Next Wednesday and Thursday I'm riding from Dunkirk to Amsterdam!
Why?
- To go to State of the Map 2009 - the international OpenStreetMap conference.
- To contribute to OpenStreetMap by recording my journey.
For those that don't know OpenStreetMap is a community driven crowd-sourced mapping program. Think wikipedia for maps. Ordinary(-ish) people contribute to a world-wide map that is of high quality and free to use. Like all maps there some parts are less complete than others. Coverage of the 'North Sea Cycle Route' part of which covers the journey from France to the Netherlands is patchy, so I'm going to fill in the gaps.
And on Sunday at 12 in the Map Room I'm presenting the whys and hows of mapping from a bike in 'A New Way To Amsterdam' (there's a bad pun for map geeks).
This is what I'm riding:
Nerdy stuff alert
To do the mapping I'm taking a:
- Nokia E71 to create a GPX tracklog
- Garmin Etrex in case the E71 packs in
- Nokia N73 running a Python script taking a photo every minute
- Dell Mini 9 to upload/edit tracks
The Route
Wednesday I'm riding from Dunkirk, along the coast to Nieuwpoort, Belgium then inland towards Oudenaarde and Brugge. Then its into the Netherlands, taking the ferry across to Zeeland where I'm staying at Logement de Craecke in the town of Veere. That's about 100 miles.
Thursday I'm riding from Veere, through Den Haag, along the coast to Haarlem then into Amsterdam (about another 100 miles) where I'm going to crash on a houseboat.
I'm pretty much prepared, just need a few tweaks to the bike, until its time to roll!
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