After the NL party it was on to holiday in Tuscany. It’s a hard, hard life I lead. Flew into Pisa and quickly fixed up some legacy engineering issues.

Actually, the tower area is really cool, you can wander about for free which is quite nice. Of particular interest is the baptistery. Acoustically perfect, every 30 minutes a security guard comes in and sings a few notes cleverly calculated to achieve harmonics as they interfere with each other. Anyway, it’s hard to describe, just make sure if you’re ever in Pisa that you go to the baptistery, it’s free to go in if you’re praying.. Here’s a recording (not mine) – scroll to 1 minute 20 seconds..

After you’ve been into the baptistery, you can then go (not free) into the Cemetery. It has a statue of Fibonacci there, and the most horrific hell scene I’ve ever seen. Seriously graphic.

From Pisa we drove to Barbarino Val D’elsa, a small village in Tuscany. My sister had picked out the place, and it really was superb. A “Palazzetto” (small palace) it was basically 4 houses combined into one. Massive. Liz had even worked out that the house would have the most killer view out over the countryside (something stupidly left out of the literature for the house… it would have been a main selling point if I was marketing it!)

Anyway, a week of exploring Tuscany, discovering the delights of “Vin santo and Cantuccini” (almond biscuity thingies dipped in a sort of desert wine), exploring Florence (Galileo museum and Uffizi), eating tonnes of ice-cream, finding a skeleton in a church and a wine tour (Chianti region)

Oh, one final thing was the sculpture garden. I really enjoyed this one – called “Energy”

These are instructions on how to take a google map and get it into a GPX file for use for offline navigation using OSMAND+ on an Android Phone.

1. Go to Google Maps and get directions (choosing the biking option) between two points.
2. Pull the route around finding the smallest roads you can!
3. Click through to the “details” page for the route and copy the URL
4. Paste the url into gpsvisualizer choosing “gpx” as the output.
5. Save the GPX into your Dropbox account (this is just to get the file onto your phone, there are lots of ways to do this, but Dropbox is the easiest)
6. If you have an Android phone, install OSMAND+, if you’re on iOS use “maps.me”
7. Go into Dropbox on your phone, and find the gpx file, click on it, and choose to save it as a track
8. Then open up OSMAND and go into “Configure Map” -> “GPX track…”, then find your gpx track
9. Finally just click on the navigation button and it should prompt you for “Do you want to use the displayed map for navigation?” after that you’ll have offline directions on your chosen route – perfect.
10. Specifically for the UK – the Sustrans website was handy. It shows bike routes around the UK. For the life of me I couldn’t see how to export a GPX of the route we did (route 4) eventually finding a sort-of export someone made from all the OpenStreetMap data. A very handy file which I can’t seem to find any more … however.. waymarkedtrails.org seems to allow you to download some of them. Note however that sometimes route 4 splits in two.. so I’m not sure how that works on a GPX.

Do you have tips? I’d love to hear them in the comments.

Then it was time for the final run to Dublin. Ireland seems pretty woeful from the point of view of nice bike-paths, at least from Rosslare to Dublin anyway. Google tried to route us on the N1 all the way, but there was a way more towards the Wicklow and Dublin mountains that we ended up taking. First day was a run up to Avoca (almost) and then the second day all the way back to Dublin.

We had our second day of rain on our way to Dublin, it felt good to be home ;). The hill in these pictures is “The Sugarloaf”. In Maori culture there’s an introduction people do, called the mihi. As a part of this you talk about your mountain, the Sugarloaf would definitely be mine, I forget the number of times we hiked up it as kids.

Anyway, finally we made it back to Dublin. All the family was there (my sister’s family was over from the US). It was lovely to complete the trip successfully. I’d happily go bike-touring again, it was lots of fun :)

A: Nothing :), well, unless it’s a care package from NZ including Tantrix and Chocolate ;) hehehehe

After Wales it was to the Pembrook coastline for us. We had a lovely day biking to Llanelli via Swansea (pronounced Clan-eth-li). Well, lovely, except for the puncture we got. It would have been fine, but the bicycle levers I had were old, and they broke off while trying to lever the tyre off the rim. Fortunately, a passer by took us to their place, gave us the tools to fix the bike and we were on our way again. Lesson learned – make sure you have extras (and new extras) of things like bike-levers that do tend to perish over time.Llanelli was a nice seaside town. The AirBnB was the best we’d been to anywhere, the view was stunning and the breakfast delicious.

The next day it was on to Laugharne, which is where the poet Dylan Thomas lived. He certainly had a nice view from which to compose his poetry, the boat house & writing shed were amazing.

We met up with our friends Rachel & Justin from Christchurch for a day. She was over visiting family and came and collected us from Laugharne and off we went to see around Tenby (where we bought a delicious pork pie) and then to the area of the coast around St. Govan’s Head. There’s a 13th Century chapel there built into the cliffside, and some quite nice beaches and wetlands. A nice place to explore for a day.

Also, Rachel had brought over a care-package from our friends Michelle & Steve in ChCh. She’d packed in lots of yum chocolate, and a replacement set of Tantrix to replace the one we’d brought travelling and then swapped for Quirkle. Maaike promptly beat me at it again. My winning streak is definitely over :(

Then for the last couple of days from Laugharne to Fishguard, my old college friend Declan and his partner Heather met up with us and we biked from just before Tenby over to Fishguard together, staying the night at Broad Haven (and a very beautiful sunset).

They certainly threw themselves in the deep-end, as it was probably the hardest bit of biking we’d done – certainly the hilliest. Still, with enough brakes and decent weather and the prospect of a pint and a decent meal at the end – well, the miles just flew by.

All too soon we arrived at Fishguard and time to get the boat to Ireland. Not far left to go now – just 110km up the coast to Dublin.