Here I go again! To be honest, I'm still at home, but I have decided to post my first entry from here, to avoid the frenetic activity at the start of my walk last year. In the event, I got to bed well after midnight on that occasion, as a result got lost on the first day of the walk and became quite grumpy!
My choice of route this year is primarily based on the need for a reasonably short walk, because of upcoming commitments, to which I may return in a later post. Peddars Way and the North Norfolk Coast may seem an unusual choice, but apart from promising to be a very attractive walk, it also has the advantage of being quite flat and quite close, at least compared to some of my earlier routes! I may of course come to regret this assertion! Experience suggests things turn out quite differently in the event!
As the name suggests, the walk is really two walks combined into one National Trail. Peddars Way follows a Roman Road as straight as an arrow from Suffolk in a North Westerley direction right up to the North Norfolk Coast. The second part of the walk obviously follows the coastline through various towns and villages (some of which helpfully have their names suffixed by "-next-the-Sea", in case one didn't notice) to the town of Cromer.
Unless you stumbled on them by accident (!), the fact that you are reading these words, means that you will have received email notification as a result of a recent post on one (or more, for which I apologise) of my previous "Time to Walk" blogs. If you would similarly like to receive email notification of the posts from this blog, please enter your email address in the link at the top right of this page, and follow the process. You can, of course, unsubscribe at any time!
Yet again I have been exploring new technology to help me with these posts. The obvious choice would be to go "mobile". I am now an avid supporter of Google ecology, especially since I discovered that I could automatically back up every single on of my thousands of photos to the Google cloud for nothing! In principle, therefore it should be simple to take photos using my Android smartphone, have them loaded into Google+ Photos, from where the best of them can easily be transferred into these posts. The posts themselves can just as easily be written on my Google Nexus tablet, and I can finally avoid lugging my ancient but trusty netbook around with me. Simple! However, after much investigation and experimentation, I have decided to stay with my tried and tested methodology after all. Firstly, the quality of the smartphone photos is nowhere near that of my Lumix camera, and in order to write text on my tablet, for instance in Google Drive, I need to be connected to the net via wifi. Previous experience has shown that on these walks, I may have only fleeting connectivity, so, no go. Obviously, all Google employees live in cities and the open country is to them a foreign land!
One other small complication is that I understand that TripAdviser has bought EveryTrail!! Some may recall that I have entered a link to EveryTrail in every post in previous blogs, so that those interested could see my daily progress in graphical detail as a result of the uploaded GPS track. For some reason, I have recently been finding it very difficult to access the EveryTrail server and hence posting the links may not prove possible. It may be that TripAdvisor is in the process of transferring the service to their own platform, and it might come right, but cynics on the net are saying that TripAdvisor has lost interest in the service because it doesn't make any money! Neither TripAdvisor nor Everytrail are saying anything themselves!
Again, please feel very free to comment on the posts. I really do appreciate your comments and it makes the whole thing so much more of a conversation. As usual, you will have to have a Blogger or a Google identity to comment and I do hope they have straightened out this clunky interface in the interim. I can only repeat my previous advice that if you are having trouble commenting, just sign up to Blogger as if you were going to write a blog yourself! The process is straightforward and you will immediately be given a Blogger identity from which to comment.
You don't even have to be crazy enough to write a blog yourself!!
(Late update! I've arrived at Thetford and am itching to start the walk tomorrow! Lets hope I still feel like this tomorrow night!!)
My choice of route this year is primarily based on the need for a reasonably short walk, because of upcoming commitments, to which I may return in a later post. Peddars Way and the North Norfolk Coast may seem an unusual choice, but apart from promising to be a very attractive walk, it also has the advantage of being quite flat and quite close, at least compared to some of my earlier routes! I may of course come to regret this assertion! Experience suggests things turn out quite differently in the event!
As the name suggests, the walk is really two walks combined into one National Trail. Peddars Way follows a Roman Road as straight as an arrow from Suffolk in a North Westerley direction right up to the North Norfolk Coast. The second part of the walk obviously follows the coastline through various towns and villages (some of which helpfully have their names suffixed by "-next-the-Sea", in case one didn't notice) to the town of Cromer.
Unless you stumbled on them by accident (!), the fact that you are reading these words, means that you will have received email notification as a result of a recent post on one (or more, for which I apologise) of my previous "Time to Walk" blogs. If you would similarly like to receive email notification of the posts from this blog, please enter your email address in the link at the top right of this page, and follow the process. You can, of course, unsubscribe at any time!
Yet again I have been exploring new technology to help me with these posts. The obvious choice would be to go "mobile". I am now an avid supporter of Google ecology, especially since I discovered that I could automatically back up every single on of my thousands of photos to the Google cloud for nothing! In principle, therefore it should be simple to take photos using my Android smartphone, have them loaded into Google+ Photos, from where the best of them can easily be transferred into these posts. The posts themselves can just as easily be written on my Google Nexus tablet, and I can finally avoid lugging my ancient but trusty netbook around with me. Simple! However, after much investigation and experimentation, I have decided to stay with my tried and tested methodology after all. Firstly, the quality of the smartphone photos is nowhere near that of my Lumix camera, and in order to write text on my tablet, for instance in Google Drive, I need to be connected to the net via wifi. Previous experience has shown that on these walks, I may have only fleeting connectivity, so, no go. Obviously, all Google employees live in cities and the open country is to them a foreign land!
One other small complication is that I understand that TripAdviser has bought EveryTrail!! Some may recall that I have entered a link to EveryTrail in every post in previous blogs, so that those interested could see my daily progress in graphical detail as a result of the uploaded GPS track. For some reason, I have recently been finding it very difficult to access the EveryTrail server and hence posting the links may not prove possible. It may be that TripAdvisor is in the process of transferring the service to their own platform, and it might come right, but cynics on the net are saying that TripAdvisor has lost interest in the service because it doesn't make any money! Neither TripAdvisor nor Everytrail are saying anything themselves!
Again, please feel very free to comment on the posts. I really do appreciate your comments and it makes the whole thing so much more of a conversation. As usual, you will have to have a Blogger or a Google identity to comment and I do hope they have straightened out this clunky interface in the interim. I can only repeat my previous advice that if you are having trouble commenting, just sign up to Blogger as if you were going to write a blog yourself! The process is straightforward and you will immediately be given a Blogger identity from which to comment.
You don't even have to be crazy enough to write a blog yourself!!
(Late update! I've arrived at Thetford and am itching to start the walk tomorrow! Lets hope I still feel like this tomorrow night!!)
At King's Cross station! I was supposed to be going to Thetford, not Hogwarts!!
well, if you do get misdirected, a walk through Hogwarts should still provide interesting posts, and possibly a multi-million dollar book contract.
ReplyDeleteAh ha! The very first comment of this campaign! Richard, so good to hear from you!
DeleteHi Kevin,
ReplyDelete6.33 am Zimbabwe time on Friday 4th April..... I can see your EveryTrail map for Day 1 (Knettishall Heath to Thompson - 11.7 miles at 2.4 mph), but not the daily blog.... there is only Day 0 - Thetford. Have you not posted yet, or is this a glitch? It is difficult to believe that you have run out of words!!
Richard