I decided to take a bike ride on Saturday and Renee decided she would come along. We started in North Akron, as I always do with the kids, and we went all the way to Peninsula. I forgot my camera, because I guess I don’t associate needing the camera when I go on these trips with anyone other than the kids. I should have brought it.

This was supposed to be the first time that I’d have a tracklog of the trip. I decided, and wrote about it in another post, that I had decided to use MyMotion in order to track the trip. There is one major problem and one small problem.

The major problem is that the trip goes all over the place. You are supposed to allow for some deviation from the trip you actually took since GPS is constantly trying to figure out where you are within something in the neighborhood of 300 to 500 meters at every ping. The problem is that the trip actually went across rivers and all over the place. The distance marked is totaling 19 miles for the trip to Peninsula, when really the round trip is only 19 miles. I don’t know if this is a problem with the GPS unit or the software. Further testing is going to be necessary.

The secondary problem is that all the information, such as speed, were not recorded. Jo informed me that I was doing it wrong. I’m supposed to save the trip as a .trk file and then convert it using a web page that he linked me to. This should fix the problem with information not being retained.

I’m not going to show you the GPS data, because I really feel like it’s worthless.

The trip was a lot of fun. It was supposed to get up to 80 degrees, but to be honest it never really felt that warm. I took plenty of water bottles, but we didn’t finish them all. We saw a bunch of woolly bear caterpillars on the trail. I was supposed to look it up, but I haven’t found any information on why it would appear that they were crossing the trail. Seems really dangerous and unnecessary.

We ate at the Winking Lizard in Peninsula. It was packed, because of the college football games. We ended up walking around Peninsula while we were waiting for a seat and we saw two snakes. They were pretty cool. It’s always so weird what nature you see when you go for these trips.

I hope that I can get some clothes that will make these bike trips possible as the weather gets colder. I don’t think they close the Towpath, but I guess I should grab a pamphlet next time and find out if they have dates for that sort of thing.