On the road again (2023-09-25)

It's been awhile since I was on the road. This trip is starting like the last one. A little less rainy but skirting the rain all morning. Stayed dry until the West edge of of NH, then light rain through VT and into NY. I did get a late start around 0900, but I'm certainly not making Nate time.

The last few weeks went quickly. The main reason to stay home was to celebrate my 33rd wedding anniversary. But I've also managed to catchup with most of my home chores, except ording road gravel and smoothing out the road to my house.

The majority of my time has been spent adding functionality to the website mapping. Most of it has been done with, a now very elaborate, script. Some of my work has been further extending features of that script. I've added parsing of Google Takeout data for their daily tracking. It's the source of the early Florida trip track. Also added code to accesss Google Photos, via the API, only to find out they strip off the EXIF Geo Location data from all my photos. That's a show stopper. Found an Android app called Autosync that handles a variety of destinations. Using SFTP to my Linux box, but also tested WebDAV directly to the Zope server. It fails because they upload to a temp name and rename the file when it's complete. Hoping to get developers to add an option to upload directly to the final filename.

To the web Map I added custom map icons, and the hooks needed to import and select them. Further extened the Leaflet module to display better on phones, used a desired display rectangle for the initial map view, and now read multiple backend files (instead of a few hard coded ones).

Learned how to better create the React frontend containers for Plone. Got a start on the next round of map customizations. Which will move away from external scripts, and utilize live web data for mapping. And eventually more interactions between photos, maps and the blog.

So where am I headed now? Short answer is the SouthWest US (SW tip of California) via Colorado. Intend to visit Moab, canyons around Las Vegas, and the Grand Canyon. Eventually passing through Texas for the eclipse in mid-October.

Only two stops today that combined gas, food and bathrooms.

Third and final stop was my campsite, just before it got dark at 1900. A Free place to camp at a park on the Erie Canal in Macedon NY. I arrived ready to bail to a KOA about nine miles back. Luckily a guy on a bicycle was just ahead of me, and walked his bike underneath a tree. I asked if he was tenting and he replied, "The guys at the fire department said it was ok". To which I responded "Great because I want to as well."

We setup tents and then talked while he cooked and ate dinner. Andre lives in NYC and is biking the path along the canal from Erie to NYC. Nice guy.

Just noting that the fire department is a noisy neighbor. Trucks deseling, fire hose practice, beeping reverse, and lights. Then throw in a car alarm for maxium effect.

Can't complain for this price.