Monday, 30th September, 2024

Seems like this month I’ve skipped quite a few days vs. what I had been doing. I think it’s because I’m obsessed with SOTA and do nothing else but look at summits, and read the forums.

I spend a lot of time researching routes, and then maintaining a spreadsheet with estimate door to door durations of trips. This is so I can figure out if I have enough time to go to a summit after dropping the kids at school and needing to be back before something else occurs. I found the site plotaroute.com allows me to set my own walking speed and it tries to adjust for gradients. Previously I was using OSMaps and that has a much slower walking speed, and so I’ve ended up wasting time or missing out on good summits in the summer months because of it.

I’ve also just bought a mountain bike on the Cycle2Work scheme, so I can bike and hike some of the summits and save time that way. Of course I’ll do some commuting to work with it as well.

The spreadsheet works well, and is sort of my notes for the summits as well. When working out the route I usually break it down into sections but then when I’m walking it, I just want the whole thing as a single route. I’ve also bought a Garmin inreach mini 2. Mostly for safety but also to have something else besides my phone with the route on it. Bigger hills I’ll take a print out of the map - although I should probably get a real map with more of the area. Ideally a waterproof version. So I’ll want to load the route onto that device. I’m also tempted to get a smart watch (possibly not Apple) for the route too…but that is maybe excessive. I’ll have to pay a subscription to Garmin to use the sat network but it’s not too bad on the lowest tier and if I ever did need it, I’ll not care about the monthly subscription. I want to do some of the higher hills and it hopefully gives some reassurance to everyone.

I’m also thinking of planning some overnighters for next year. Where I drive down on a day, hike somewhere, stay overnight (in the car? or maybe in a cheap hotel 😅) then hike again the next day and drive home. Should get in a few big hills with this method but not upset the family unit too much…perhaps I’ll pitch the idea once a month say. Well I want somewhere to keep a track of these trips and I’ve started in tiddlywiki but it’s not great. I don’t know why. Feel like I lose it in there and then forget about it. Perhaps I should repurpose that dokuwiki instance that I think is kicking around somewhere to use for it. Seems the wiki subdomain of my radio blog is still on ikiwiki. I could use that but I think dokuwiki is more convenient. Espeically if I want to keep track of some private things as well.

I had an idea of making a SOTA related website. Either one for the WhatsApp group chat, showing our stats or something. A simple static page, probably having to use javascript to query the API and get some numbers. And also one which helps figure out what I’ve been trying to do, namely “how long will it take me?”. That one is more complex and likely too much for me. Other than being a searchable record of my own information. Perhaps I should add it to my blog posts in the table. The radio blog still has lots of scope for more pages and things but yet to do anything about that.

It’s funny I still have to proof read blog posts in a browser, rendered as the webpage before I see typos.

Maybe I should use my blog for planning sota trips, rather than some other website…