VeloViewer Explorer Score and Max Square

[imajez]

Was that where Skyfall was filmed then?

[citoyen]

Was that where Skyfall was filmed then?

It was indeed.

I've only cycled on the road round there, but the offroad riding looks splendid.

[imajez]

Just discovered I have 5039 tiles thanks to Statshunter telling me I have a badge.
And my cluster is 43 off off 4000.
Sounds more impressive than my Max Square increasing by just one this year. 

[Solocle]

4646 tiles now after LEJOG.

Only passed the road to Loch Etive while cycling the A82. Still gorgeous!

The descent through Glencoe, however... complete whiteout 

While I wasn't at all focused on tiles, I did find a little bit of time...

[L CC]

My max square is currently constrained by no - access areas.

I have a cunning plan..

Done. And, to be honest, a lovely walk.
Now constrained merely by hills.
3 overlapping 27x27.

[imajez]

I've ridden Catterick Garrison a few times. We used used to run MTB races there, long before GPS devices. But I think that's a different part of the Army land to which you just walked.

[L CC]

Other side of the Swale.

[imajez]

I did some tiling not in the Peak District last week and with some urban riding for a change. With a gentle bit of moorland road with nice views  to warm me up.


We're going to need a bigger bin!






So that'll be easier than of late I thought. Nope. And more nope.
I decided on spur of moment to carry on along an off road spur as it led to a couple of moorland tiles I had to skip on a previous ride due to fading light. Well it's only a few more KM.



An extra 13.6km, which as I had suspected when looking at maps at home, may be more sensibly ridden on an MTB. In fact I noticed MTB tyre tracks to the side, avoiding the rock garden I rode on my 33mm tyre shod CX.
[I do like a bit of technical riding]








I also cut a corner on a road section which again went off piste. Which although lovely, made previous off excursion seem like tarmac due to being 25% double track up then 45% down, 25cm wide, overgrown and with a quarry to fall into should you mess up.
Though as is quite frequent of late, I see the Flatlands of Manchester in the distance.
 


I had a brief respite from lumpy terrain as I looped through some flat urban areas and even along a canal and along a euphemistically named road.








Today's loop started next to the M62 and crossed over and under it several times on way around the region, but then more Pennine Bridleway [which can be incredibly hard going in places, it was 25%+ in pic below] replaced the easy urban riding and I was losing light due to the very slow average speed because there was a LOT more off road than originally planned. So when I got to the top of route if was rather dingy indeed, so I decided to cut off last section as riding moorland in dark was not wise. Ironically caused by my riding a previous section I avoided for same reason.
But at least time time I had brought a front light with me. Not my heavy proper off road lights though, so a lot of the time I rode without light because my night vision was better than the commuter light in twilight and I didn't trust the battery to last. Made for an interesting last hour or so.









The Motorway here and the path along side it are actually the dam wall for Scammonden reservoir.


But car is only a KM or so to go from here. Woohoo!

[Deano]

A trip to France has really bounced up my overall tileage, but done pretty much fuck all for my cluster or square (still at 49x49). I did make sure to take different routes back where possible in the UK, mind, to open up the possibility of linking it all down south, and I rode a few genuinely lovely tracks between Donnie and Selby to push my cluster up to 6623, and my tileage went from 21300 to 23124.

[Deano]

Gutted not to get an extra 2000 tiles.

[Peter]

@ imajez

Some lovely pictures, there - and a very hard ride.  After you'd done the Rakewood Viaduct section and dropped towards Milnrow, you passed my house at the bottom of the steep hill, just before the left turn into the village.  When you did it, the houses were on the left (they still are) but surrounded by scaffolding, though I dare say you were concentrating on braking!  There's nothing wrong with the name Ladyhouse Lane!  It's a memory of a 17th century farm that was razed for the motorway slip-road in the 70s.  I know the canal sculpture well (I frequently ride past it and I think the bridge you show is the one on Manchester Road with the 1 in 3 cobbled descent with right angled bend taking you under the main road, isn't it?  The lock house is on the right at the same spot.  Lovely pictures of the Rakewood viaduct, too.  Is the trig point on White Hill on the Pennine Way?  There are worse ways to collect tiles! 

By the way, the hairdressers in Milnrow is called ...... Images!

[imajez]

I rode route clockwise https://www.strava.com/activities/5931396943   - so after going under the Rakewood Viaduct I then went North and seriously uphill to Windy Hill Transmitter. So I guess I would have cycled up past yours.

I came across sculptures, including a cyclist by the same artist as one on canal near Dewsbury whilst tiling around the River Calder North of Huddersfield.





The Trig point was on the spur heading towards Greenfield. It's on Standedge before you get to Standedge [road] Cutting.
Re the bridge [with bus]...I rode under it and stayed on canal, so it was very flat, def no 1 in 3 incline that I saw there.  This is the location on Google Maps best viewed in Chrome for full 3D rendering...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Manchester+Rd,+Rochdale/@53.5708639,-2.174953,45a,35y,294.19h,57.35t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x487bbbd777201993:0x1479b75f4273f2a0!8m2!3d53.6000948!4d-2.1788559

[Peter]

you've really got me puzzled about that cobbled incline - mind you, I've only done it a few dozen times!  Time for another go....... .

That will have been hard up to Windy Hill up the "bridle path".  It used to be like the Somme with the 4x4 destruction.

[imajez]

If Windy Hill had been at start of ride, I'd have ridden it all. But being at the end of a battering and tiring ride meant I was low on energy. This combined with road gearing meant annoyingly had to push up a couple of bits I'd normally try and ride.
There were 4 lads on mini motorbikes riding the opposite way. Despite the no motor vehicles warning signs. And some parts were very trashed by vehicles. It was pretty dry though. Would not like to ride that in the soggy months.

[Peter]

I don't even walk up there in the soggy months!

[imajez]

Don't blame you. I try and avoid moors unless it's dry.
It's no fun, can be dangerous [I got swallowed by a quicksand bog once and that was in dry] and you can cause a lot of damage.

[Ivo]

Yesterday I finally managed the last tiles of the Leopoldsburg military training ground. It involved dragging my bike for over an hour through soft sand churned up by tracked vehicles.
But no I've removed the nasty tiles blocking my north-westward expension of my cluster. To the north east there's still the small matter of the former RAF Brüggen but that will change when they redevelop the area.
I jumped from a 41x41 to a 47x47square yesterday.

[Jack_P]

Thanks , fixed now found out that you need to double click ride in Activities. Is this a case of having to check up for lost /missing tiles due to Veloviewer straight lining out all the little bends. Thats ok when you are cycling thro tiles but not much use if trying to catch tiles that are only visited buy cycling in just enough to trigger a new veloviewer tile on the garmin or phone.

It’s not really VeloViewer, it’s Strava. Everyone using the Strava API is allowed to use it a certain number of times per hour and per day. If you ask for “all the user’s rides in this time range” or “the details of this one ride” both of those count as one query - even though you might get 30 rides from the first form. So an API user like VeloViewer needs to use the first form as much as possible, but unfortunately this only gives the “summary” map - ie Strava is sending VeloViewer the “straightened lines”. Then the user notices some tiles are missing and double-clicks the ride - VV then uses the other form of the API - asking Strava about that one ride only - this is costly in terms of using up its API allowance, but worth it because the user really is interested in the detailed map that comes with it. The tiles now get calculated accurately

Hope that helps!

Works the other way too, with a recent injury confining me to the sofa I went back through all my old rides on Veloviewer, filtered to over 30 miles. This meant a full re-query of all rides in more detail (sorry Ben for API overload) which absolutely decimated my Max square. 

I had about a dozen solo tiles where the straight lines had just clipped the corners; some very local, others not so.  I had previuosly done this regularly for several years on all rides since becoming interested in tiling, but hadn't realised how much the older rides had an effect. Oh well gives me another target to go for picking off these new holes in my square.

I'm guessing some of those with big squares would see the same if they haven't religiously checked all rides. 

[citoyen]

absolutely decimated my Max square. 

Good excuse to get back out on the bike - as soon as you're fit enough.

I've not done any cycling aside from the commute for ages. Feeling a distinct lack of mojo right now, but I've got some holes in my max cluster that are nagging away at me so I really should make an effort to do something about that. I don't even have the excuse of being injured, just feckless.

[imajez]

I had about a dozen solo tiles where the straight lines had just clipped the corners; some very local, others not so.  I had previuosly done this regularly for several years on all rides since becoming interested in tiling, but hadn't realised how much the older rides had an effect. Oh well gives me another target to go for picking off these new holes in my square.

I'm guessing some of those with big squares would see the same if they haven't religiously checked all rides.

Maybe not. 2-3 years back Ben rejigged the accuracy of the tiling setup and 'squarepocalypse' was the result. Previously there was a teeny tiny bit of fudge, so being very close to a tile got counted. Pretty much everyone's square was affected, so lots of 'revisiting' tiles was done. This made folk make doubly sure they got into a tile.
I started using Statshunter recently and my max square in that was markedly smaller. Which i thought odd and on checking it was because of a missing tile fairly close to home. Now I had gone through tile [only just on corner], I checked. But had done so going downhill on road at high speed and the gps points on route were not recorded *in* the tile. Statshunter doesn't count tile unless a GPS timestamp is in tile even if route definitely goes through it. So I went out and rode that way again and through said tile on another road to make sure.

[Bilfred]

Last week I took the inflatable kayak to the Noordoostpolder on two days to bag all the water tiles that might some day limit my square:

The ones on the right were not strictly necessary, you could grab those on land as well, but that would involve some hike-a-bike, cycling over lumpy grassland and avoiding a grumpy farmer Besides, it's just lovely kayaking in the Weerribben (North-East patch), small canals in a peat-bog area:


Then this week it was two long (26km each) trips in the Dollard sea:

The first one (east part) was rather dicey, even though weather conditions were perfect: nice temperature and no wind at all. It turned the sea in a mirror:

What makes the Dollard somewhat problematic is the fact that it isn't really sea, it's land that floods on the high tide. Meaning that low tide most of it falls dry. And if you fall dry, you'll be surrounded by (up to) kilometers of 10-40cm deep very soft, very slimy clay. Forget about getting out of your boat and walking, it's impossible, even for a few meters! So you'll be stuck waiting for the high tide and by that time it will be dark...
There is however a natural gully which meanders from the locks at Nieuwe Statenzijl along the South coast then up North that remains deep enough for a kayak. You'll be peddling surrounded by mud:


And you're be peddling like mad but making slow progress regardless. The water looks very calm in the gully, but when looking at the buoys you could see there is a significant current you have to peddle against.

The second trip was by comparison a walk in the park. I did start with high tide and followed the receding tide all the way to Delfzijl. Combined speed (current, paddling and even a little tailwind) got up to 12 kph!

Overall not an enormous amount of new tiles, but it was very satisfying to bag them. And I'll wager that it will be a while before another person comes along to get these tiles in the Dollard and IJselmeer 

Very precise and concise paddling, chapeau


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[salar55]

Veloviewer explorer, now this has a few problems? How on earth can it be an explorer app if Veloviewer has a heat map button, takes all the excitement out of the ride as you can look at the app on the phone . Met someone who said I just copy a ride off Strava and follow the garmin😳. Now if veloviewer dropped the heatmap getting lost just means you are exploring. EXPLORER for me is a line of tiles, cluster is missing out all the crap and Max square is wasting time cycling through all the crap that no-one bothered about a few years ago😂

[quixoticgeek]

Last week I took the inflatable kayak to the Noordoostpolder on two days to bag all the water tiles that might some day limit my square:

The ones on the right were not strictly necessary, you could grab those on land as well, but that would involve some hike-a-bike, cycling over lumpy grassland and avoiding a grumpy farmer Besides, it's just lovely kayaking in the Weerribben (North-East patch), small canals in a peat-bog area:


Then this week it was two long (26km each) trips in the Dollard sea:

The first one (east part) was rather dicey, even though weather conditions were perfect: nice temperature and no wind at all. It turned the sea in a mirror:

What makes the Dollard somewhat problematic is the fact that it isn't really sea, it's land that floods on the high tide. Meaning that low tide most of it falls dry. And if you fall dry, you'll be surrounded by (up to) kilometers of 10-40cm deep very soft, very slimy clay. Forget about getting out of your boat and walking, it's impossible, even for a few meters! So you'll be stuck waiting for the high tide and by that time it will be dark...
There is however a natural gully which meanders from the locks at Nieuwe Statenzijl along the South coast then up North that remains deep enough for a kayak. You'll be peddling surrounded by mud:

Impressive. What boat are you using?

At some point I'm going to need to do something with a boat in the area of De Biesbosch national park. As long as the Wolderwijd near ZeeWolde. Tho the later I may try the swim thing with my friend on the SUP for safety like I did with the Gooimeer.

If I ever successfully lose enough weight that I fit, in it, I want to get an Oru Kayak, that may open up a few more possibilities.

J

[Zed43]

I have a MRS Nomad S1 light (open version without spraydeck). Word of caution: you'll need narrow hips to fit comfortably when it is pumped up hard.

The Oru Beach LT looks very interesting; packsize and weight notably more than the Nomad, but also faster in the water (narrower, longer water length).

Wolderwijd and Veluwerandmeer I ticked off a few weeks ago. Train to Harderwijk, then cycling to the beaches where I would start peddling. Had the Nomad on the front rack and everything else (peddles, PFD, pump, food in a backpack.

The Biesbosch is also on my list, but mostly because I think it will be a great area for kayaking; it's not likely that it will be part of my square (then again, I do hate holes in the cluster, so that will be an incentive too )

[Revolution9]

74 new tiles on Saturdays Moulin Muirs 200
Total now 10712