Planning for the sake of it

I spent Christmas at 32,000ft winging my way from Taipei to Hong Kong and then onwards to Perth courtesy of Cathay Pacific.  I had anticipated both flights would be reasonably empty and that proved to be an invalid assumption.  There were few empty seats.  However I must have been lucky as I was in an isle seat with an empty seat between me and the passenger in the window position.  The airline food was OK and the service good.  I would fly with Cathay Pacific again should the opportunity arise.

There were numerous chores around the house waiting for my return.  After several days they were sorted and I then did an oil change on the bike internally geared rear wheel.  I also managed several long bike rides.  Whilst I felt fitter, the high temperature sucked the energy from me.

Whilst completing the scheduled pool clean I noticed the DIY solar pool water heater system wasn't working.  The display on the MPPT solar controller was blank.  My initial reaction was the controller had failed (it was very cheap) and then logic kicked in.  "Look for the simple things first".  Placing the multimeter on the solar panel terminals confirmed the panel was producing power.  However when I placed the multimeter on the 12V battery terminals there was only 6V.  This suggested the "repurposed" battery I'd taken from the local recycling centre might have died.  Then I checked the battery terminal connections.  The positive terminal was very loose.  After tightening it the system sprang back into life!

With daily temperatures hoovering around 24-27C I've been spending time inside.   Whilst sitting at the pc I decided to produce some map traces of cycling routes in Europe.  The first was a trace of the route used by English pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land.  The route goes from Canterbury to France, Belgium, Luxemburg, Germany, Switzerland and down to the bottom of Italy where they then travelled from Brindisi to the Holy Land.  My trace only goes as far as the head of the Rhine in Switzerland.

My second trace follows the Rhine from it's source to its mouth.

It has taken several days to create the trace in Open Street Map as a GPX format file.  The trace was then converted to Google Earth format (kml) using GPSBabel before being imported into Google Maps.

Each route is approximately 1300km.

Jan has been following media comments regarding Harry's book.  Not something that particularly interests me.  Apparently she had read a queue had already formed outside Waterstones based on a rumour Harry would be conducting a booking signing.