Introduction

Windcheetah number 749 is a recumbent tricycle designed by Mike Burrows and built by AVD of Sale, Manchester, England. It has an extremely comfortable riding position, the stability of a three-wheeler with a low centre of gravity, and an easy set of controls.

The Lake District National Park is a fabulous playground waiting to be explored.

Bring these together with a digital camera and a website and you have all of the ingredients for a project that documents, in words and photographs on the web, a series of outings along the roads and lanes of lakeland.

Motorists

People! When they're in their cars they see cyclists as real nuisances who shouldn't be allowed on the road - they don't pay any road tax after all. However, as soon as the motorist dons the lycra shorts and the sunglasses, the SPDrille's on the other foot. Cycling two-abreast is perfectly OK because they have as much right to be on the road as anyone, and we'll all be riding bikes when the oil runs out, and they're not causing the greenhouse effect like those smelly noisy cars.

All I want to say is thank you to all those courteous motorists who wait patiently for a chance to pass me and then give me miles of clearance, and hi to all the cyclists, I agree with you really.

Overripe Bananas

I've noticed on the Ordnance Survey maps that they put on helpful symbols to tell you how much energy you need to travel along a road. The most useful symbol is the black, overripe banana. This appears where the road is particularly steep, and I use it as an indication of how many bananas I would have to eat to have the energy to travel up the slope. Recumbents don't go uphill very well, so usually I need to add an extra banana to the number on the map.

The Windermere

My unit of distance is The Windermere, or about 10 miles. My aim over a day's cycling is to keep my average speed below 1 Windermere per hour. It's not that I think my rib cage would crush and it would be impossible to breathe above that speed, it's simply that this journey is about observation and not about racing. If I go faster than 1 Wph then probably I'm not looking at the surroundings properly and am becoming more interested in fitness and performance than the landscape I'm travelling in, which would be a shame.

Technology

This site was developed using ASP.Net to generate HTML pages from XML files. Each leg of a journey is described independently as an XML fragment comprising an image descriptor and paragraphs of text. The journey is then constructed by building a list of legs in the right order. When you click on a link to view a journey, an XSLT stylesheet processes the selected journey node, and outputs the HTML header, the introduction etc., and then processes each journey leg. This involves displaying the text and the image in a table, alternating between placing the image in the left cell and the right cell. Using this approach means you will see the same information displayed when a given leg, e.g. Ambleside to Clappersgate, appears in more than one journey. Any questions?