I finally went out and did more cycling today (this week's total has only been 70km, down from the usual 250-300km) and finished surveying Goonellabah.

So the region bounded by the Goonellabah ABS suburb boundary can now be considered "navigable road complete".

Richmond Hill Road also got another once-over so now there's only a couple of side streets in Richmond Hill which are unsurveyed. I wanted to get them all done but it's a hilly area and I was just getting too tired. It's amazing how much your athletic performance drops after a short break!

I'm a little lost as to what to map now. Perhaps it's time to stretch out and have a stab at Casino and/or Alstonville. They're just both so far away. Casino is a 60km round trip and Alstonville is 27km away (going via backroads).

We'll see what happens. Hopefully my cycling mileage will increase again, but it'll be harder without the motivation of mapping.

Did another (significant) chunk of Goonellabah today. It's definitely only one ride away from road completion.

In addition to the roads I also did another survey of Tuckie Tuckie Creek and the footways etc associated with the area.

Oh, and the landuse tags have been updated to reflect the recent surveying. Basically all the residential landuse areas have been drawn in along with an industrial area.

There's a fair bit of new housing development in the area so it will need re-visiting in about a year or so. Hopefully an active local will spring up by then.

I finally got around to doing more mapping today and surveyed Chilcotts Grass. Somebody had already given a few streets a trace but hadn't drawn anything in.

There's not really anything more to say... As usual Goonellabah is "2-3 rides away" from completion. It may be finished this week or it may not. It depends on how much progress gets made on a big assignment I've got.

I've been in contact with the webmaster from the Newcastle Cycleways Movement and have asked if their "existing cycleways" data can be incorporated into OSM. Just waiting for a reply on that one :).

Ended up waking up early this morning (6:45am is the earliest I've been awake for many years) and since it was seriously foggy I figured it was a good excuse to cycle to high ground and take a few photos. Of course, a section of Goonellabah got mapped in the process but that will be uploaded later today, after a 2nd mapping session in the afternoon.

The diary entry is centered on the location the following photo was taken. It's looking North East. The aspect is a bit unfortunate due to the position of the Sun but it's the best that could be found.

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I did some more mapping in Goonellabah today, mainly as an excuse to do some hill sprints on the bike.

Anyway, that's all fairly routine. What wasn't expected was the discovery of a large section of road which collapsed in the recent (~6 weeks ago now I think) floods.

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I'd planned a 100km ride for today but ended up cutting it a bit short due to illness and cold weather. For some reason I feel really icky in the stomach, even to the point of throwing up a little bit on the ride. Not sure what could be causing it, the prime suspect would be the virus that my 2 housemates have but it could also be a product of eating less to lose weight or even just lack of sleep lately. We'll see how it pans out.

Anyway, did 92km. Would have done 100km but it started raining which really kills enthusiasm. It was also a fairly cold day with a max of 19C.

Today's changeset was mainly converting ABS boundaries to roads. Pretty much every boundary in these parts is either a road or a creek/river. There was a road which was traced out though. I also discovered a nice rainforest remnant at Booyoung. It's an area with walking trails and BBQ, toilets etc. It'll need to be re-surveyed as I just cycled through and noted it.

There were a lot of things which I passed which could have been mapped but to be honest I really wasn't in the mood for it today.

The changeset can be visualised here.

I did a bit more surveying around Goonellabah today. The plan was to survey the streets coming off Richmond Hill Road but a lack of energy resulted in a section a bit closer to home being done instead.

Tomorrow will probably be a rest day. Goonellabah's hilly terrain means that mapping the area several days in a row isn't really a fun thing to do. At least, not on a sport/road bike which doesn't have ultra-low gears like the MTB does.

Anyway, the rest will allow me to catch up on study and get the MTB wheel re-build finished.

As usual, the changeset is here.

This morning I went to the bike shop and bought the parts required to get the mountain bike running again. Ended up just getting a $30 Shimano 32T middle chainring to replace the really cheap stock 32T ring. I've not tried it yet but it certainly looks a lot nicer than the previous one. It's got much better chain pickup ridge...things on it too.

The other purchase was a new set of spokes for the rear wheel. The left side spokes were snapping due to the disc brake tension and the right side were chewed up from when the chain got stuck between them and the cassette.

The newly laced wheel is sitting on the bedroom floor at the moment. I followed the procedure described by the late Sheldon Brown and it ended up being much simpler than previously thought. It took about 20mins to thread all the spokes.

Tomorrow they get tensioned up and the wheel gets trued. Or, at least, that process starts. Chances are it will be a long and frustrating process but we'll see how it goes.

Not a great deal of streets got mapped today but the ones that did were rather hilly. You always need to be careful mapping streets on a pushbike when they come off one called Mountain View Drive

Today's changeset is here.

Today I went on an adventure ride: 70km of sealed and unsealed roads (~20km unsealed total) from Lismore to Protesters Falls.

The ride itself was stunning. This part of the world has astounding natural beauty and as such the Nightcap National Park is classed as a world heritage area.

New map data will include Terania Creek Road and a couple of parks/toilets etc on the way. As yet the data isn't uploaded.

Now for the adventure part: about 1km away from the picnic area near the falls a rear spoke snapped. So I rode home 34km down one spoke.

Then at The Channon 2 chainring mounting bolts sheered off. One got left in the never never, the other was *just* hanging on. So I spent 40mins removing the larger 2 of my 3 chainrings and cycled the remaining 20km home on just the small (28T, I think) ring. Max speed was ~12-14km/h :p. I attempted to use cable ties to bend the 2nd chainring back so the small ring could be used but this only lasted about 40m before the ties snapped.

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