As alluded to in a previous blog post, we see this trip as a great opportunity to do cool and funky things with data – much along the lines of “Information is Beautiful”, although probably not executed quite as well. We have yet to decide exactly what data we’ll gather and what art projects we’ll take on, however GPS is a kind of obvious starting point. What follows is a bit of a GPS geek indulgence.

Even before we begin to think about what we might do with any GPS data that we generate, we had to decide how we would gather it. Now if power wasn’t an issue, we’d be laughing. We’re not laughing (but we are smiling – it’s ok – we’re happy). Smartphones and GPS dongles that plug into your computer are great, but they’re quite power hungry, and we only have limited battery power. One option was to purchase a Raspberry Pi, add a GPS dongle to it and write some capture software, but that would take time.

There are loads of GPS trackers on the market… but most of them want a SIM card in them so that you can remotely locate the tracker. Now that would be pretty cool, but with roaming mobile charges that wouldn’t be cheap. What we needed was something with a long battery life whose only function was to log co-ordinates, altitude and time every 5 seconds, which we could then download at a later date. Enter Ivor (our i-gotu GT600):

So we’ve got the device, which records all we want it to, but also has a great battery life which is extended further by a motion detector which puts it on standby if it’s not moving. Good stuff! Only one issue; we don’t use Windows (well, actually I do have Windows on my Ubuntu laptop, but only because the TomTom software has no Ubuntu alternatives and won’t work on the age Mac we have). This means we can’t use the @Trip software as a matter of course. No worries – thanks to igotu2gpx, we’re cooking on gas (more on the subject of cooking with gas later!) and can transfer our co-ordinates onto the computer and into standard gpx format. The only thing that we can’t do with this is remove the data from the GPS device itself… so for that we’ll be forced to boot into Windows.

Once the data is in gpx format, we’ve been using GPSPrune to do a little bit of processing; things like removing duplicate points, changing the time offset and extracting a few stats. It’s quite cool:

So that’s all well and good, but we want to do something a bit more funky with this GPS data that we’re gathering. We’re going to have absolutely shed loads of it, spreading across most of Europe and we don’t want it to go to waste. Well… we’ll upload it to openstreetmap obviously, but there’s got to be something exciting and creative that we can do with it all. We’ve had a little bit of a play with gpxanim which animates a gpx track and that’s more along the lines of what we’re thinking maybe.

In the interests of getting more ideas, we thought we’d open it up to you and share our raw gpx data as we go round. We know lots of people who are creative and maybe a little bit geeky (in a good way), so if you would like our data, just let us know and it’s yours!

Maybe someone will come up with something as funky as one of Bruno Imbrizi’s experiments…?

I’m not sure whether the title should be a reference to the wonderful weather we’ve had since leaving our jobs, or a reference to all of the things that keep on going wrong with Bertha as we try to fix her up (it pours)! At least one helps the other be more manageable.

Bertha has passed her MOT! Get in! Harry, the friendly mechanic, only had to replace the rear brake assemblies and fit new batteries and she sailed through her MOT. We have to thank Sean for helping us choose a van that is so good mechanically… which segways nicely into the work we’ve been doing on her since we got her back on Monday.

The main job is still the damp issue in the rear corner, requiring us to rip out gently remove the rotten battens and plywood to replace it with sound stuff. We planned to do this on Thursday (because we had good friends staying with us at the beginning of the week) – starting by taking out the rear window so we could get access to the rotten wood. Which night did it rain? Wednesday… continuing into Thursday morning… not really the weather for removing windows. We had to therefore shuffle things around a bit and do that today. We ripped out carefully extracted the window, then Kiri announced that she was “ready to demolish”.

At close of play today we have successfully removed (and replaced, including re-sealing with sikaflex (not bathroom sealant, which we suspect may be partially to blame for our damp issues)) the rear window. We’ve also removed many, many rotten bits of wood that might have happened to be structural and replaced them with fresh, treated timber and we’ve removed all of the plywood that we’re going to remove.

Now onto the things that seem to be going wrong. When we got the van back, I was keen to fix the freeze split in the water heater, so got out my soldering iron, did my stuff, then put some plumber’s putty on it just to make sure. However, when I reinstalled it and turned on the water, the water pump wasn’t working. Sad times.

A quick check of the leisure battery showed that there was a “burnt bit on a white plastic thingy” (sorry for the technical language), which didn’t seem to be healthy. We then undid the zig unit (no idea what “zig” means, but it’s the electrical control unit), found a loose black wire in there, re-wired it to a random other black wire, which made the lights on the front of the zig unit work (where they hadn’t before), but made the lights randomly turn off when you turned another light on… before quickly unwiring it did absolutely nothing and thought we would leave it to someone who knows about electrics. A quick phone call to the heroic Harry confirmed that the inline fuse holder (white plastic burnt thingy) had been like that before the new leisure battery was installed. So, I went to unscrew the fuse holder, managed to smash the glass and destroy the 15amp fuse, which then stopped any of the electrics from working from the leisure battery… meaning that the wpbt (white plastic burnt thingy) was probably a legacy problem. In any case, we have another one on order, as well as a multimeter so we can try to properly diagnose things.

The other minor distraction involved a gas canister. Mum, don’t panic – we’re fine and we’re going to get the gas checked out by a professional before we use it. We’re replacing our gas system with Gaslow – refillable LPG tanks, so to prepare for that I removed the old Calor gas tank from the gas locker. This revealed the flue and duct from the gas heater. That was vaguely disconnected and bodged together with gaffer tape. Another thing to add to the to-do list.

As least curtains and re-upholstery shouldn’t be too complicated…

Doing web design, whilst chasing cows out of your front garden… you don’t see that happening in London! Living in the countryside whilst we do the last few things before our trip is taking a little bit of adjusting to, but it’s great!

It’s now been just over a week since we left London and we had hoped to have made good progress with Bertha, our four-wheeled friend, by this stage. However, the last time we checked up on her, she looked like this (well, her rear axle did):

Bertha is in safe hands though, with a friendly mechanic, undergoing a service before her MOT. The signs are all fairly positive, as the only things which require attention are a minor issue with the rear brakes and a leisure battery which is leaking vaguely explosive hydrogen. Thank goodness we hadn’t got round to testing the gas yet! So with these things being fixed (delayed a little by a wait for parts), we’ve been focussing on the non-van-related things to do for our trip, interspersed with a few other lovely activities.

The main thing that we’ve been focussing on is this site; specifically the KIST 2EU section. We’ve added an FAQs page (please ask us more questions to go on it!) and we’re slowly working through the creation of our country guides. They’re not going to rival Lonely Planet, but they should at least hold all of the pertinent information that we’ll need in one place. There’s still work to be done on an infographics page; something that has to be done considering my background in data analysis and Kiri’s graphic design skills. We also still need to work out exactly how we’re going to display a map of our route as we go along – we’ll write a separate blog post shortly about our testing of a GPS device.

There have also been a few purchases that we’ve been making; the most significant of which is fabric for re-upholstering the seats in the living area and making new curtains. After a lot of research (including visiting this website which has a great quote of “We offer a discount to OAPs on a Wednesday”), we decided that we’ll use cotton dust sheets as the main fabric (£10.99 for a 12′ by 9′ sheet!), then sew patches of interesting material onto them to brighten it all up. I also spent a couple of hours servicing and setting up our folding bikes so the chain doesn’t fall off when you change gear!

With all of this busyness, our Lightbulb Head work has taken a bit of a back seat, however it was great to see Pig and Porter in action at the Ashburnham Flower show and taste their wares. Seriously, with beer and food that tasty, which sells itself, they don’t really need the website for marketing, but we’re spending a bit of time working with them whilst we’re in the area.

We have also attempted to do a countryside time lapse video to rival the one we did in London before we left (Oval crossroads). On our first day here, Norman the local farmer was mowing a field, so we set up a camera expectantly… It turns out that there’s a slower pace of life outside London (plenty of tea breaks in the mowing!), so the resulting time lapse doesn’t particularly work on its own. We’ll combine it into another bit of film work at some stage though.

As for the “lovely activities”, these have included a barbecue followed by watching shooting stars, a visit to play pirate golf in Hastings and attending the local MI (men’s institute) meeting. We could get used to village life!

We’re leaving London tomorrow and we’re not coming back…well, actually, we are coming back in 2 weeks for a wedding, but then we’re not coming back! Yes, after weeks and months of planning, we’re finally leaving London to embark on upgrading Bertha (our motorhome) before we set off in her around Europe. These last few weeks in London have been pretty full on – here’s a flavour of what we’ve been up to.

Aside from both going through the rigmarole of leaving our jobs (thank you for the moderately priced bottle of wine!), we’ve had the interesting task of deciding where to leave our belongings whilst we’re travelling. Our family have been very kind and have given us the use of a loft, so in early July we hired a van and drove most of our things to Leicester. Now we don’t want Bertha to feel inadequate in any way, but the hire van was less than a year old, with only 1000 miles on the clock and incredible air conditioning on the first hot weekend of the year. Bliss. So that’s most of our belongings dealt with.

For months I’ve been wanting to do a time lapse from the top of St. Mark’s church overlooking the crossroads at Oval tube station and a couple of weeks ago we finally got round to it. There’s a blog post about it on our business website (lightbulbhead.co.uk) if you’re interested in the back story, but here’s the video:

We’ve also been looking after the design and content of the St. Mark’s website for the last couple of years and we wanted to leave it in a state where we were happy with it visually, but we could hand over the management of content to someone in the church office. Again, there’s a blog post about it at lightbulbhead.co.uk covering some of the technical details. If you want to go straight to the website, it’s stmarkskennington.org.

We’re terrible at goodbyes, but we’ve enjoyed spending some final fleeting moments with our London friends in the last few days in various locations; a garden, a pub, another pub and today at church. It’s now just time for the packing of the last few things in the flat and a quick wipe of surfaces on top of the deep clean we’ve done in the last week. I think we’ll leave our mouse traps for the next tenants…they’ll need them!

The adventure starts here!