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

Lots of pics of the weekend on Flickr, including my tent (in the middle)!
And me, striking a rather 18th century pose!

Tags: BoA

Came back from BoA 2006 last night. Knackered after the journey and the bike ride from Fulham home, but I didn't go to bed till 2 since I was putting up a gallery of pictures. Anyway I had a great time. Lots of us camped on the lawn.
You can't actually see my tent in the photo above, but it's to the left of the red tent, which is a Vango TBS Spirit 200+, mine being the Lite version of the same tent. The tent was great, although I only just fit inside. The flysheet is attached to the outershell so it all goes up as one and the tent poles are colour coded. It was really easy both to get up and to get down. The only down side was that the little porch had no floor so my shoes were left on the grass, and of course it's billed as a two man tent. Two lovers maybe. It's also only just long enough for me, my feet reached the end of the flysheet area while my head was at the other end.

Flysheets are great things, you're inside, away from the bugs, but you're outside in the fresh air. The side of the outer didn't actually touch the ground to there was excellent airflow, it was a warm weekend with cold nights, but the tent stayed comfortable the whole time. Once thing I'll need next time I go camping is a better pillow. I have a Vango pillow but it's far too thin for me. I had to use an inflatable neck pillow as a support - not very comfortable. I'll have to save up for a Tempur Travel Pillow. The inflatable ground mat through, very cheap from Decathlon, was very comfy, but then so was the spongy lawn underneath it.

The first evening we went down the the Swan pub in town, these are the first pics in the photo gallery. I met some riders who I discovered later were in tents next to mine. Lots of good Moultoneering talk - it's good to talk to others who 'get it'. I forget all names but one guy had come down from Scotland with his RAC Moulton - that bike had been built as a marketing wheeze, and we heard tales of heroic rides up mountains on two-speeders and the subsequent burning out of the coaster brakes on the way down again. That rider was Josh who rides one of these for his work as a gardener.

Anyway onto the bikes, and so many of them, we counted around 50 F-frames and around 70 X-frames on the Saturday. I saw my first TSR at the sale in the village hall, I don't think there were any TSR campers. They are very nice machines, confirmed when I got to ride a few in the Afternoon.

The Sturmey-Archer model (see above example), I rode a few times. Smoother than I expected, completely silent when riding and very quiet when coasting, I also rode a Rohloff equipped TSR, lighter than I expected and it gave more range, but it also gave less information at the changer, and on the TSR it requires a chain tensioner, ruining the clean look. The best feeling though was changing gear, and the gear just changing, no fussy cog-changing - this was particularly apparent when going up the hill, where I had to gingerly change down on the deraillieur equipped bikes before ascending.

So, I'm sold on the Sturmey gear, but I can't just buy a TSR, I'd need to get a V-braked version to be able to fit my Marathon Plus tyres, and looking at the official mudguards, it's going to be very tight to get it all to fit. The mudguards are designed to cover a 1.5 tyre completely, they look like they are the same 1.75 size as the Marathon Plus. Anyway that's for next year. I also had the pleasure of riding a New Series again, this year the gears were perfect, but I was shocked at how much give there was in the suspension. I had to lock out the front suspension when going up the hill - well, I think you're meant to do that anyway. The bike though was so pretty and so light, only about 7.5 kilos.

Talking about kilos, a funny thing happened in the talk. They did a weigh off between an old Moulton racer and a traditional track racer, the Moulton had beaten the racer in a time trial but the racer was 5lbs lighter. What was odd was they weighed the bikes and gave the weight in pounds. I've no idea really what a pound is, I only know kilos, so I can say the track racer weighed 8.15 kilos and the Moulton, 10.4kg. I wonder if all the Moulton bikes are created in imperial measurements then?

We were told about the time trial which the Moulton had won but also about the weight testing. The original F-frame Moulton was rated to carry 32kg of luggage. We were told how a barrel of cider was carried around on the prototype and how it was also ridden around the rough tracks of Iceland - not something I can imagine someone trying with a New Series.

In the evening we had a barbecue, I cooked some sausages and I was given half a tasty sweet potato. I heard whilst eating that 85% of Moultons are bought by the Japanese - that's quite remarkable, but I suppose as well as the Britishness cult, they also more likely have the saving to pay for one.

And that was it really, there was a ride on Sunday, during which I dried out the flysheet and I packed up, hoping to see the same faces next year.

Tags: BoA