Whether it’s a walk in the woods or an all-day hike across country, I’ve always enjoyed spending time outdoors, moving slowly, grateful just to take it all in. This category will mostly be a collection of my favourite routes, but may also feature the odd bit of hiking gear.
An easy 3 hour ramble with sweeping vistas and ancient shaded woodland, starting and finishing on the Steam Heritage Trail which links Peel with the Isle of Man’s capital, Douglas. Don’t be fooled by the short distance and minimal elevation gain – this route includes a river crossing and several squelchy bogs.
Rattling through the list of subjects I wanted to share with y’all but haven’t gotten around to, thoughts naturally turn to winter sports, and the issue of sliding about on ice like a drunken uncle at a wedding. Don’t you just love lockdown? With that, here’s a couple of words on a product that’s made me look forward to getting out on icy trails and frozen paths: my Microspikes.
A health-inducing lockdown loop from downtown Crosby to the roof of the world, or the top of Marown, which is pretty much the same thing. Pack the picnic blanket and Compeed, this one’s gonna be good.
A while back I saw a post on Reddit questioning the accuracy of step tracking when using hiking poles. This made me think. I use poles now and then for longer / steeper hikes – was I missing out on some tracked calories which could later be exchanged for beer? Time to find out!
Another hastily clobbered together route that turned out all right, on the hottest day of the year, and it’s only May. This one sees us getting sunburnt over 4 hours and 715 sweaty meters of elevation, bagging one of the island’s highest peaks and visiting an ancient hermitage. Welcome to the Dalby circuit.
Availability of open-source map data has been eroding sales of Garmin’s proprietary maps for some time now, and in this short post I’m going to share my approach for getting several countries worth of routable maps onto my handheld device and my laptop.
Most of the major bugs with Garmin’s latest instalment in the popular GPSMap series have been ironed out, so I’m sharing my thoughts after living and travelling with the device for a month. Spoiler alert: there are still some – ahem – Undocumented Features spoiling an otherwise great outdoor GPS.
In the never ending quest to reduce the size of my travelling kit I’ve found two new solutions, two reasons to leave the laptop at home more often: a keyboard that lets me type well using my phone, and an app that lets me plan hikes or runs for use with my Garmin fitness watch.
By no means an in-depth review, this is a page of my experiences after two weeks with Garmin’s new fitness wearable, the Fēnix 5 Plus. I take a look at the device’s performance with particular emphasis on heart rate monitor and GPS, and touch on some of the other observations while walking, hiking, running, and cycling using this £749 premium wearable.