The 2006 Peace-Of-Mind-Guaranteed

 Mad River Valley/Woodstock Cycling Tour

What a great trip!  This was a four-day cycling trip through mid-Vermont.  Great routes, wonderful weather, outstanding guides, and the best group of cycling companions ever.  

The route maps and profiles below were created from my GPS tracks and reflect the routes that I rode.  They may not reflect the posted routes since I got lost a couple of times!  Elevations are based on the topo maps, not my GPS.  If you're interested in playing with the GPS data, I can email you the .GPX files containing the track data.

The pictures below are thumbnails - you can click them to get them full-sized.  The route profiles are full-sized.

Monday, August 14 (Happy Birthday to me!)

Unfortunately I forgot to turn on the GPS for part of the route.  The software seems to have interpolated those 10 miles pretty reasonably, but the map above doesn't exactly represent the path followed.

Tuesday, August 15

Wednesday, August 16

Note:  That one peak in the elevation profile at about 40 miles didn't really happen.  That was when we took the van to go around a large hill and I shut off the GPS, turning it on again when we restarted riding.  It interpolated the distance between the two points, which apparently went over some high ground.  

Thursday, August 17

This is the reward for climbing about 1500 vertical feet of mixed paved and dirt road.  The elevation was about 2300 feet and the view was spectacular.

The whole route

Tech Stuff

Since there were conversations on the trip about the Moment of Inertia of cycling shoes, and mentions of the Central Limit Theorem, I thought some may be interested in the tech aspects of the photos and GPS profiles.  The GPS profiles came from the Garmin Forerunner 301, which I wore on my wrist.  This downloads into a program called SportTracks, which allows displaying the route, elevation, distance, speed and heart rate as measured by the Forerunner.  It also allows creating a GPS log file called a .GPX file, which is in XML format.  I loaded the GPX files for each day into Delorme Topo USA 6, which creates a "draw" image for each GPX file.  I then activated an elevation profile for each draw image. The map and elevation profile were then copied from Topo USA and pasted into the Front Page web page.

l also used the GPX data to "geocode" the pictures.  This process takes a GPS log, which knows the time and latitude and longitude, and matches it up with the "Date Picture Taken" data in the JPG image.  If the GPX log has a location near the time of a picture, the geocode "location stamper" codes the latitude and longitude into the JPG header of the picture (it doesn't change the image).  This allows viewing pictures next to a map image, with the location of the picture indicated on the map.  If you're interested in this technology, look for the WWMX website for the applications that will do this.  

If you want ALL of the pictures, email me your address and I'll send them on a CD (they're about 350 megs).  They're geocoded, so you can view their locations with the WWMX software.

The camera is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX5, which is a 5 megapixel super-zoom (12x) with image stabilization.  It has Leica optics and takes great pictures.  Unfortunately I dropped it at the hot tub at the Three Stallion Inn and it no longer works, which is why I don't have many pictures from Thursday.