Almost every time I get into the car I wish I was going on a road trip. I wish I was driving from point A to point B and that the drive would take hours, rather than minutes. As much as I hate “commuting” between point A and point B on a daily basis I love travelling from A to B as a journey. I love sitting for many hours in a car, thinking, looking at the landscape, remembering things, thinking of the future and more.
Recently I started the Appalachian Trail Challenge on Garmin Connect and every sstep I take counts towards the goal. The goal is to walk 3,500km, which is around 4.9 million steps. I have walked 652 km out of 3,500 so I have completed about 18 percent of the challenge. I am almost a fifth done.
More Than A Year According to the pacer app I have taken 4.6 million steps in the last year, 2.
Yesterday i drove through the rain for two hours at night and it was so demanding that i stopped the audiobook to focus on driving. It was harder to see the lines, and the rain was heavy enough to impact visibility.
I made it but i would think twice about driving through such rain at night on a 12hr drive for the last two hours.
In Spain I keep seeing the BKL Prolimp bikes and I like them. They’re tricycles rather than bikes but I think they could be useful. Instead of transporting a broadcast camera and tripod in a car or smart you could transport them on the back of this bike. Instead of a bin bag though I would have the tripod bag and find a way to fix the camera as well.
This walk takes you from the Port of Javea up to the lighthouse near San Antonio before continuing along the top towards Los Molinos. These are old grain mills. They used wind power to grind grain for several centuries before being taken out of action as modernisation arrived.
The walk takes you along the port before you start to climb. As you walk along the port you will see a number of cats, either being lazy, or playing.
With global warming the idea that we would get white Christmas, with snow, freezing weather and more is outdated. In the 21st century the opposite is true. We will probably get grey and rainy weather instead. If we stay in Switzerland. I used to love the idea of snowy Christmas, snowboarding and skiing but I don’t like the modern global warming version, of a boring cold, with no snow.
That’s why it makes sense to migrate south, for a week or two and see the sun.
One nuissance of most modern smart watches is that you must charge then once a day, once a week, or once a month. When you’re in Spain though, with a solar watch things change. At first you go from “26 days of battery remaining” to “36 days of battery remaining”, to “39 days remaining”. Before long the watch displays “infinity time remaining”. When you’re in watch the sun charges the batteries faster than normal use depletes the batteries.
https://youtube.com/shorts/XsWAjOjk5ic?feature=share
A seaside walk
I don’t know whether I’m nervous or anxious about driving from 11-13 hours almost non stop tomorrow. In the past I have driven from Switzerland to Spain, without stopping. In the past we had to stop to refuel but not anymore, not with modern cars. We have to stop for toilet breaks instead.
During long drives I spend my time listening, either to books, or to podcasts. Recently I have spent a lot more time listening to books.
Not too far from Aix en Provence you can find a Roman bridge with two arches under which to pass as you cross. I expect that the stones from others were quarried and so this is the last surviving example. If we check the sources we might find mentions of more.
https://twitter.com/DrJEBall/status/1501998794036109319
I located it on Google Maps for you