Between D2D and NL (end July)

A few days after my 45 day D2D tour ended I had an appointment to have a custom seat fitted for my bike. It was with Longo Custom Seats in Maryland. A full days ride from home. My Sargent seat is better than the stock DL1050xt seat, but not as comfortable as my old Russel Day Long. So I knew it could be better.

The trip to Maryland went well and I had the seat fitted. Unfortunately my butt was toasted from all the seat time so far this year. The full day in the saddle down to Maryland certainly didn't help. Everything was tender, so I felt every pea. It's hard to be such a princess.

My test rides and the day and a half ride home really didn't convince me that the seat was better than the Sargent. So I had to let my butt recover, then wait and see ona long day. Days later the seat felt good, maybe as good as the Sargent with Alaskan Sheepskin topper. But still didn't just disappear under my ass, like I had hoped. When the shoe fits you shouldn't ever sense that it's there. That's what I really wanted.

During my non riding time I started working on the Leaflet mapping code I want to add to the website. After a few days of work I was shocked to have something stubbed that was so close to what I wanted. It made viewing my trip and photos so much nicer that I was ecstatic about deploying.

So excited that I started working on the backend integration into the website and nearly completed it before we left for Newfoundland. The last three days I ported over and modified pre-existing code to get nearly everything I originally wanted onto a Plone website that was fully data driven. I nearly made the new code live with the D2D data the night before heading to Newfoundland. But decided that was just a bad idea if things went wrong.

I spent the final evening writing a web scraper that would locate and match up the photos already on the Plone website with the metadata I had used for testing. When I ran the code and it spit out the nearly 3000 photo URLs I was very pleased, because I was so close I could taste it.

However all this effort ate all of our last three nights before leaving for NL. And I mean ALL of the nights. I was up until 0330 at least two of those nights, and got up early everyday to stay on the early schedule. Not ideal trip prep.