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 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. 

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. 

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.

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!

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 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.

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'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!

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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!

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'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.

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:

(View in high res)

I'm writing this on the eve of the date that Stanford has traditionally notified applicants about their admissions decisions for the Master of Science in computer science course. I'm expecting to get rejected again this year - this is the second time I've applied for the program. However, what I thought might be interesting is to shed some light on what kind of candidate you have to be to get into this program. The obvious caveat being that I haven't navigated the process successfully - so this might not be accurate. Additionally, this is an external view of the process - so it's likely to be misinformed.

What value I can add though, is that I've read through a considerable number of profiles from applicants who have successfully been admitted to Stanford. I've also been in touch with several of these and learnt more about their background. I've applied twice and I've read just about everything that there could possibly be online about the process, and several actual books too. For a lot of the last year, it's all that's been on my mind (unhealthy, and unfortunate for my friends and family). I've also been in touch with a family friend who is a professor of a computer science graduate program at a state university. This advice will apply to many other graduate schools too - I picked Stanford since it's the only one of the big four that has an established and popular general computer science Master's program. (Carnegie Mellon started theirs only a couple of years ago, and Berkeley only offers a Master's of Engineering program. MIT only admits applicants with a PhD as their degree objective.)

This post isn't mean to put you off applying to Stanford - but it's mean to bring you down to the ground and help you understand the harsh and competitive reality of applying to the number 1 US Master's program in computer science so that you can make an informed decision about whether you want to spend your $125 there (and many hours of your time applying).

The Competition

The first thing to note is that there are about 700 applications for approximately 120 offers (extrapolating based on data available here). Nearly everyone who gets an offer takes it. Rather than taking this as 6 people for every place, think about it as there being 580 other applicants who you must be better than in order to get admitted. This figure includes HCP applicants who, more often than not, will have taken NDO classes (see the next section) and hence will have a slight advantage over external applicants.

While this pool of applicants is reasonably self selecting (i.e. most will be incredibly competitive) - there do seem to be a large number of unqualified people who apply simply on the back of the Stanford name. This undoubtedly makes the admissions committee's job much harder and increases the chance of your application being a false negative - i.e. rejected despite being perfectly well qualified.

The Process

This is how I imagine the committee's evaluation process to be, based on what I've read around the interweb (and on this paper).

Firstly, applications are pre-screened for those that don't meet a minimum GRE and GPA threshold (see the next two sections).

Secondly, some (but not all) of the committee will look at each application and assign it a score. These scores are normalised between members so that the distribution of scores are roughly equivalent. These scores are then summed to give an overall score for the applicant. Based on specific thresholds, applications are either accepted or rejected. This threshold is different for different applications - it is higher to external applicants than for internal applicants who have previously studied at Stanford. For the Stanford MS CS program, HCP applicants (their part time option for people who work in the Bay Area) are considered together with full time applicants. Since their primary goal is to evaluate how well you'll do at Stanford level coursework, having taken NDO (non-degree option) classes and having scored well in them suggests you will cope and hence there is a lower threshold for these applicants. See this ancient email for more information.

An easy way to get ahead in the Stanford applications game is to take a handful of NDO classes online and do well in them. These are not cheap however, especially compared to the plethora of free MOOCs available online.

GRE

Stanford themselves state on their FAQ page that a strong application would include GRE scores in the 90th percentile. The first time I applied, my scores were in the 89th and 84th percentile - high but not high enough. Unless every other aspect of your application is stellar, I wouldn't bother applying with scores that aren't in the 90th percentile (a fact that I realised after my first rejection). This isn't an impossible score to achieve - it just requires a month or more of reasonable studying. Doing well on the GRE is all about practice - and if you're unable to do well on the GRE after a significant amount of practice, then perhaps graduate school isn't for you. Before applying for the second time, I studied a little harder and was able to bump my scores up to the 93rd and 96th percentile without much difficulty.

Grade Point Average

The successful applicants I've seen generally have a stellar GPA (there are exceptions of course, but I'll talk about that in a moment). Successful US applicants seem to mainly have GPAs greater than 3.6 / 4.0. International applicants tend to be in the top segment of their class. Be wary if you're an international student at a university like Oxford or Cambridge - your 1st class 70% mark in your papers will translate badly (even though the admissions committee are aware of the different grading scales) - a 70% in an American university translates, I'm told, to a C grade. This does not reflect well at all. Another caveat (which I failed at foreseeing) was that Stanford's FAQ page suggests putting in the minimum required GPA if your undergraduate university doesn't provide one. I left this blank which defaults to 0.0. If any sort of harsh automated filter is used - my application will probably go straight to the rejection pile.

A note on automated filters - from what I've read (and it's not clear whether Stanford has implemented these in their admissions workflow and in what form), filters will only discard your application if you fail on both the minimum required GPA and any minimum required GRE. Harsh but an easy way for the admissions committee to focus on the known top applicants. Yes, it's unfair - as we all know, many academically challenged applicants struggled at university and they've gone on to make millions or do world changing deeds - but computer science graduate schools can afford to be this selective.

There are just so many applicants that they don't need to take bets - they just want people who they know will cope with their courses, and so they use past performance as an indicator of future performance. Some universities are harsher than this than others - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is notorious for wanting incoming students to have a near 4.0 GPA, even for their professional MCS program. Of course this puts applicants from highly competitive universities at a disadvantage - while I struggled to maintain high exam marks at Cambridge, I could have studied at other universities where examinations aren't graded on a curve and done extremely well.

Additionally, note that university ranking has much less of an effect than you might hope. It matters less where you went than how well you did there. They won't take a mediocre applicant from a top 10 university over a great applicant from a top 50 university - all other things being equal.

Extra-Curricular

Additionally, you may think - it's OK, I didn't do so well during my time at university but I have great extra-curriculars! That's perfect - if you're applying for an MBA program. I cycled for Cambridge University and across a frickin' continent - that's great, but Stanford probably doesn't really care. Sure, you may have made it to Everest Base Camp or the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro - but that has little bearing on how well you're going to do in their graduate level courses (although it will stead you well in all those future walking meetings that technology companies are beginning to love).

What Stanford and other top computer science graduate schools want to see, however, is that you are a great computer scientist. For instance - you've started technology companies in your spare time (which might explain low grades) or you're a programming competition fanatic. If you're going for a PhD program, they want to see that you're a good researcher - so you need to have published at least some good quality research. There's a certain irony in the fact that you need to have research experience in order to gain admission to a course where you effectively learn how to research but that's the changing shape of the world these days.

Research experience is extremely beneficial although not mandatory. Academics live mainly to publish papers, at least it seems that way in the US. If you've written a paper, you're effectively speaking their language. It's incredibly hard to publish a paper when you're not at university (unless you're lucky to be in a situation where you can do so through) - and still very hard to do so while an undergraduate student. It helps a lot though.

Letters of Recommendation

Another large pit ripe for falling into, especially applicable to international students - is that letters of recommendation are preferably written by a professor who knows you well. Admissions committees view the source of the letters in this order: professor they know > professor they don't know > general academic (lecturer, etc.) > graduate student > line manager > colleague. This is because a professor's academic reputation is at stake when they write a letter of recommendation - so logic dictates they are more likely to be honest. They also have a better understanding of what skills are required at graduate school.

This is incredibly difficult - at most British universities, lecturers have a hands off approach to teaching outside of lectures themselves. I know just a single professor well enough from Cambridge - who was an unreliable letter writer at best and a disastrous letter writer at worst (in the last application round he spent a total of 17 minutes on one of my letters). My strategy has been to solicit strong letters from less prestigious non-academic letter writers who know me well - such as my current and previous manager, both of whom had good things to say about me. I figure a very strong letter from someone less well known is better than a nondescript letter from a professor who barely knew you.

American letter writers are much more effusive in how they write about candidates - be aware of this when you brief your letter writers. For example, everything 'good' should be 'great' and so on. Furthermore, brief them on the sort of content that they might want to include - on the basis that the admissions committee want to know how well you will do at graduate school.

The categories I asked my writers to mention were:

• Research ability / ability to succeed at graduate level


• Comparison against peers of a similar experience level


• Hard examples of projects I've done (well)


• Leadership skills, passion, work habits, character, social skills, writing skills, presentation skills and other accomplishments

Additionally, if you have a low GPA - or some overt blip in your performance, it's very helpful to get a letter writer who knew at the time to acknowledge it.

Statement of Purpose

The problem with my statement of purpose essay and those written by most other applicants is that it's less of a statement of purpose and more of a resume in prose form.

What I'm going to say next is painfully obvious, yet is something that nearly all of us mess up. Make your statement of purpose an actual statement of purpose! You need to say what you actually plan to do - why you applied, what you plan to do while enrolled (what courses? what research aims?) and what you plan to do after graduating.

You should aim to specialise each essay as much as possible (and SRSLY, if you copy and paste, make sure you check for errors). This means mentioning courses that you would like to study, professors that you would like to study or research with and why that particular program is perfect for you.

Start this early - the process of writing the essay may help you realise that you actually probably don't want to study there so much. This is helpful because it means you'll either save yourself the application fee or it will sting slightly less when/if you get rejected. Additionally, it's one of the few aspects of the application that is totally in your control so only a fool wouldn't make full use of this advantage.

One final tip - think of your essay as being similar to a cover letter. Instead of saying why you want a particular job and using examples from your resume to back it up, you're saying why you should be admitted to particular program and backing it up with examples from your life.

Rankings

Try not to fixate too much on the US News graduate school rankings. It's not a bad place to start - but you need to actually look at the programs and departments in depth before applying. I see so many applicants who blindly pick the top 10 and apply to these - this is a recipe for failure. Look at the credits required for graduation and try to compose an actual program of courses for yourself (as best you can). I tried this with several universities and realised that actually they didn't offer anything I wanted to study.

Professional versus Academic Programs

A note on professional programs versus academic programs. Professional programs are definitely easier to get admission into than academic programs. Academic Master's are used by students with average to good profiles to get valuable (research) experience and brush up their GPA before applying for a PhD program. Generally admissions committees for top departments seem to only accept applicants with a PhD (or a career in academia) as their career objective to academic Master's programs - unless you have a particularly strong background or there is an otherwise compelling reason to admit you. I fell into this trap this year - and was quickly rejected by many of the academic programs I had applied to.

Finances

If you're going for a Master's program and you can't afford to - then reconsider strongly whether it's worth applying to many of the top programs. As I said, they are so oversubscribed that they don't need to offer financial aid to attract students and nearly always won't. Those that do, for example the University of Wisconsin at Madison - are considerably more oversubscribed. Last year they received 1220 applicants for both PhD and Master's programs - and fill fewer places than Stanford (about 70 Master's students graduate per year).

Contacting Graduate Schools

In order to stress the point about over-subscription - it will be extremely difficult to get a reply from the admissions office for many of the top universities during application season. They will not pick up the phone or reply to emails. You will have more luck outside of September to April, but they're still likely to be very brusque. If you're applying for a professional program, you'll have a better chance of talking to someone - since these programs are more profitable for the university and therefore they provide better support for applicants. If you get rejected from a top university, don't expect any feedback - and don't expect them to provide much in the way of useful advice if you do manage to talk to someone. Your best bet is one of the many graduate forums (see the resources section at the end of this post).

Decisions

When it comes to decisions, universities send out their decisions at a similar date yearly. You should be aware that often universities will send out all of their acceptances first and often wait for up to six weeks before sending out rejections. This gives them the flexibility to offer any quickly rejected offers to other applicants - although this is rare, since most applicants will sit on offers until they all come in. If you see a rash of acceptances on one of the decisions trackers online and you haven't heard anything within a day or two - assume you've been rejected, it's better for your sanity. Some universities (such as UT Austin) are particularly evil - and don't send out rejections at all.

Area of Concentration

Finally, it's worth saying that you should consider what area you want to study carefully. I want to study artificial intelligence and I've always wanted to study this. There were a couple of courses taught at Cambridge but I didn't get to immerse myself in the way that I hoped and time constraints made it very difficult to devote enough attention to them. That said, my employment experience and extra-curriculars are unrelated to the field. This loops back to what I said earlier - in order to gain admission for a course to learn about AI (or any other specialization) - they want to see experience in AI. This matters less so for general computer science courses but if you're applying to say CMU's Robotics Institute (as I did) - you haven't got a chance without relevant experience.

Additionally, some areas are vastly more popular than others. I'd assume that admissions committees want to balance their classes as much as possible, so if you apply for AI/Machine Learning/Robotics or some similarly oversubscribed area - BE WARY! Competition within that area will be tougher (on an absolute numbers basis). Bear in mind that you can always choose courses from a different specialisation to the one you apply for.

Conclusion

To conclude - I apologise if I sound overly cynical - I just want to be realistic about your chances (and mine!). With the economy pushing graduates onto higher education across all subjects and the considerable salary differential (or, the perception of one) between technology jobs in the United States and elsewhere, there are more applicants than ever before. It's even harder if you're an international applicant as most of us are. There's some great advice on the internet but much of it was written a few years ago, and as any good technologist knows, things change so very quickly.

Good luck with your application, I wish you all the best. If you have any questions or feedback, please message me on The Grad Cafe. I can't promise to reply but I will try.

I've also written about the economics of getting a Master's degree here, as well as about adequate preparation for incoming robotics Master's students. Finally, another post about employability with a Master of Engineering degree.

A Note on Copyright

This post is published under the Creative Commmons BY-NC-SA license. Please feel free to share it along with with a link back to this page.

Resources

GRE Preparation

• Nova's GRE Math Prep Course - Full of harder and more comprehensive examples than the official GRE book.


• Essential Words for the GRE - A short book that was very helpful when learning vocabulary.


• GRE The Official Guide to the Revised General Test - The official ETS GRE book. A must have.


• Painless GRE - An Android application that was extremely helpful to brush on vocabulary while commuting to work.

On Letters of Recommendation

• Advice from UW's Michael Ernst


• Advice from Brown's Shriram Krishnamurthi


• A Sample Letter


• Some Advice on About.com

Books

• Graduate Admissions Essays, Fourth Edition - Donald Asher - An extremely well written collection of essays along with analysis.

Forums

• Edulix - Edulix is an Indian graduate programs forum. It has a trove of data through their 'uniSearch' on who's been admitted where. The uniSearch is incredibly clunky but is a valuable resource to see how competitive you might need to be.


• The Grad Cafe - My favourite grad applicants forum. They have a great results tracker and users are very helpful.

Internet

• Graduate Study in the Computer and Mathematical Sciences - A Survival Manual - useful advice on all aspects of graduate life.


• Mike Gleicher's Graduate School FAQ


• HOWTO: Get into grad school for science, engineering, math and computer science


• Advice for researchers and students


• Why Go to Graduate School and How to Get into the Program of your Dreams


• Applying to Graduate School in Computer Science (A U.S. Perspective)


• Jason I. Hong's collection of hyperlinks


• GradDecision - supposedly authored by Stanford's Andrew Ng


• Getting into CS Graduate School in the USA


• Demystifying the American Graduate Admissions Process - a paper written by Karthik Ragunathan, a Master's student from Stanford who was part of their MS admissions committee. Perhaps the most useful single document you will read.


• Ktik's Two Cents - a blog of admissions advice by Karthik
  

A Collection of Rejection Letters

On Google+ here.

I'm a little bit terrified of the world at the moment but, at the same, quietly optimistic.
The last eighteen months have been tough, I've been in and out of hospital, personal relationships came to an unfortunate (but, I suppose, inevitable) end and my career plan was derailed (temporarily). The hopelessly ambitious robot who runs my mind decided to take a brief holiday but as my life slowly sorts itself out, has returned to coerce the rest of me into moving forward.

One thing I've really missed, and this seems to happen whenever I'm back in London for any extended period of time - is cycling. Real cycling. A loose definition of real cycling might involve what we did each weekend in Cambridge - pounding the mild inclines and declines of Thetford Forest weekend after weekend in the quest to gain a mild advantage at the next Sports series race. A tighter definition might be something like the Tour D'Afrique. There's nothing quite like cycling over buttery smooth roads in the Sudanese desert, or soaring (metaphorically of course) towards the Tanzanian border over 'rolling' hills.

When I'm sitting in front of two screens with dry eyes, struggling to stave off the boredom of fixing another damned bug created by someone else, I think of these days. Even more at times like this when Doctor's orders are to stay away from my bike and just three years ago I was ploughing on through a corrugated and sandy Sudanese national park.

The fact that I probably couldn't do what I did three years ago now is what scares me. I've just turned 25 - and walking on the ice with my arm in a sling a few weeks ago was a nervewracking experience (and damned painful when I did eventually slip).

Perhaps I'm just getting old and boring.

Still, my knee's better now (I can run without searing pain!) and my shoulder feels better than it has since 2004. I was often scared of mountain biking after past hiatuses - so this should be no different. After watching Premium Rush this evening, I can't wait to get back on my bike. Graduate school applications should hopefully do well - my usual habit of meticulously overanalysing the process is helping - and I'll be starting a new, albeit very different, adventure in six months time.

So bring on May, sunshine and that joyous feeling of rolling freedom.

I had to duck out of the way when the barriers started closing.
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Over the last two years, I've developed a strong liking for matcha after first discovering it at the Canary Wharf branch of EAT. (In 2011 I set myself the goal of trying every variation of every warm drink in popular London coffee shops.)

Matcha, if you've not heard of it before, is a finely ground green powder made from green tea leaves. In Japan it is something of a delicacy and is normally served as part of an elaborate tea ceremony. In the west, it is commonly mixed with warm milk to produce a 'matcha latte'. It is relatively expensive because production of matcha is very slow, about 30 grams per hour according to Wikipedia.

Matcha varies in quality - the most expensive and highest grades have a much more intense flavour than cheaper variants. I've been experimenting with different sources of matcha, including from eBay (not good), from a variety of shops in San Francisco (very good) and from a variety of shops in London's Chinatown. The best I've found is from the Japan Centre in London.

It can be made into a variety of drinks, I normally either mix it into a protein shake or with milk (and a spoonful of Milo to sweeten slightly). It also makes a great baking ingredient and to date I've made a matcha trifle (rather like tiramisu), matcha, pistachio and white chocolate brownies and matcha rusks.

Fuck Yeah, Matcha! is a particularly favourite Tumblr of mine - they showcase beautiful photos of matcha based food and drink.

Matcha is also great for sufferers of thyroid disease like myself because it has a much lower fluoride content than tea and coffee. It also has a much longer half life - similar to green tea, so there are no unpleasant headaches in store. My favourite description of matcha's effects comes from Breakaway Matcha:

"The caffeine hit of an espresso can be a bit like having an express train screaming through the middle of your body: a deep, powerful, jittery roar. I find the effects of matcha to be just as stimulating but in a more delicate, refined way, as if a thousand butterflies have descended on my body, beating their wings until I'm lifted, gently but resolutely, a few inches off the ground. (Seriously.)"


My latest project has been to try and catalogue all the places that serve matcha in London. The map below is publicly editable - click here to add to it.

View Matcha! in a larger map

14:01
After several hours of procrastination, I'm starting out on an adventure, feeling a little tired, very fat and generally not my best. I'm writing a prototype mobile app to gather clinical survey data for a study my uncle will soon be running throughout hospitals in Edinburgh. The first port of call was Trigger.io's Forge tool, which compiles and packages HTML and Javascript to both Android and iOS mobile devices. This doesn't look like it'll be suitable for my needs, so I've registered as an Apple developer. The learning curve looks steep and so far it's taken nearly an hour (and still going) for Xcode to install on my tiny MacBook Air. The mini DisplayPort adaptor that is meant to connect my laptop to my monitor doesn't work, so I've ordered a new one in anticipation of the long hours that I don't want to be spending peering at an 11" screen.

This is an Easter Bank Holiday adventure. Time for some more matcha.

14:28
Xcode installed successfully! I'm running through the beginner's 'Hello World' tutorial. Xcode looks pretty slick but I'm a little terrified at the sight of Objective-C - having mainly programmed in C# and Java since my second year of university...

22:05
Was massively side tracked while going through the 'Hello World' tutorial and ended up catching up on the last but one copy of Wired. Then I went to the gym, came back, ate dinner ad played with my baby cousin for a few hours and watched an episode of Futarama. There's always tomorrow...

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Olympics!
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Brothers!
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A sneaky photo of the city I call home.
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A magnificent two story train.
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Luxury in first class ;-).
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Beautifully fogless.
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Again, no fog!
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Traffic and windmills. Fantastic.
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A terrifying climb up to the summit.
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Good morning Yosemite!
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We're very lucky not to have run out of fuel!
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