I see it's been almost a year since my last post. Then I did herald the arrival of the mountainbikedurham.com website.

Obviously things have been delayed somewhat.

In the meantime check out this website for details of some great riding in the North East of England.

http://www.visitnortheastengland.com/mtb/

You can even win an iPod!







http://www.visitnortheastengland.com/mtb/

Mountain Bike Durham is not well....

So after not posting for months and months I decide to post to say that I'm working on a new website - www.mountainbikedurham.com which will be up and running very very soon!

In the meantime here is a short film about the dangers of the sport:

New links list....

Added a new links list to the page ( over there, left at top of page). This will link to google maps of routes described in this blog. There will still be links from posts but I plan to make them accessib from the side bar as well.

You 'll see that the Cassop Vale route still not complete with description! But a 1:25,000 map will show you the way without problem! It will be complete tomorrow - thats a promise!

There's also a new link to the CTC's cyclehero campaign. Worth a look - you can win a spesh!

Make some noise...

Out this morning with youngest daughter on trailer bike and old friends G & F and their daughter on her bike. G took us on a circular off-road route from Seaham , taking in South Hetton, Murton and Dawdon. There seems to be a lot of new off road tracks in that area and they seem worthy of further exploration.

Joined the International Mountain Bike Association (IMBA) today - they do a lot of work around rights of way access and trail building. I've added a link to their website so take a look and join.

Concert for Diana on telly tonight. P Diddy shouted out: "If you miss Princess Diana - make some noise!" Priceless.

Its been a long time baby.....

Far too long! Seem to have lost my way a bit since last post....Gary Bainbridge (edit: Gary Grainger - link works OK!) tells me that's common for newbies. We manage up to about 10 weeks concerted effort and then fall by the wayside! Well thats not for me. I ain't no goddamn quitter.

So I've added a new link to the non-mtb links and google mapped more of my route! Gary left a useful comment about trail-gator.com. I actually thought it was a trail mapping tool, until I checked it out myself and its an ingenious way of making a trailer bike out of a proper kids bike!

I've had a long think about this blog and decided that I need to stick to it and develop into what I set out to create way back in April. I need to add more photo's and colour and news. So there!!!!

Google Maps 2

So I've taken the plunge with Picasa. Installed on PC that only has a few pictures on it reducing my worries about privacy greatly!

And I have tried out adding a photo to the Google map for the Cassop Vale route, and it seems to work!

This is a "good thing" : it resolves many of the problems that I had encountered when trying to work out how to mtb routes here. Using Google maps means that these can be viewed easily, linked to, printed off easily, turned into jpeg relatively easily and you can even get directions to any point on it, meaning that for loops the "start" can be anywhere you want it to be.

This whole project is taking a lot longer than I ever imagined but now I feel some progress has been made.

Sunny Sunday afternoon....

Sunny Sunday afternoon ride..... P persuaded me to venture out. I was feeling like an afternoon in front of the TV but he talked me into a quick blast out towards Finchale Priory, on the banks of the Wear. Explored some bridle paths and tracks to try and make a bigger, more exciting ride but that part seems a little limited. Perhaps linking it into a bigger loop might work...

On the way back stop off to the bmx track so P could get some "air". Or try to get some "air" anyway. We decide that the jumps are too close together and blame the designer.

Email from Fred - he's been reading about my difficulties with PDF, jpeg etc and made a great suggestion. It wasn't the answer I was looking for, but seems to have given me a solution. A screengrab can be saved as jpeg so why was I struggling to find a way to convert pdf?

I 'll see how that works. I want there to be a printable written description of routes as well as a map. Thats why I want a jpeg version as that can be zoomed in on and manipulated at ease and takes up less space on here!