Tonight, I’ve been transferring the planned route onto my GPS. It’s a fairly old device with limited memory, so I’ve had to make some compromises. It can only store 20 “routes” consisting of 50 points. Having studied the maps, I decided that navigation in Scotland was pretty darn straightforward, whereas navigation through England was much harder (no bias here!). So I decided to spend all my GPS points on the first 7 days, using three ‘routes’ per day to pack in maximum detail.
I designed the routes on mapmyride.com, which allows you to download them as GPX files – however these typically use about 300 points per day.
Next, I used gpsbabel’s “simplify” filter to get each day down to 150 points, and another filter to convert the “track” files which mapmyride provide into “route” files. Finally, I needed to split each day into three separate 50-point routes. I briefly entertained the notion of using xslt, before seeing sense and doing it in about two minutes using emacs keyboard macros.
So now I’m tooled up with high-res tech, ready to navigate across the country using relativistically-corrected satellite quad-lateration.
Here is my planned route, with links to maps showing each day’s travels:
d1 (Mon) Lands End to Wadebridge [64miles]
d2 (Tue) Wadebridge to Great Torrington [57miles]
d3 (Wed) Great Torrington to Bridgewater [68miles]
d4 (Thu) Bridgewater to Tintern [72miles]
d5 (Fri) Tintern to Much Wenlock [81miles]
d6 (Sat) Much Wenlock to Leigh [83miles]
d7 (Sun) Leigh to Sedbergh [77miles]
d8 (Mon) Sedbergh to Longtown [62miles]
d9 (Tue) Longtown to Auchinleck [73miles]
d10 (Wed) Auchinleck to Tarbet [63miles]
d11 (Thu) Tarbet to Ft William [73miles]
d12 (Fri) Ft William to Inverness [61miles]
d13 (Sat) Inverness to Brora [56miles]
d14 (Sun) Brora to John o’Groats [63miles]