Mapping Hacks

In 2006 my daughter Molly and I rode our bikes in Europe, including from Prague to Vienna.  One of the high points was stumbling upon the Vojenske Military museum.  We were riding on our second day out of Praque and started seeing signs for a military museum.  It was 10 km this way, and then 8 km that way.  And then we started seeing signs for a motorcycle museum.

It was a strange thing.  The signs created an impossible geography.  First the military museum was 8 km and the motorcycle museum was 6, and then, somehow, the numbers changed but in a way which MADE NO SENSE!

And then we came around a corner and the military museum sign pointed us UP A DANG HILL!  We had fully loaded bikes, and really little patience for hills, but we persevered.

And it was glorious!  Today I managed to find a web site on the museum.
And I have flickr photos…

I wrote code to tag my photos based on which waypoints they were near.  So I have tags like ‘ waypoint:nearest_tag=SEXMUSEUM‘ and ‘waypoint:SEXMUSEUM_distance=0.11miles‘

(those are for this awesome photo of a policeman in Amsterdam offering me porn)

Here is a kml file of most of the trip.  Look especially at the aerial imagery around the waypoint ‘yuck’ where we ended up by the side of a major freeway, unable to go foward, or back, or anyway at all…until we finally ran across two lanes of high speed merging traffic and threw ourselves into the safety of high weeds by the side of the road, and then we clambored over a fence, with heavily laden bikes, and trudged through a field before finding the safety of a road which was not a freeway.

Oh yes…we were lost!

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