As well as the typical photos and video, I also recorded gps traces of our recumbent trike cycle adventure.  Sorting these trip records has been takiing up most of my spare time since arriving back home, and I now only have the video to go.  That will be a significantly longer job, I suspect.

But the exciting thing about having gps traces put together is that I can put interactive maps into my daily update blog posts.  Starting with our first day riding from Whitehaven to Keswick, you can now explore the map of our route on each of the 11 days.  Feel free to zoom in, pan around, and change the map underlay as much as you want.

Tags: travel

Our ride covered a total of 576.84 km in 11 days, and the adventure was wonderful.  The wet final day made us glad to reach Edinburgh, but it was almost a shame the next morning to leave our trikes chained up.

We have so many delightful memories from our cycle tour of Cumbria, Northumberland, and the Scottish Borders.  Some of them are a bit mixed up and blurred together, and we’ll need to organise photos and video to put them back in sequence in our minds.  Although muscles are sore and tired after all the pedalling, we are convinced that another cycle tour should happen.  

But not just yet. Instead of loading our panniers and riding on, we caught a bus into the city and visited Edinburgh Castle.  It is a great building on a perfect location and it has fascinating history, but we were overwhelmed by all the people.  A week and a half of riding through small villages and minor roads must have recalibrated our tolerance of tourist crowds.

It was nice to spend a second night in the same place after being constantly on the move.  Today we picked up a hire car and drove back to the Lake District in about 3 hours.  Covering the distance so quickly was actually a bit disorienting, but Lake Windermere is beautiful.  The foreshore at Bowness became peaceful after the tourists left in the evening, and was full of photo opportunities as the sun set.

Tags: travel