Tag: travel

Travelstarter: Nice mission terrible name

I first saw Travel starter via Cristiano Betta

A crowdfunding startup for travelers wanting to support the place they are visiting? Sounded too good to be true… But I was impressed with I saw.

TravelStarter is a new way to travel by supporting local tourism and saving money at the same time. It’s easy – you pick your next destination, select your favorite project or reward, and we take care of the rest.

Although I can’t really see it taking off, I think its a really nice idea. For example a friend of mine, went to Goa for a month. She loved it so much that the family she stayed with, she regularly still checks in on them and I think sends them small gifts every now and then. With something like travelstarter, she could help,  encourage others and work towards a better village as a whole.

It wouldn’t really work too well for myself because I tend to head to cities and places which are not really in dire need of external help. Then again it might be interesting to hear about some of the local projects and communities before and after I travel.

It feels like a good idea but not something which I expect VC’s will go for? Terrible name too…

Ride down to Bristol via Snowdonia

At end of my journey

In a previous post I talked about driving to Bristol via Snowdonia. Well I’m happy to say I made it! Yeh me! 400+ miles completed.

I know most of you are saying, so what? But I have never driven so far on my Silverwing scooter before. I use to drive between London and Bristol on the A4 when I moved to London and it use to be a very long trip (4hours). Main reason it took so long is because I was on a 125cc scooter and it was going flat out most of the journey. I couldn’t use the motorway with my L plates and 125cc bike. Such a journey I would need to nap for a hour or so straight away afterwards!

I recorded the journey using my tracks as usual but unfortunately turned it off when stopping at Aberystwyth. I also forgot to turn it on a couple times, hence some small gaps in the journey.

Here is my ride from Manchester to Liverpool to Llandidno to Llarwst to Blaenau Ffestiniog to Barmouth to Dolgellau to Machynlleth to Aberystwyth. Blaenau was impressive, I wished my camera still had enough battery because you swing around a mountain down a beautiful valley into this clearing. The clearing is a mine site with a village in the middle. Barmouth was a mistake because when looking at google maps, I thought the line across the river was a public bridge but it was actually a train bridge. I actually thought I missed it but ended up going back on myself towards Dolgellau. I did stop at Llandidno and try and go around the Great Orme (the wrong way it seems). I also tried to pay at the mersey tunnel but realised it was free for bikes.

Then I stayed at the Queensbridge hotel on the seafront where I got told I was being moving to the Four Seasons in town. Didn’t really matter because it was pretty much the same.

After a sleep and breakfast I headed out again. From Aberystwyth to Rhayader to Talgarth to Abergavenny to Newport to Bristol. The travel across the 2nd seven bridge cross was free, and I somewhat forgot this. Also got stuck in a bit of traffic around Newport and Bullth Wells due to the Royal Wales festival.

The camera clamp actually held all the way through the journey, I was very impressive and thought it was bound to fall off somepoint.

I think I might have connected the two parts together using Google Maps Engine. I tried to do it with a non-native XML editor but KML is a odd format which I don’t really get the schema.

So having that ride under my belt and the weather looking to hold while I drive back. I may avoid Birmingham and the Motorway to drive up through Wales again.

Who knows… Maybe I’ll drive down again and Ireland is calling me too. I always knew the Honda Silverwing was a touring scooter being the little sibling of the Honda Goldwing.

Traveling on public transport in London

Theres something about public transport which I like. Ah yes the ability to sit down and read and listen without too much interuption. I swear I'm pretty much going through my whole 240+ RSS feed subscriptions in one journey too and from work. So yeah pretty much within 2hrs I'm able to tag all the interesting entries which I wish to read or look at later.

Its not only my RSS which I'm able to go through much quicker now. I have actually added more podcasts to my subscription because I'm going through them pretty quickly now.

As a lot of you know I've now moved to Woolwich and that means I need to get a totally different train into London now a days. I was, still am (will always be) nervious of reading my aggregator via my laptop on the train. People get mugged for a lot less and I've been pretty lucky so far. I get some really weird looks and I cant work out if its either my Firefox Tshirt or the laptop? Now I know the social enginnering tshirt would certainly cause a second glance but I cant work out if its just that sly glance of I know that logo, I use that browser at home too or more what the heck is he doing on a train to dartford with a laptop? Who knows? Interesttingly on the way to work this week me and Dave were talking about taking apart BBC's unencypted Digital TV signals and the licence which this can be done under, yeah usual geeky culture politics stuff that we tend to talk about. When this women (cant remember her name right now) stopped us and asked if we had heard of Creative Commons. Honestly me and Dave gave each other a double look (like you only see in Cartoons) and said yes, absolutly! During the course of the conversation which went from Greenwich to London Bridge we touched on Boingboing, gaming, Licencing and a few more things. I did give her my business card before she ran off into the crowd of people pushing there way to work. Although Sarah wasnt that pleased about that. She has not emailed me yet, but it was great to have a geeky conversation on the train.

I did have another conversation with some stranger on the train this week but it was very very odd and maybe not worth getting into.

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