Ride Without Gps

A Page from one of the.....

Gall and Inglis cycle touring books I have collected which

show contours for almost any road route you might choose in England.

These are the covers of 1898 Southeast and 1923 England Editions

My own highly illustrative and achievementful section of ridewithgps.com . (Actually, I don't bother with this bit)

One of the useful bits of ridewithgps.com.  Within the next few weeks I will be riding and leading a ride over this route.

And this is how to work out how far it is to work and back, without the benefit of a speedo.

Hi

In some areas of my life I am a luddite (non believer in technology) and in others I am not.  As examples, I don't own a smartphone, do fitbits,  facebook, linkedin, snapchat, sms, gps or itunes and a host of other techno stuff.  My current bikes don't have speedos (budgie smuggler or digital computer type) .  

While these high tech things might have their virtues, I can probably live without them, and if I used them, they would probably waste my time.  It is really a question of whether a  thing (say a fitbit) is my servant, providing useful information compared to the time invested, or your master, being more of a pain in the backside than what its worth.

  On the other hand, I am perfectly prepared to forge ahead in the brave new world of 3d cad and printers and the new and interesting Human Powered Vehicles they can create. And blogs and stuff.

To each his own I guess.  Recently I started preparing an Audax permanent ride from Albury to Corryong and return, and some of the correspondence with Audax HQ went thusly "You need to map the rides preferably using  a mapping program, ride with GPS is preferred" and that was rather daunting to a luddite like me.  But I jumped in and after a few tries, ended up with quite a good result, with nice contours showing the ride elevation and slopes for the proposed ride going up and down all over the place. Hopefully the stuff I've done will be enough to produce an Audax ride guide. 

The contour information is in no way new!  The small sized, fine papered, bible-resembling Gall and Inglis Contour books provided the same information for England from about 1898 on, and I've copied a few pages here in this post.

After a few weeks of riding to my new work / study at Monash Caulfield, curiosity and the lack of a speedo got the better of me and I set to work to find how far I rode every day.  After a few mouse clicks I was there, about 15 flattish k's to work.  No speedo or fit bit necessary.

Plan to do a recce ride near Corryong next weekend and and I'm leading an ozhpv ride weekend based on the proposed Audax route the weekend after that (coming up very quickly, gosh!)  I will post photos.

Regards

Steve Nurse