I'm doing my last purchases for my trip to Bradford on Avon this year. I am cycling there from Oxford to Wallingford, where I'll be camping there by the river (the campsite will hopefully be dried out by then!). In fact, here's the plan:

• Wednesday night train to Oxford
• Thursday morning, walking tour of Oxford and visit to Ashmolean museum
• Thursday afternoon, ride down to Wallingford (20 miles?) - camp on the river
• Friday, ride 11km down to Goring and joining the Ridgeway to the western end, then take the canal to Bradford-on-Avon
• So, did some purchases early this week (pay day) 3 of them came today:

First is my GPS. This below isnt it, the GPS is on the window sill behind me, this is MGMaps (so named because it contained Mobile Google Maps, until Google told them that they weren't allowed to), so in the picture is the somewhat crappy Yahoo! Maps with a marker in the middle showing my current position (note the missing map tiles on the right - not available according to Yahoo!).

The program is superficially easy to use, but I am yet to figure out how to change the map. It supports several online maps, and I have changed it from map to blurry satellite, but by accident, and I can't change it back, and waiting for Yahoo's map tiles to download is SLOW. Trying it with Viewranger I got mixed results. I think this was due to me not pairing the unit with the phone and giving it free access to the phone.

I used it to log me as I rode over to Greenwich to help a mate move house. After a few hundred meters I got a beep to tell me that the connection was lost. A couple of stops, restarts and reboot later and long waits for it to search for devices, it got working again. Tried it tonight after having paired the devices using the Bluetooth tool on the phone and sha-bing, worked instantly in Viewranger. Back on the ride though, I tested the Trip function on the phone just after Deptford and it didn't seem to give me moving information. Several miles later I realise that the app has frozen ruining the log, a bit. However, looking on what it did record it was very accurate. I've got another longer ride over to Chiwick tommorow. So, I'll see if the reliability improves.

The second thing that came via Royal Mail van delivery (the GPS was a missed delivery from Friday), was the Tempur Travel Pillow.

The packaging was pretty bad, a big cardboard box containing a little pillow. It should have been shipped in its little compression bag which is about 1/5^th the size. But I can't really sleep with a regular camping pillow, so this luxury is an essential. And the last thing to come was delivered by the postman:

Ooh, solar panels! This was intended for charging the Phone and GPS on the road, but the GPS has a long battery life and a non-standard power port (standard meaning Nokia), so this will do only for the phone. No idea how it will work, but I bought it because the panels actually charge a big battery, and you then plug the battery (behind the panels) into the phone. It also has 2 USB port for charging an iPod. The charging works in natural light and specifically not with fluorescent lighting. True too, I put it in sunlight and the LED shows it is charging. I put it under a downlighter and it sort of charges, I put it against my iMac screen and nothing. Anyway, I think the idea is that you charge the battery normally and then use the sun as a top-up. We shall see.

Tags: Moulton, Pashley, BoA, GPS