Wednesday, 10 October 2007

Route post-mortem

I've been having a play with the routing you can do on Google Maps. If you click on the links below you should be able to see the route we followed, where we stopped and some of the places where significant "events" took place.

All works well apart from Day 3 where Google Maps simply won't navigate only the roads we travelled, hence this day appears in three parts.

The tally for the Google Maps route is 4520km. You can see from the picture that the actual distance driven was 4562km. No doubt some of the delta is by a couple of undocumented excursions to use the phone and the like. Even so, it's amazing how Google Maps manages to be 99.1% accurate over such a long trip.

Day 1 - Helmshore to Doncaster, Ashford, Dover, Calais, Bruges
673km, about 8 hours 42 mins

Day 2 - Bruges to Maastricht, Frankfurt, Davos
1,051km, about 10 hours 5 mins

Day 3 (Part 1, part 2, part 3) - Davos to Stelvio, Trento, Bar, Ristorante, Odina
611km, about 7 hours 13 mins

Day 4 - Odina to Castello d'Albola, Castello di Metelo, Odina
94km, about 1 hour 55 mins

Day 5 - Odina to Florence
72km, about 1 hour 22 mins

Day 6 - Florence to Helmshore
2,019km, about 20 hours 51 mins

Been there, done that!

Lisa kindly recorded (you can download it from Usenet if you haven't got a Lisa) episode 1 of the new series of the BBC's Top Gear programme that was broadcast while we were away. In it James, Richard and Jeremy set out to find the best driving road in the World.

Starting with a bit of fannying around near Monaco they head up to Switzerland and, after being booked overnight into a rather poor hotel, end up in Davos. From there they take the roads over the hills to Italy and ultimately Stelvio and realise they've found just what they were looking for.

This story sounds remarkably similar to our own experience. A similar route and a truly great road (although there was nothing wrong with our hotel). Anyway, the programme is well worth the watch if you get chance to see it.

Jeremy Clarkson, Oct 2007: "Davos to Stelvio, the greatest driving road in the World!" :-)