Off to Amy’s for the weekend. I spent the morning coding.

At my parents’ house now. Tired and off to bed.

This is nuts. We go home tomorrow, back to merry old Englandshire in an EasyJet flying toothpaste tube/cattle transporter. Our flight leaves at 4pm, but air travel tradition dictates we arrive two hours early for check in (a thirty second process, naturally). To make things even more tedious, our bus from Chamonix leaves at 7am - yes, in order to arrive ready for the flight that leaves at 4pm, I have to leave at 7 in the morning. And naturally that means waking up at 6am.

And some people actually go travelling for fun.

Today we went to 3,800 metres to the top of the Aiguille Du Midi. Up there the air was noticeably thinner and the temperature below freezing. I was quite glad I’d decided to take my padded jacket and gloves. The people making their way across the glacier towards Italy seemed quite small.

How did we manage this feat of mountaineering in such a seemingly simple manner? Well it’s all thanks to some very crazy people in the 50s who decided it’d be great to build a cable car run to the summit. Yes, for the small sum of €38 you and your granny can catch a cable car to 3,000m - a height where full on cold weather clothing, crevasse rescue gear and a pretty damn good overall fitness level is usually the minimum requirement for not becoming dead.

Yeah the cable car takes the piss and makes dangerous scenery seem safe and just like a cold winter’s day, but it’s also nice to take a short cut occasionally and go somewhere that ordinarily you’d not be able to visit.

The people who built the cable car originally were utterly insane. There’s a gallery showing how it was built. We went up in an enclosed metal box secured to a very thick and sturdy steel cable. The original builders first had to get the cable to the top by dragging it, and then they simply climbed up it, or rode little open-air carts that were nothing more than a wheel bolted to a plank of wood.

Below you should be able to see the readouts from my GPS. It went somewhat nuts when first powered on, suddenly being transported 3km into the sky must mess with its calculations slightly. I also didn’t go for a walk across the tops of the mountains like it shows. Just look at the maximum height, that’s the only interesting part.

Livejournal readers, click the title.

Aguille Du Midi

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging

Had a bit of a lazy day today due to the rain. After waking up at the more civil time of 9am we caught the bus into Chamonix, and then another bus to a village up the valley. The idea was to then walk back, but after watching the rain start beating down we gave up on that plan and instead entered tourist mode and began wandering the streets, before catching a bus back.

This evening we went back into town, making good use of our free bus passes, and did some continental sitting-in-coffee-shops-watching-people, it’s quite amusing. Before coming back to the hostel we went for a curry, which was nice but supposedly expensive; I don’t know what the exchange rate is, so it’s all just numbers with no real meaning

Welcome aboard EasyJet flight Screaming Baby 592 from Liverpool to Geneva. On your flight today you will spend more time waiting in the airport than on the plane itself. Upon reaching Geneva, remember we have landed in Switzerland and not France.

After failing to buy a new mobile phone we zoomed off to the airport, got on our plane full of shouting children and were transported to Geneva. From there we caught a bus to Chamonix.

The hostel is quite basic, but has all the essentials - warmth, lighting, electricity, water and free Wifi conveniently provided by some wifi transmitter nearby. My N810 fails to connect consistently, but my dad’s Eee PC is quite happy.

I’ve just managed to extract the GPS route from my GPS and have it on my N810, unfortunately I can’t upload it to any mapping sites because it takes too long and the connection dies. Guess I’ll have to keep them until I get back and upload then.

Chamonix is an interesting place, containing people from pretty much every nationality we’ve got. There’s lots of places to eat and buy tourist crap from, and a giant muddy river running through the middle. Supposedly there’s some large hills or something around it, but all I saw was cloud

Tomorrow we’re off for a walk up something high and steep if the weather is good. I’m charging my camera batteries as we speak. I hope I have enough memory space to store all the photos! I think I have about 7GB of space spread over all the various memory cards I own, and with this Eee I can copy things around.

Assuming this wifi holds out, I’ll continue posting

Final day. Today we were joined by Devlin (David) and Ryan, making a grand total of six people crammed into my front room. This weekend has been really cool, it was great to see everyone and this was the first time I’ve had this many people in my house in one go.

I collected David and Ryan from the station and then we all spent the rest of the afternoon playing games, browsing the web and watching telly. Many cups of tea were drunk, along with lots of cake and left over bbq food. Then, in the evening I started ferrying people back to the station. I had to take two trips otherwise people would have been riding on my roof

I’ve just had word that everyone is back OK.

Oh, and I’ve just lost chocolate-box Russian roulette by eating the coffee creme. I’d nearly made it through an entire tray of chocolates, with only three left before finding the nasty coffee one.

My car passed its MOT, requiring only a change of oil, brake fluid and washer water. No nasty surprises or anything. I took it in at 10am, and it was ready at 4pm. Much better than when I lived in the Lake District and it could take three days before the bloke even bothered to look at it.

The front tyres will need replacing at some point, as will the exhaust system. The large thing in the image is the rear silencer on my car. It’s a metal box approximately the size of a shoebox. The large flake of rust is about the size of a credit card. Other, smaller bits of rust fell off when I gave the whole thing a prod with my carkeys.

And yet it passed the MOT, with the advisory notice that the rear exhaust system has corrosion.

Taking my car in was easy, I dropped it off and planned to catch the bus home. I first had to stop at the post office to collect a parcel (which turned out to be my printed and bound copy of the Apple Obective-C programming language). I didn’t really know when the busses were leaving to go to my house, so I ambled through town towards the bus station, into the station and straight onto the bus as it was about to leave.

Getting back to my car was slightly less relaxing. I had planned to just get the bus back in again, but when the garage rang at 4pm to tell me the car was ready they also said they shut at 5pm, not 6pm like they’d told me before. Great, an hour to get to the garage by public transport. Not possible, the next bus wasn’t until 4:45pm. I had two options - wait until tomorrow, or bike it.

I dragged my bike out the cellar, reinflated the tyres, reattached the brakes, gave the rear gear changer a kick and hurtled off at warp 9. I had half an hour to cycle through busy rush hour traffic in a journey that takes 15 minutes by car. And I made it too, in 14 minutes. In rush hour, bikes are quicker than cars. Cars make handy shields when going around roundabouts too, as I successfully negotiated the big, busy roundabout in town without ending up under someone’s car. It took longer to fold the thing up and secure it in the back of my car.

I think I’ll be making a trip to the bike shop soon though. I need a new back wheel, a total replacement of my brake system from the cables right down to the mechanisms and blocks, the rear gear changer needs soaking in de-greaser and probably stripping, and I think the front forks are loose. It’s so good that bikes don’t need MOTs like cars do, mine would probably be classed as dangerous and not given back to me. I need a new bike helmet too. The frame is OK though.

I need to get out and do more cycling, the steep hill between me and town was a bit too steep and I had to stop part way up it for a rest, which was a bit crap. I used to cycle up much steeper things daily in previous jobs, and I think that’s the point really. It didn’t help that my bike got stuck in a fairly high gear either.

There’s something very satisfying about cycling to a place though. The speed I cycle at has a direct relation to how quickly I get to my destination. There are no variables beyond my control that would otherwise slow down a car journey. Traffic lights don’t apply - you can get off and use the crossings (or ignore them and slip through if you want to be naughty), and empty pavements are handy too.

Today I have spent most of my time sat in a car. In the morning I went off into Marlborough again to do some more expensive food shopping to stock Amy’s grandma up for a while. Then we had to drive home. To make the trip a bit more interesting I plotted a less motorway-intensive drive towards the M1, going via Cirencester, Stow-in-the-Wold and Warwick, then up the M40, M42 and after a bit of zooming down the A42, the M1.

Much nicer driving through the countryside on a sunny day than rocketing up the motorway sealed away in the car. Even if I did spend quite a lot of time stuck behind a tractor, low-loader carrying a grass cutter, two vans and a truck. The truck was from a contract bed hire company for the hotel trade. It was brand new, with an 08 plate and a pleasing blue colour. That’s how long I got to stare at it. All the way from Cirencester to the turning to Stratford-upon-Avon. I used the grindingly steep hills to my advantage and had some food and stared out the windows a bit.

It was a much more civilised drive back. I’m normally racing against time to be back at a decent time because I have something Important to do the day after. Not this time though. My car’s due an MOT and service tomorrow and that’s about it.

We made it back to sunny Scunthorpe for 5pm, taking about 4 hours in total. Then, after a brief rest at Amy’s I shuttled back to Wakefield, stopping at her local Tescos to do some shopping of my own. A bit of a step down from the weekend’s parading around Waitrose, but I did get a bargain on some organic eggs (and in a fit of irony some cheap chicken). My cupboards are now full and look like I live there

(There’s no Internet in Wiltshire and barely any phone signal either. This post will get sent when I get back home).

Wiltshire is very pretty, lots of greenery and flowers, fields and all the nice stuff you expect in the countryside. It’s also got very old and very expensive houses full of rich people swanning around in their open top cars. You know you’re in a posh part of the country when the cheapest supermarket in the town (Marlborough) is a Waitrose.

A nice change to usual was driving down the night before in daylight, it only getting dark as I left the motorway and started going through the twisty roads and lanes around Amy’s grandma’s village. I like driving down single-track roads in the dark, it reminds me of living in the Lake District.

We were given some money by Amy’s mum to go and buy food for the weekend. I was given a list and set about buying food - from Waitrose. It was a uniquely bizarre experience shopping for someone else with their money, but also buying stuff for yourself with it. Normally I scour the shelves for cheap things and almost-out-of-date food. This time I was instructed to buy the good stuff.

The good stuff tastes good, but you don’t get much of it. Me and Amy and her dog went for a walk around Marlborough in the sun and I managed to buy two books:

I’m currently making my way through the weighty Redemption Ark and it seems like a good read so far. It has Space, Sci-Fi and enough of a storyline to keep me reading.