Road signs
i love cycling overseas you get to see all sorts of interesting signs. This one is great. I didn’t know that Red Squirrels in England are licensed to drive.
England
When you get sick of cycling…
The top of a big red bus can be a great way to see London. Besides, the driver has a better idea of how to get to the destination than hapless Adelaide cyclists (see previous post!).
Boris Bikes
We rode Boris Bikes on each of our four days in London. I distinctly recall being amazed a the number of docking stations when sitting on my couch back in Adelaide when I looked at the docking station PDF. But, in a variation of Murphy’s Law, you can never seem to find one when you are on the bike looking for one to leave you bike and when you don’t need one.
Here is our list of dos an don’ts
Do
1) make sure you have a map of docking stations – that may help overcome the Murphy’s law variation described above.
2) download a map app and mount your iPhone to the handlebar – it will save you cycling the wrong direction for 20 minutes. We tried to head to the Victoria and Albert museum but somehow ended up in the inner east!?!
3) make sure when you dock the bike, that the lights appear. We didn’t get the lights once and went for a little walk only to be prevented from picking up the two required bikes. This then involves a phone call and walking back to the original docking station.
4) Do cycle near Buckingham Palace at 11:00am, it is lot easier to ride on the road (no cars) than walking.
Don’ts
1) Ride the wrong way up a one-way street. (There are many of those!) The friendly police become less friendly.
2) Avoid the roads near Buckingham Palace at 11:00am. I am throwing out a big hello to the 10s of thousands of tourists who have taken a photo of the Australian couple cycling around the Palace. We were the only traffic on the street.
3) Cycle to a docking station in a tourist area in the morning expecting a space to be available. There won’t be any! It might look like it will save time but trying to find another docking station with space can be frustrating.
4) Don’t conclude because you see a name that you recognise that you are cycling the right direction. Helen said something like “Look, that sign says St James, we must be almost there.” The fact was that we were cycling in the opposite direction.
5) Expect any street-map or sign to be helpful for finding a docking station. The only exception are the maps on the docking station. Catch 22, the problem is you are looking at the map because the docking station can’t be found (I never thought they could disappear Dr Who style).
Official Rest Day
Like the riders in the Tour de France, every hard working traveler needs a rest from blogging. Today is it.
We finished dinner last night at 12:30 at The Ledbury. Yumm!
Until tomorrow.
Bookcase at the V&A
Not the healthiest option
snack at the V&A.
I had a healthy wrap with salad before this, I promise.
No traffic
Cycling has it’s advantages if you want a view.
Eurostar to London
We caught the train From Le Mans to Paris, went on a great taxi ride through Paris, then the Eurostar to London.
Foodie report…
Went to St John Restaurant last night!
The restaurant was quite noisy with a couple of large parties. Service was generally good, with a few long waits tarnishing the experience a bit. The food however is absolutely wonderful. It is a clean, minimal and traditional. Nothing over complicated. It highlights the best of British food.
He had potted pork with pickled cabbage, saddle of rabbit with courgettes with sides of spring vegetables and potatoes. Followed by shared Chocloate Cake and course of freshly backed Madeleines (awesome!!). She had brown shrimp and cabbage salad, pigeon and radishses.
I’d recommend everyone visit. It is a good contrast to the more complicated French food and it shows that the British traditions certainly have much to offer.
The Saturday morning technology report!
Well every holiday seems to involve a series of compromises in relation to the technology required to take photos and blog. This time we’ve ditched the hacked Dell Mini running Mac OS X and external hard drive. We have replaced it with two iPads, a photo back-up (Sanho iPad Hyperdrive), wireless router (for fixed internet in hotel rooms). Don’t forget three cameras!!
Well for those contemplating this setup I can provide some advice. The iPads work wonderfully well. Flickr Stackr is a great App fro managing your Flickr account (You can’t use all of the Flickr online functions on iPad’s Safari), Photoshop Express is great for a quick crop, rotate and touch-up. I can not be so glowing about WordPress application for blogging, it seems to have unexplained problems uploading sometimes. I find Flickr’s blog to WordPress function the easiest way to get a photo onto the blog.
The biggest problem is that a typical holiday could involved 40gb of photos, no iPad can handle that. The largest available is 64gb and with Apps and Music that is cutting it fine. So here steps in the Sanho iPad Hyperdrive. It is a portable, battery powered hardrive. It pretends to be a camera card so it can upload photos to the iPad. It also offers incremental backups. Sounds great? It did, we bought one. It has, in my opinion, very flakey operating software. I have had to format the harddrive twice and it seems to have problems with incremental back-ups. In no way would I recommend it someone for a road-trip.
So what gives? Well Apple has made a great platform with the the iPad, but Apple either needs to release a larger iPad (128gb or 256gb would be nice) or it needs to offer a better way of having external storage. Until that time it is a bit of a hassle for a long-road trip. I also hope that the next version of iOS makes it easier to delete events or photo albums on the iPad, currently it seems you can only delete a photo at a time! Ickkk that could cause RSI!
Your on the road technical advisor!
