TravellingStrom

A big day today, I had to shift all my gear from a paid for storage shed to my container out on a property. It only took 3 trips, but with travel etc it took about 7 hours. Anyway the trailer was perfect, when I backed the first load in, the trailer bed was high enough to be inside the container and easy to unload.

From here:

To here

Then I just had to repeat as many times as was needed, which turned out to be 3 times only as I mentioned above. And as a bonus, due to the trailer going inside the container, it was easy to lay the fridge down on the long trailer and lift it up again by myself. So, everything is done, no more storage shed 🙂 And that means I do not need to grab some friends on Saturday to move the fridge, washing machine etc, I can now sleep in 🙂 And as I have drinks planned down the club, this may be needed!

The final shot and I even have room inside if I wanted to put my bike in, but that won’t happen 🙂

I am organising medical insurance as I have been advised to do so before I get to the US by Lesley and Jim, the Guzzi riders. I checked out the local Commonwealth Bank branch and spoke to the lovely Meagan, and have info, but no decision yet. I will do some more phoning around tomorrow. I only went in because I needed to add a PIN number to my Credit Card.

My repaired Comms system turned up today, now I am waiting on my TomTom GPS, hopefully tomorrow( This cost $200 for a new mounting bracket and battery, if it had not been given free with the bike I would be even more pissed off, I am not sure TomTom is up to my type of travel, but then again, I have not tried any other brands on the bike, so maybe they would all have issues ). I am also waiting on a CD from Garmin, a copy of Mapsource to load on the laptop as I intend to use the tracks function, this will save me looking for maps and cutting/pasting etc while on the road. I have a new sensor for my Tyre Watch being sent to the US address, also some new VSRI stickers for my bike being sent there also. I have shit flying everywhere!!!!! I hope it misses the fan!

Anyway, just as an idea of what it takes to do a days travel map manually, check this out, this is from my Oz trip last year and is from north west Tasmania.

So, to arrive at that result I would load GoogleMaps, get it to the size I want covering my trip then do a CTL/Printscreen. Paste that in microsoft PAINT, cut the section I want, then use the paint brush to manually draw the red line outlining my travel for the day, then save, upload to Photobucket and finally paste the link in the blog.

That is a time consuming part of the blog and not entirely accurate, so I am hopeful the Garmin to Google earth will be easier and more beneficial. I know the tracks will be useful for a site I am looking at called Smelly Bikers, which is what I will be 🙂

Now compare that with this one

So, that is a track from the Winton Adventure Riders AGM in 2007. It is a bit different because there were no roads, hahaha, but the basic principle is that to get that I plug the Garmin GPS into the pute, upload the tracks, click on ‘view in Google Earth’, do a CTR/Printscreen as before, cut out the section I want, save and upload.

I can save the time it takes to stuff around with the map sizing, also the playing around in Paint with a paintbrush trying to follow roads etc.

Anyway, I shall try it again and see if it is better than what I did last year.

Cheers for now
TravellingStrom