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January 26, 2005

26/01/2005-23:50:47

mmm... mexican

Posted by robl at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)

26/01/2005-16:24:07

can anyone else see a face in this newly varnished wood ?

Posted by robl at 04:24 PM | Comments (1)

January 25, 2005

Where we are going!

Our itinerary:

Posted by deb at 01:12 AM | Comments (0)

January 24, 2005

Plans made !

Well, we've booked our trip (or at least reserved the tickets). The itinery is linked from the sidebar on the right. I thought I'd give a quick rundown on how we decided where we wanted to go ...

The first thing was deciding on how long we wanted to go for - this came down to us wanting to be back for christmas 05 so we were limited to a maximum trip of about 10/11 months. Other factors are obviously cash and optionally how much time you can get off work (we just decided to quit - yey !).

Once you've figured out how long you want to travel for the next part is the most difficult one - the destinations !

One of the things we've tried to do a lot of on our holidays recently is snowboarding, we've both got reasonably proficient so we decided to make a large part of our trip involve it. I've been to Canada a couple of times and I've loved Vancouver and B.C in general so we wanted to take a little tour if possible. It also happens to be a great destination for Snowboarding which is handy :)

Deb has always wanted to go and see Japan/China (being the sushi master and all) and I wanted to see Hong Kong so that was another set of destinations added.

We both wanted to go to New Zealand and spend a good amount of time there (again another great location for Snowboarding !) - another key destination.

To fill in the gaps between these countries we spent an afternoon looking through various travel books - The Travel Book and One Planet (thanks Deb's Parents and Steve). We marked all the places we wanted to go and see and fit them in between our key destinations.

We then whittled them down - there were a few we would have liked to have seen like Chile/Easter Island and Nepal. Nepal was a possibility but the US Government travel warnings didn't look too friendly so we decided against it.

We wanted to see some sun between the snowboarding so we tried to pick destinations with a bit of Sun (Mexico, Bangkok, Japan, Fiji) at the times between the snowboarding countries.

Then there were some places that were 'jump points' to get where we wanted to go - San Fransisco and Austrailia being the main ones so we decided to hang around rather than fly straight through.

The last thing - booking the tickets. We went to STA travel and talked to a nice man called Bob who took us all through it.

The only problem with all this - people can't vote where we go next - it was something we really wanted to do but the cost was prohibitive - although I still think there are some Poll based things we can do as we've got a month in Mexico where we're not sure what we want to do and over three months in New Zealand.

Posted by robl at 11:20 PM | Comments (0)

24/01/2005-17:27:36

new splashback

Posted by robl at 05:27 PM | Comments (0)

24/01/2005-06:08:28

pikachu and the ladies

Posted by robl at 06:08 AM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2005

Follow up to First GPS Journey Map

Well, I received the Euro Metroguide and I plotted the track from Otley to Manchester and it was a lot more detailed. I've plotted the detail from moving out of the house to getting out of Otley so the street level detail is shown. I've also shown the equivalent map to the one I posted from the basemap. I might give City Navigator a try next ...

The detailed street map:
Detailed streetmap

The overview map:
Overview map

Posted by robl at 06:09 PM | Comments (3)

January 22, 2005

First GPS Journey Map

We used the GPS (properly) for the first time today, Richard took us shopping to Manchester for the day and I used the GPS to record the route he took. I've only currently got the basemap loaded into the unit (I should be getting the latest Euro Metroguide in the next few days) so I was interested in how accurate the basic worldmap loaded into the unit is. It turns out it's not that bad but not much use for road navigation :)

The 'track' is below. It's not terrible but thats as detailed as it gets .... When I get the Euroguide map I'll plot it on that for a comparison.


Otley to manchester

Posted by robl at 09:11 PM | Comments (3)

22/01/2005-15:52:55

sage @ picadilly

Posted by robl at 03:53 PM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2005

21/01/2005-22:29:23

jacknife in otley

Posted by robl at 10:29 PM | Comments (0)

21/01/2005-21:49:48

shes got the whole world in her hands

Posted by robl at 09:49 PM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2005

19/01/2005-16:23:31

more tea vicar ?

Posted by robl at 04:23 PM | Comments (0)

Garmin etrex Legend C arrives


I've finally got myself a GPS reciever, so we can update our position on the map in the sidebar as we travel round the world. I really didn't know too much about GPS receivers when I first started looking round but I had a few criteria that it had to meet :

Also I would have liked :

After searching I originally came up with two (cheap) choices :

I was initially quite excited by the Fortuna as it was pretty much the only unit with both a handheld display and bluetooth (and was available on ebay for less than £100). After some thought I decided I didn't really need bluetooth as I'd probably buy a dedicated sat nav system for the car when I got back and there wasn't any decent GPS software for my P910i. If I was going to use it with the laptop then I didn't really need the bluetooth connectivity as we're not going to be walking with the laptop out :)

This left the Garmin eTrex which more or less fitted my basic criteria but only supported a serial port connection to the laptop - you can buy serial to usb adaptors but I'd read some posts saying they didn't always work (as Garmin Mapsource software only looks for COM ports 1->4). Thats when the technolust hit me - I saw the new Garmin eTrex Legend C ... It was basically like the old Garmin etrex Vista (top end of the garmin outdoor line) with 24Mb of mapping memory but without the compass and altimeter and this one had colour and did autorouting for when you're in the car ! It also supported USB out of the box ...

So £245 later I've got a brand spanking new handheld GPS ...

Here are a few pictures - deb's the photographer (this way I can test the photogallery functionality too !)

Posted by robl at 02:12 PM | Comments (0)

Realwood Furniture & Joinery Launched

Apart from watching "Charmed", since quitting work I've been mostly spending my time finishing off a few sites. So on Monday we launched the first, Larry's new site: realwood.co.uk

There's still a little more content to go up there, but it's generally complete - yay.

Posted by deb at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)

January 18, 2005

Letters to the Editor

With all this time on our hands, and with the help of Mr Running Richard himself, I had my debut in the local Newspaper (Wharfedale and Airedale Observer) letters section last Thursday. We did write this after a couple of beers, but I feel it expresses some of my views on when is going on in Otley at the moment.

Look under (our mirror) "Plans run-in" for my letter...

Posted by deb at 12:22 AM | Comments (0)

January 16, 2005

16/01/2005-00:46:30

birthday !

Posted by robl at 12:46 AM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2005

15/01/2005-20:59:23

yaadgar quality mixed sweets

Posted by robl at 08:59 PM | Comments (0)

15/01/2005-20:34:39

ricks trick

Posted by robl at 08:34 PM | Comments (0)

15/01/2005-01:50:21

cheese tree !

Posted by robl at 01:50 AM | Comments (0)

15/01/2005-00:51:28

haha

Posted by robl at 12:51 AM | Comments (0)

15/01/2005-00:45:46

bowling green

Posted by robl at 12:45 AM | Comments (0)

15/01/2005-00:43:38

yey - my toenail came off

Posted by robl at 12:43 AM | Comments (0)

15/01/2005-00:38:54

my new profession

Posted by robl at 12:38 AM | Comments (0)

15/01/2005-00:36:36

mmm ... pasta bake

Posted by robl at 12:36 AM | Comments (0)

15/01/2005-00:26:37

deb goes crazy

Posted by robl at 12:26 AM | Comments (0)

January 13, 2005

First Post !

Well, we've finally taken the plunge and jacked in our jobs. We've saved our pennies and now we can afford to lounge at home, err, travel round the world. For those of you who know us well it will come as no surprise to learn that we've not quite finished the planning yet - however what we have done is developed this web site to log our travels :) We'll be putting up a new poll every so often, in theory we should be allowing you to vote for where we travel to next - there's a certain lack of flexibilty due to the nature of round the world tickets but we'll see how it goes but I think we'll probably have to pick the first destination. The first poll is up now - although it's not destination based - Go and vote !

Posted by robl at 01:30 PM | Comments (6)

Very big map of where we've been

Very big map of where we've been

Posted by robl at 03:16 AM | Comments (0)

Big Map of where we've been

As we travel round the world we'll be plotting our progress from country to country - see where we've been ...

Big map<br /> of where we've been

Posted by robl at 03:10 AM | Comments (0)

Wake Up

Should we get out of bed before midday ?

Posted by robl at 02:15 AM | Comments (4)