CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
@algo,
Interesting - with a code from a paper map you can download maps even on the free service.
https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/shop/os-maps-online2.html
The Premium also allows you to print A3 now which is an improvement on the days when I subscribed to Getamap.
Might have a play with the app over the weekend
I paid £20 for a year's subscription to OS. It's been pretty useful, but I still much prefer paper maps. Have a few more months before I have to decide if I'll renew or not.
Phone use is OK, handy to have but I wouldn't rely on it. Quite hard to read compared with paper.
Most useful has been browsing on the computer (via the web interface) and printing out what we need. Scale printing is pretty good, though now have a folder full of random A4 sheets.
@algo, yeah, that does sound quite reasonable. Presumably after a year the maps are no longer viewable?
For maps that you download and get to keep forever then ViewRanger do all of Britain at 1:25000 for £250 (Pretty sure it was around £400 a couple of years back).
My go to place (when I'm on the PC) for browsing 1:25000 scale maps is http://www.bing.com/maps (change the drop down to OS).
Pretty speedy, almost as good as the no-longer-working http://uslot.com/NewBingTestPage.html
I had intended to print out the Explorer maps for the watershed crossings and the fiddling about in Inshriach from Bing maps (free for some reason) but I print so little these days that the printer had dried up and I couldn't do it before I set off. In retrospect I should have seen to this, especially given that I was solo.
@paddyirish
Can lend you the Akto for a trial if you're thinking of remortgaging for purchase?
Course a boy can't cross the heart of Caledonia without a time-lapse camera in his shonky trailer...
| [+] Embed the video | Video Download | Get the Flash Video |
Warning contains bagpipes
I also have a Hilleberg Akto which I use for backpacking. I'm very precious about it as they are so expensive! It is a great tent.
I've been using the view ranger app, which I put £20 (or similar on as a minimum purchase for a walk route I wanted last year (later found the paper map argh). Through the app, you can buy OS map tiles. I've bought lots lately but still have lots of credit left. And you can have the app/tiles on at least three devices. We've found it very handy, and (gasp) better than a map for trying to locate random archeological sites via the gps locator.
Oh, and you can use them offline (as we did for the first year). You just don't get the handy gps locator thing.
+1'for the Schwalbe land cruiser tyres. They handle Edinburgh's potholed pavements and not-really-dropped orbs with aplomb.
"not-really-dropped orbs" sounds like something a comedy juggler would have.
I just stumbled on a picture that brought back the exact feeling at the end of this ride.
Scotrail refused point blank to transport my bicycle trailer for this ride. Point blank you say? Oh, if I'd told them it was piece of filed artillery that would have been fine.
Rupert Soames OBE brother of Fatty Soames, grandson of Winnie et cetera
Filed artillery? Good gosh almighty.
"Fatty" no more -
@chdot
If we set up a thread titled 'Thread Drift' would it inevitably become the default place to discuss cycling in the City of Edinburgh?
Title of this one encourages enough drift.
Pro-Am ride of some of the territory covered in this journey, all in one of our national languages;
Watched that last night. Brought back fond memories of the unending series of crossings of the Allt Kinglass. Factual error though: you can cycle round the north side of Loch Lyon, even though the Landranger map says you can't.
Lovely that the 'local guide' character was a hillwalker riding a home-brew nineties trail bike.
When I posted the original write up a while back I was conscious that I couldn't really do this journey justice in the CCE text box, wonderful though the discipline of that oblong can be, so I set myself the goal of doing a longer piece on the same subject. It seemed like the ideal topic for an article in Scottish Cycling and I had a bit of time so I sat down in the library but the words wouldn't stop and soon I had rather too many for a magazine. I kept on pushing the keys of the laptop until the words stopped and when I looked there was a substantial pile of them.
Long story short: yesterday I got a formal offer from a rather serious publisher for the rights to the book that I accidentally wrote, which they now plan to issue as an illustrated paperback. I've already got mocked-up front covers and talked about sales and marketing plans. I'm as pleased about that as you might imagine and also a little bit scared. It's a world about which I knew nothing and into which I just walked off the street.
None of this would have happened if I hadn't stumbled on CCE seven years ago. This is a place that more or less mandates tangential but careful writing around the core theme of bicycling and all I've done is to take that practice up a level.
Equally, I don't think I would ever have dared to start writing if it hadn't been for private comments on here by @sallyhinch and @algo, who are rather more serious and capable individuals than I am and both real creative artists into the bargain. If this thing does make it onto bookshelves they will both have been critical in that process.
I've shamelessly pinched a couple of themes from the forum too. @Morningsider and @kaputnik will recognise a couple of sentences if they ever dip into the text. A few other contributors that I've never met in the real world have also been very useful without knowing it.
Long live bicycles, long live books, long live CCE.
Even if it's not a full autobiography, I hope the title is from the same pool.
Fantastic iwrats. Well done. I look forward to reading it
That's superb.
Fantastic stuff, looking forward to reading it.
<hint>Will there be a proper boozy book launch?</hint>
@urchaidh - no doubt there will be an overnight cross country cycle to get to it.
@urchaidh
I don't know how it works with lightweight first-timers but I would hold my manhood cheap if I didn't argue for a wine-stained launch event of some kind. As @Stickman suggests it will be held in a bothy at the high end of a stony track.
Good work. That take the idea of an accidental autobiography title up several extra levels.
Cracking stuff. Looking forward to reading it. Any timescales?
You must log in to post.
Cycling in Edinburgh Flickr group
Video embedded using Easy Video Embed plugin
posts