A lot of my possessions, particularly those bought recently, are quite easy to decide upon. If I don't use them regularly, or haven't used them frequently and don't hold any sentimental value - it either goes on eBay if it has value (yay for marginal supplementary income), or on Freecycle.
It becomes trickier when I start going back in time. I currently live at my parents' house and so am still surrounded by many of my childhood possessions. Several of these were hard-earned, through summer jobs and a lot of hustling on eBay. Others of these were notable 'firsts' - or hold similar sentimental value. For instance, my first model helicopter (a beautiful Thunder Tiger Raptor 30 V2) or about six pairs of clipless bicycle pedals (no idea how or why). Many of these items took me from my formerly obese teenage self to the competitive (but not necessarily quick!) cyclist I am today.
With that in mind, this is a difficult task. As I try to emulate Alex Supertramp and discard myself of everything I absolutely don't need, I realise that it's not possible. I love these memories of the past that are inherently attached to each object I am forced to keep - of the summer evenings we spent flying model aircraft in the park instead of revising for A-levels, of my first mountain bike race, of all the computers I've built over the years, of the many thousands of miles we cycled across that beautiful, beautiful continent. One day I'll come home and bring all of these things with me - not because they're worth anything or because they're necessarily useful but because of all the wonderful stories that they'll help me tell.
It becomes trickier when I start going back in time. I currently live at my parents' house and so am still surrounded by many of my childhood possessions. Several of these were hard-earned, through summer jobs and a lot of hustling on eBay. Others of these were notable 'firsts' - or hold similar sentimental value. For instance, my first model helicopter (a beautiful Thunder Tiger Raptor 30 V2) or about six pairs of clipless bicycle pedals (no idea how or why). Many of these items took me from my formerly obese teenage self to the competitive (but not necessarily quick!) cyclist I am today.
With that in mind, this is a difficult task. As I try to emulate Alex Supertramp and discard myself of everything I absolutely don't need, I realise that it's not possible. I love these memories of the past that are inherently attached to each object I am forced to keep - of the summer evenings we spent flying model aircraft in the park instead of revising for A-levels, of my first mountain bike race, of all the computers I've built over the years, of the many thousands of miles we cycled across that beautiful, beautiful continent. One day I'll come home and bring all of these things with me - not because they're worth anything or because they're necessarily useful but because of all the wonderful stories that they'll help me tell.
No comments yet!
In 10 days or so, I'll be returning to my secondary school, the Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, to give a talk to parents and students in year 12 about Computer Science. This will be part of an annual careers evening - I'm not sure if they've had a 'representative' for Computer Science in the past but it is a very promising sign that they do this year.
Certainly when I was applying to university to study Computer Science almost eight years ago, there was very little in terms of specific application support. Even worse, three years ago, after graduating, when I went to go speak to the careers advisor at the time, he informed me that "students just don't want to study Computer Science, they just want to stick to professional careers like law, medicine and economics". Needless to say, I was astonished at his lack of foresight. When a student attends a careers evening and all they see are big stands and presentations on traditional professional careers, they're bound to give these more consideration. Equally so, a private school has the responsibility to equip its pupils suitably for changes in society at large - parents may not be aware that a career in technology nowadays can be quite fulfilling, stable and lucrative. (As a computer scientists, my peers and I had no trouble finding good work when graduating into a recession. The same can not be said of my economist friends, several of whom are underemployed or were forced into further study.)
Thankfully that careers adviser has since moved on and HABS is making good efforts to support and nurture any fledgling technologists in their student body. They have a capable head of IT who runs a lunchtime computing society where students are introduced to programming. He's also very current with the latest computing trends (they've already introduced Raspberry Pis into the syllabus) and has plans to adopt the new GCSE computing curriculum.
These are all very positive signs. When smart young pupils spend a considerable proportion of their free time using technology, whether it be their smartphone or their Playstation 3, and want to learn more about how these products are built, there's absolutely no reason why a forward thinking secondary school can't and shouldn't support them all the way.
The slide deck for my presentation is available here. Please feel free to re-use it under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
Certainly when I was applying to university to study Computer Science almost eight years ago, there was very little in terms of specific application support. Even worse, three years ago, after graduating, when I went to go speak to the careers advisor at the time, he informed me that "students just don't want to study Computer Science, they just want to stick to professional careers like law, medicine and economics". Needless to say, I was astonished at his lack of foresight. When a student attends a careers evening and all they see are big stands and presentations on traditional professional careers, they're bound to give these more consideration. Equally so, a private school has the responsibility to equip its pupils suitably for changes in society at large - parents may not be aware that a career in technology nowadays can be quite fulfilling, stable and lucrative. (As a computer scientists, my peers and I had no trouble finding good work when graduating into a recession. The same can not be said of my economist friends, several of whom are underemployed or were forced into further study.)
Thankfully that careers adviser has since moved on and HABS is making good efforts to support and nurture any fledgling technologists in their student body. They have a capable head of IT who runs a lunchtime computing society where students are introduced to programming. He's also very current with the latest computing trends (they've already introduced Raspberry Pis into the syllabus) and has plans to adopt the new GCSE computing curriculum.
These are all very positive signs. When smart young pupils spend a considerable proportion of their free time using technology, whether it be their smartphone or their Playstation 3, and want to learn more about how these products are built, there's absolutely no reason why a forward thinking secondary school can't and shouldn't support them all the way.
The slide deck for my presentation is available here. Please feel free to re-use it under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
No comments yet!
One of the aspects of my job that I most covet is the amount of new music I get to listen to (loosely in the name of 'work' ;-)).
Over the last few years, I've become a huge fan of reggae music. While I like the older and more classical stuff, I realised there were limited avenues to discover the music produced by more modern millennial artists.
With that in mind, my friend Siva (who is also a huge reggae fan) and I recently launched a new music blog to showcase and promote our favourite millennial reggae music.
Millennial Roots is online at http://millennialroots.net. We're hoping to post regular updates a couple of times a week at least.
You can also find us on Soundcloud, Twitter and Facebook.
Enjoy!
Over the last few years, I've become a huge fan of reggae music. While I like the older and more classical stuff, I realised there were limited avenues to discover the music produced by more modern millennial artists.
With that in mind, my friend Siva (who is also a huge reggae fan) and I recently launched a new music blog to showcase and promote our favourite millennial reggae music.
Millennial Roots is online at http://millennialroots.net. We're hoping to post regular updates a couple of times a week at least.
You can also find us on Soundcloud, Twitter and Facebook.
Enjoy!
No comments yet!
I'm a massive Fitbit fan - it satisfies my compulsive data gathering and obsessive fitness habits quite well. I'm actually on my fifth Fitbit. Originally I bought three, one for myself and one for each of my parents - although they never really got into the habit of using theirs. I lost my first Fitbit when walking through Bank underground station, my second one when helping a friend move flat and my third when skiing. Thankfully Fitbit replaced the third with a Fitbit Ultra which I lost somewhere on the journey between Vienna and London a few months ago. They again replaced this with their new Fitbit One - which is MUCH less prone to accidentally getting knocked off when your trousers brush past stationary objects.
With this in mind, generally my opinion of Fitbit's customer service is very very positive. I do quite like the company and while their API could be much better documented (I spent four hours over Christmas trying to figure out how to include their jar file hosted on Github from maven > >) - generally their documentation is pretty decent.
That said, when I looked up the instructions on how to calibrate my Fitbit, I came across an alarming inconsistency. My explanation of this was clear enough in the email I sent their customer support:
I was certain they mean step length - this shouldn't be a difficult thing to change - it involves changing a handful of field labels and their help documentation. Justifiably I was dismayed to receive their response - which was essentially a copy of their help page (that I originally linked them to) sent back to me.
Now, I'm all up for supporting these startups as much as possible (and from my experience at Last.fm, it's absolutely amazing how supportive some users can be) but I don't have the time or effort required to continue to push this relatively minor change through. Hopefully this post will help anyone curious about Fitbit's use of 'stride length' in the future.
With this in mind, generally my opinion of Fitbit's customer service is very very positive. I do quite like the company and while their API could be much better documented (I spent four hours over Christmas trying to figure out how to include their jar file hosted on Github from maven > >) - generally their documentation is pretty decent.
That said, when I looked up the instructions on how to calibrate my Fitbit, I came across an alarming inconsistency. My explanation of this was clear enough in the email I sent their customer support:
I'm a little bit confused about calibrating my stride length. The description given on this help page ( http://help.fitbit.com/customer/portal/articles/176045-how-do-i-measure-and-adjust-my-stride-length- ) is actually of what is traditionally called the step length.
Stride length would actually be double this - since stride measures the distance between consecutive steps by the same foot.
When setting the stride length in my Fitbit settings, am I supposed to use the stride length as discussed on that help page or should I use the correct and traditional definition of it - where I multiply the step length by 2.
For example, I took 210 steps to walk 160 metres. This means that, using Fitbit's definition of stride length, I have a stride length of 76 centimetres. However, the stride length for the average man is approximately 157 centimetres, and the step length for the average man is approximately 78 centimetres. My calculated stride length is actually closer to the average step length - which suggests Fitbit's explanation of stride length is incorrect - or that you actually mean step length.
I'd appreciate some clarification on this (and it would be helpful, if it is wrong, to update the help page).
Thanks,
Sunil
I was certain they mean step length - this shouldn't be a difficult thing to change - it involves changing a handful of field labels and their help documentation. Justifiably I was dismayed to receive their response - which was essentially a copy of their help page (that I originally linked them to) sent back to me.
Hi Sunil,
To clarify, the Fitbit definition of a stride is the distance you cover in a single step.
To reiterate the instructions on that page:
1. Go to a track or somewhere that you know the exact distance of.
2. Count your steps as you walk across that distance, making sure you travel at least 20 steps.
3. Divide the total distance (in feet) taken by the number of steps to get your stride length.
Your running stride can be calculated the same way, only by running a known distance rather than walking.
To adjust your stride length on your Dashboard, please do the following:
1. Log into your Fitbit.com Dashboard and click on the gear icon in the upper right corner of your Dashboard and select "Settings".
2. You will see a field for Stride Length and Running Stride Length. From here, you can manually enter your personal stride length. If you leave these blank, your profile will estimate these values based on your height and gender.
3. Click the "Update Profile" button to save your changes. Note that a sync will be required to update your tracker with your new stride measurements.
Let us know if this answers your question, or if we can provide further insight.
Sincerely,
Matthew and the Fitbit Team
Now, I'm all up for supporting these startups as much as possible (and from my experience at Last.fm, it's absolutely amazing how supportive some users can be) but I don't have the time or effort required to continue to push this relatively minor change through. Hopefully this post will help anyone curious about Fitbit's use of 'stride length' in the future.
No comments yet!
This is one of my favourite anecdotes - I've told it to so many people now, that I feel I may as well type it up to share with friends of the Geek on a Bicycle.
In 2007, a group of three friends and I ventured out to Alaska on a two week Trek America trip which took us in a figure of eight circuit some way into the Alaskan interior and back down south again to the peninsula. As 19 and 20 year olds, we wouldn't have been able to travel the vast Alaskan highways in our own car. We went at the beginning of September which is traditionally the last good part of Alaskan summer. In fact, a week after we left it started snowing heavily.
With a small surplus of cash from my summer internship, and in a photography craze, I had been lusting after the newly announced Samsung GX-10 D-SLR - this was a rebranded Pentax K10D but as Samsung's first SLR, discounted. Prices in London were pushing £450 but I held that camera in the back of mind. When we got to Anchorage, we stumbled across a famous camera shop - Stewart's Photo Shop. Amazingly, they had this camera in stock and with the GBP-USD rate being favourable, I walked out with the camera, an 8GB SD card and a case for under £400.
Alaska treated us to some beautiful weather that first week and armed with my shiny new camera, I took three hundred photos in the first three days. Additionally, having geeked out before the trip, I had a second smaller camera, a mobile phone and GPS tracker which I kept on the go concurrently - taking a GPS track as went with the intention of geo tagging photos afterwards.
On the third day, we rolled up to Maclaren River Lodge - a place that, to this day, is still my favourite place in the entire world. To get to the lodge, we travelled for a few hours off the paved highway down a gravelly mountain pass and over a deep ravine on a rickety wooden bridge. The lodge itself was beautifully built, run by an owner whose name eludes me. We visitors slept in a wooden bunk house and ate dinner in a warm and homely common room. Near to the lodge were kennels housing the owner's huskies - while unpacking our belongings we caught site of these Iditarod competitors in training as they pulled a quad bike along the road. On the night we arrived, the sun set in a hauntingly beautiful orange sky where the peach infused clouds rolled infinitely onwards in every direction.
The next morning we took an aluminium gunboat out to a enormous plain where we would trek out to a glacier, attempt to touch it and then return by kayak. Fuelling the gunboat was an amusingly terrifying experience as our loveable lodge owner smoked a cigar with one hand and poured liquid diesel into the gunboat's tank.
The trek itself was deceptively tiring, taking what seemed like forever to reach the glacier in the middle distance. Disappointingly, we weren't able to touch the glacier itself but I did grab a nice handful of its meltwater. The plain we trekked over was so far from actual civilisation that it was possibly the single most awe inspiring place I have ever been to. The feeling of being almost completely and utterly alone was sublime.
In the spirit of our Alaskan adventure, my group of four friends and a couple of others elected to canoe back to the camp, a three hour paddle downriver versus a thirty minute boat ride back. By the time we returned to the river bank where we had first stepped off the gun boat, the rest of the group had left and the only sign of their presence were a number of upturned canoes and a pile of paddles. It was nearing early evening with the sun low in the sky and we had calculated that we would reach camp just as it became dark.
The river itself was fairly shallow, but being so close to a melting glacier, was flowing fairly quickly. About five to ten metres wide, it was guided along by gravelly banks beyond which were summery meadows of metre high grass and the occasional bush.
My good friend Aamod and I decided to pair up. We flipped our canoe, placed in on the surface of the water and slowly got in. There were two dry compartments - fore and aft. Aamod, being super wary of his gear getting wet had used up our camp's supply of plastic sandwich bags to individually wrap each of his possessions. He further extended this protection by locking his bag within the fore compartment. Despite having several hundred pounds worth of technology in my day bag, I failed to seal the aft compartment closed after placing my bag in there.
As we pushed off, I was adamant that I knew the correct form for steering a canoe, having spent the previous year rowing at my university college. I thought that if we wanted to turn right, we should paddle on the left. Aamod, having been canoeing (I hasten to add - unsuccessfully) before, was convinced that paddling on the right side would accomplish this. In some ways, we were both right - except that instead of both paddling on the same side, one person should have held his oar up, to slow the boat down.
We began our journey by meandering from bank to bank, arguing with each other over the correct steering technique and making little headway. Still, the river moved quickly and we were moving downstream at a respectable rate.
Six minutes into the journey, our meandering took an unfortunate turn (quite literally) and we made contact with a ridge of gravel amidst the river. Were it the bank, we would likely have just bounced off and head back towards the other side of the river. Unfortunately, the shape of the mid-river ridge and the angle with which we struck it (and Newton's 3rd Law) meant that our canoe flipped over almost immediately. Aamod and I fell straight into the icy water, followed by my bag containing my two cameras, phone and GPS tracker.
My immediate reaction to this was to swear as loudly as possible. Having heard our cries and the considerable splash of two overweight (at the time) young men falling into the water, our friends turned around. Amused, they laughed and took photos.
It was no laughing matter however and with the river speed pushing 17 miles per hour (a fact revealed by the six minutes of GPS data I had captured and was later able to analyse) it was a struggle to even stand up in the shallow river. After much fumbling of our feet, Aamod and I managed to hold our positions, with me holding the paddle in my right arm and the boat with my left upstream and Aamod standing downstream of the bow of the boat.
The next step was to try and flip the boat to its correct orientation. This in itself was remarkably easy but as the corrected boat gained a V profile in the fast moving water, it began to accelerate downstream. Unfortunately, Aamod was standing downstream of the boat and as it picked up speed, it continued at pace into his crotch. I was still holding the rear of the boat but Aamod, now in considerable pain, pitched over and let go of the front of the boat.
With Aamod's crotch now no longer stopping the boat from moving downstream, it continued with the water and pulled me along with it. With my boots struggling to gain any traction on the riverbed, I flipped the canoe in an attempt to get it to slow down. This helped and I was able to stop the canoe from moving as quickly as it was but this left me in an undesirable position, trapped under the boat in an air pocket that was quickly filling up with water. The boat continued to move with the water and whilst I tried to dig my heels into the gravelly floor of the river, the force of the river was too much.
Realising at this stage that I could very possibly drown if trapped under the boat for much longer, I jumped up with all my might and pushed the boat up and over to the side. The water quickly took hold of it again and carried it off away from us. By this point Aamod had begun to make a move for the damned ridge in the middle of the river and I did the same.
Crawling up onto the ridge, we were both soaked and quickly started shivering. Luckily we were the penultimate canoe in our group and the last canoe pulled over as soon as they saw us. I don't remember much of the next three hours except that it was extremely cold and it quickly grew dark. One of the two canoeists who pulled over was a retired high school English teacher called Buzz who told us about how he had once travelled to London, on a trip to Europe in his early 20s (in the 60s). I can't imagine how different it must be now. He also showed us his photos on his SLR and mentioned that he had almost run out of space on his SD card and would soon buy another to put photos on - since he didn't own a computer. Wow.
I couldn't help but laugh at my misfortune with my D-SLR while we waited for help. As it became dark, Aamod and I started getting colder and colder. We sheltered under the upturned canoe. Our clothes refused to dry with any sort of speed and the ridge itself, being about 10 feet long and 3 feet wide, didn't offer enough space to move and generate heat.
About three hours later, we heard a distant droning noise. Help, we hoped. The shiny aluminium gunboat grew closer and perched on the bow of the boat was the lodge owner's husky - nose out and searching for us. The lodge owner piloted his gunboat, cigar in mouth and with a concerned look on his face. Next to him was our tour guide. Hanging out of the rear of the boat was our canoe and paddle. They pulled up, wrapped us up in some warm blankets and fed us some watery instant hot chocolate.
The journey back was a blur - under the dark night sky, the banks of the river became indistinguishable and I wasn't in any sort of mood to pay attention to anything but getting warmer. Soon the lights of the lodge appeared in the distance and before we knew it, we were home, having missed dinner and having been excused from having to do the washing up! I was relieved to hear that my bag had been recovered - trying to get a police report to verify that I had lost my camera for the insurance company in the middle of the Alaskan outback would have been a very difficult task indeed.
The rest of the trip was beautiful but I have no photos of my own of the places we visited. I'll go back one day and continue the canoe trip - although this time I'll both waterproof my gear and perhaps agree with Aamod on how best to steer downstream :-).
The GPS track of that fateful journey:
View Larger Map
The picture my friends snapped as they were busy laughing at us:
In 2007, a group of three friends and I ventured out to Alaska on a two week Trek America trip which took us in a figure of eight circuit some way into the Alaskan interior and back down south again to the peninsula. As 19 and 20 year olds, we wouldn't have been able to travel the vast Alaskan highways in our own car. We went at the beginning of September which is traditionally the last good part of Alaskan summer. In fact, a week after we left it started snowing heavily.
With a small surplus of cash from my summer internship, and in a photography craze, I had been lusting after the newly announced Samsung GX-10 D-SLR - this was a rebranded Pentax K10D but as Samsung's first SLR, discounted. Prices in London were pushing £450 but I held that camera in the back of mind. When we got to Anchorage, we stumbled across a famous camera shop - Stewart's Photo Shop. Amazingly, they had this camera in stock and with the GBP-USD rate being favourable, I walked out with the camera, an 8GB SD card and a case for under £400.
Alaska treated us to some beautiful weather that first week and armed with my shiny new camera, I took three hundred photos in the first three days. Additionally, having geeked out before the trip, I had a second smaller camera, a mobile phone and GPS tracker which I kept on the go concurrently - taking a GPS track as went with the intention of geo tagging photos afterwards.
On the third day, we rolled up to Maclaren River Lodge - a place that, to this day, is still my favourite place in the entire world. To get to the lodge, we travelled for a few hours off the paved highway down a gravelly mountain pass and over a deep ravine on a rickety wooden bridge. The lodge itself was beautifully built, run by an owner whose name eludes me. We visitors slept in a wooden bunk house and ate dinner in a warm and homely common room. Near to the lodge were kennels housing the owner's huskies - while unpacking our belongings we caught site of these Iditarod competitors in training as they pulled a quad bike along the road. On the night we arrived, the sun set in a hauntingly beautiful orange sky where the peach infused clouds rolled infinitely onwards in every direction.
The next morning we took an aluminium gunboat out to a enormous plain where we would trek out to a glacier, attempt to touch it and then return by kayak. Fuelling the gunboat was an amusingly terrifying experience as our loveable lodge owner smoked a cigar with one hand and poured liquid diesel into the gunboat's tank.
The trek itself was deceptively tiring, taking what seemed like forever to reach the glacier in the middle distance. Disappointingly, we weren't able to touch the glacier itself but I did grab a nice handful of its meltwater. The plain we trekked over was so far from actual civilisation that it was possibly the single most awe inspiring place I have ever been to. The feeling of being almost completely and utterly alone was sublime.
In the spirit of our Alaskan adventure, my group of four friends and a couple of others elected to canoe back to the camp, a three hour paddle downriver versus a thirty minute boat ride back. By the time we returned to the river bank where we had first stepped off the gun boat, the rest of the group had left and the only sign of their presence were a number of upturned canoes and a pile of paddles. It was nearing early evening with the sun low in the sky and we had calculated that we would reach camp just as it became dark.
The river itself was fairly shallow, but being so close to a melting glacier, was flowing fairly quickly. About five to ten metres wide, it was guided along by gravelly banks beyond which were summery meadows of metre high grass and the occasional bush.
My good friend Aamod and I decided to pair up. We flipped our canoe, placed in on the surface of the water and slowly got in. There were two dry compartments - fore and aft. Aamod, being super wary of his gear getting wet had used up our camp's supply of plastic sandwich bags to individually wrap each of his possessions. He further extended this protection by locking his bag within the fore compartment. Despite having several hundred pounds worth of technology in my day bag, I failed to seal the aft compartment closed after placing my bag in there.
As we pushed off, I was adamant that I knew the correct form for steering a canoe, having spent the previous year rowing at my university college. I thought that if we wanted to turn right, we should paddle on the left. Aamod, having been canoeing (I hasten to add - unsuccessfully) before, was convinced that paddling on the right side would accomplish this. In some ways, we were both right - except that instead of both paddling on the same side, one person should have held his oar up, to slow the boat down.
We began our journey by meandering from bank to bank, arguing with each other over the correct steering technique and making little headway. Still, the river moved quickly and we were moving downstream at a respectable rate.
Six minutes into the journey, our meandering took an unfortunate turn (quite literally) and we made contact with a ridge of gravel amidst the river. Were it the bank, we would likely have just bounced off and head back towards the other side of the river. Unfortunately, the shape of the mid-river ridge and the angle with which we struck it (and Newton's 3rd Law) meant that our canoe flipped over almost immediately. Aamod and I fell straight into the icy water, followed by my bag containing my two cameras, phone and GPS tracker.
My immediate reaction to this was to swear as loudly as possible. Having heard our cries and the considerable splash of two overweight (at the time) young men falling into the water, our friends turned around. Amused, they laughed and took photos.
It was no laughing matter however and with the river speed pushing 17 miles per hour (a fact revealed by the six minutes of GPS data I had captured and was later able to analyse) it was a struggle to even stand up in the shallow river. After much fumbling of our feet, Aamod and I managed to hold our positions, with me holding the paddle in my right arm and the boat with my left upstream and Aamod standing downstream of the bow of the boat.
The next step was to try and flip the boat to its correct orientation. This in itself was remarkably easy but as the corrected boat gained a V profile in the fast moving water, it began to accelerate downstream. Unfortunately, Aamod was standing downstream of the boat and as it picked up speed, it continued at pace into his crotch. I was still holding the rear of the boat but Aamod, now in considerable pain, pitched over and let go of the front of the boat.
With Aamod's crotch now no longer stopping the boat from moving downstream, it continued with the water and pulled me along with it. With my boots struggling to gain any traction on the riverbed, I flipped the canoe in an attempt to get it to slow down. This helped and I was able to stop the canoe from moving as quickly as it was but this left me in an undesirable position, trapped under the boat in an air pocket that was quickly filling up with water. The boat continued to move with the water and whilst I tried to dig my heels into the gravelly floor of the river, the force of the river was too much.
Realising at this stage that I could very possibly drown if trapped under the boat for much longer, I jumped up with all my might and pushed the boat up and over to the side. The water quickly took hold of it again and carried it off away from us. By this point Aamod had begun to make a move for the damned ridge in the middle of the river and I did the same.
Crawling up onto the ridge, we were both soaked and quickly started shivering. Luckily we were the penultimate canoe in our group and the last canoe pulled over as soon as they saw us. I don't remember much of the next three hours except that it was extremely cold and it quickly grew dark. One of the two canoeists who pulled over was a retired high school English teacher called Buzz who told us about how he had once travelled to London, on a trip to Europe in his early 20s (in the 60s). I can't imagine how different it must be now. He also showed us his photos on his SLR and mentioned that he had almost run out of space on his SD card and would soon buy another to put photos on - since he didn't own a computer. Wow.
I couldn't help but laugh at my misfortune with my D-SLR while we waited for help. As it became dark, Aamod and I started getting colder and colder. We sheltered under the upturned canoe. Our clothes refused to dry with any sort of speed and the ridge itself, being about 10 feet long and 3 feet wide, didn't offer enough space to move and generate heat.
About three hours later, we heard a distant droning noise. Help, we hoped. The shiny aluminium gunboat grew closer and perched on the bow of the boat was the lodge owner's husky - nose out and searching for us. The lodge owner piloted his gunboat, cigar in mouth and with a concerned look on his face. Next to him was our tour guide. Hanging out of the rear of the boat was our canoe and paddle. They pulled up, wrapped us up in some warm blankets and fed us some watery instant hot chocolate.
The journey back was a blur - under the dark night sky, the banks of the river became indistinguishable and I wasn't in any sort of mood to pay attention to anything but getting warmer. Soon the lights of the lodge appeared in the distance and before we knew it, we were home, having missed dinner and having been excused from having to do the washing up! I was relieved to hear that my bag had been recovered - trying to get a police report to verify that I had lost my camera for the insurance company in the middle of the Alaskan outback would have been a very difficult task indeed.
The rest of the trip was beautiful but I have no photos of my own of the places we visited. I'll go back one day and continue the canoe trip - although this time I'll both waterproof my gear and perhaps agree with Aamod on how best to steer downstream :-).
The GPS track of that fateful journey:
View Larger Map
The picture my friends snapped as they were busy laughing at us:
Don Donner II wrote at 10:03 pm on Sat 20th Apr -
Amazing! Things don't change much in Alaska so I am sure you can replicate that journey and continue
where you 'left off'. 2017...here it comes...
where you 'left off'. 2017...here it comes...
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