Cemetery whooooooOooOoo

[garote]

Today's excursion: The Melbourne General Cemetery.



There's a good chunk of history here.



... As well as a good chunk of creepy!



One Halloween, when I was a kid, I was given a maze to color in at school. It was a graveyard in the woods, with the tombstones leaning crazily around, and ghosts and skeletons capering. I decided I would draw my own version of the maze, by tracing shapes out of it, one at a time, onto a new piece of paper. As I went I became enthralled with the idea of a graveyard maze that stretched to infinity - an endless recombination of the same few elements, and the real trick was, it was a three-dimensional place, and if you stood in any spot and took a flat photograph of what you saw, the photograph would make a two-dimensional maze, with an entrance and an exit.

Walking around here brought back that memory, and that idea.



"The Werewolf", by Angela Carter, describes graveyards as "those bleak and touching townships of the dead."



Spiders are SRS BSNS here, too.



I don't know what happened to Tom Askew or his parents, but I suspect they were lost at sea.



The Jewish quarter.



Buried here, we find three of the four people who headed the first Western expedition to cross the continent of Australia.



Walter Lindrum was the founder and first president of the Sportsmen's Association of Australia. The grave is cleverly designed - the pockets in the "pool table" have tiny holes in them so the table doesn't fill with water.



As part of my Australia adventure, I decided to eat as the Australians eat. I decided that this meant eating lots of fish and chips. Sea Salt served their fish thickly battered, and made the chips nice and crispy for me, even though soggy chips are more traditional.

(Note: I decided I had to stop being vegan in November, when my symptoms were extremely bad. I've still strongly de-emphasized dairy, and I refuse to drink milk. My symptoms have improved in the last month. I may try for vegan again at some point, since I suspect the improvement was for unrelated reasons.)



I'm a bike nerd, and I thought this bike was nifty, so here you go!

Comments

[mommadona.livejournal.com]

i'm loving your updates!

could you say a little bit about how you track your biking routes? do you use gps on the iphone/ipad, etc? do you know where you are going when you set out? are you actively consulting your gps as you ride? thanks.

[garote]

w00t!

To track the routes I use a Garmin Forerunner 305, stuck to the handlebar of the bicycle.
( https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?pID=349 )

I bought it before iPhones existed, but now that I have it, I'm glad it's with me. I just turn it on and hit 'start' and forget it's there ... the battery lasts 10 hours, and the display is visible in all light conditions, and it's able to tell me my speed.

I actively consult it as I ride in order to adjust my own pedaling effort. I find that if I'm pedaling over about 12mph, I'm probably putting in "too much" effort, and am on the way to getting myself tired out.

It's possible to embed route information into it, which I regularly do for San Jose Bike Party, but for most rides I just wing it. ADVENTURE!!!

Then I take the GPS home, plug it into a USB port, and run Ascent (an OS X cycling app), which syncs everything over, and tells me a huge pile of stats that I mostly ignore. :)

[mommadona.livejournal.com]

thanks for the reply! your comments have been very helpful!

i'm going to europe this summer and trying to figure out a way to avoid the getting-lost-tourist-stress. also want to go on some long bike rides in the low countries although i am as not as conditioned or trained as people like you.

i did just get an ipad (actually returned the wifi one for a 3g one) but my b/f has been charged with investigating other gps methods since you can't consult an ipad while you're riding. plus data plans for ipads in western europe are the most expensive in the world!

[garote]

Actually an iPad is an EXCELLENT resource. I used mine extensively when traveling in Australia.
The trick was, I had to know a local.

Celia (a local) took me to a phone store where I got a month-to-month-billed data-only SIM for the iPad. So for 25 bucks, I was able to use the 3G in the iPad all through Australia, including Tasmania. I used it every day, multiple times a day. I used it to find motels and restaurants, read local news, chat with people on AIM, make reservations and book tickets, send email trip updates from cafes, look at my environment in satellite and street view, etc. It's even got Skype on it, which is MUCH cheaper for international calls to the folks back home.

I placed the iPad in a saddlebag on the bicycle, and whenever I wanted to know where I was, what was around me, where I needed to go, et cetera, I just stopped, reached into the bag, took out the iPad, used it, put it back, and got back on the bike. Not a problem. No need to have a map in front of you every second, after all. In restaurants it was a conversation starter. I used it to show people photos from back home. Played a little jazz on it when I was relaxing. I used it with Celia to co-plan my outings the day before, since it was big enough for both of us to see and easily poke at the same time.

I had an iPhone on the handlebars but I didn't buy a SIM for it, so it was useful only as a music player and backup camera.

Yes, the data plans are expensive, but frankly, if you're going to be in Europe for close to a month, I would say this: Dropping phat cash on a data plan, whether phone or iPad, would be a much bigger enhancement to your trip than dropping phat cash on another GPS device that you may or may not need later.

The only thing that held me back when using the iPad was that I couldn't immediately call ahead to the hotels I found that didn't offer digital reservations. I'm pretty sure some cleverness with Skype would have solved that problem.