I've been making a push recently to seek out postboxes in East Kent. CT1, CT2, and CT5 are already shown as complete on the Dracos website. Now we've only got one box left to find in both CT3 and CT4 before each of those is complete as well.

Finding some of the boxes has been particularly tricky as some the descriptions are pretty useless. For example one of the CT4 boxes is described as "Stone Street". To anybody local to me that means the Roman road of the same name. Pretty much the whole road is within CT4, which covers a sizeable portion of the East Kent countryside. Basically the description narrows it down to a search of about 8 miles in length of road, or about 80% of its total length. Now that's helpful.

I've mainly been concentrating on the CT postal sector, but also straying over into the neighbouring ME and TN sectors from time to time. Today I'm pleased that we've reached a milestone of sorts for CT: 2/3 of all of the boxes have now been found when comparing against the Dracos data. That equates to 708 boxes.

In searching out some of the remaining boxes I've found that a few typos have unfortunately been made in the refs for I'd mapped a long time ago. Thus they weren't showing up as mapped when the Dracos updates from OSM data each Sunday. Some Postgres queries quickly uncovered candidates for these though, followed by a trip to the boxes themselves to confirm their correct refs. A further Postgres query reveals that there are a few boxes elsewhere in the UK with duplicated refs. So, if you live near one of these boxes then it may be worth another check:
CO13 70
DG11 40
E17 35
E4 4
IG2 70
IV1 113
KT10 173
N21 18
N22 6
RG21 210
RH14 81
S40 6
S61 303
SE1 36
SE25 4
SE9 50
SW15 3
WA8 5

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This Easter I cycle-camped from Fishguard to Canterbury as part of my training for my Three Corners (Dover, Land's End & John O'Groats) loop that I'll be doing for charity this summer. Of course I wanted OSM to benefit from this training trip, so my original plans were to cycle the whole of NCR4, to fill in the missing gaps we had....and then Richard Fairhurst announced that he'd completed NCR4. So, I decided to tackle NCR47 instead. Thanks for the recommendation Richard. The scenery in the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park is every bit as amazing as you said it is.

I've finally finished entering my NCR47 data now. Most of it into made last week's cycle map rendering and it's great to see. Unfortunately there were two short sections that I was unable to cycle (one due to a landslide and the other due to a building site), but everything else is now mapped. Almost all of the route was well signed, the main exceptions being in and near Carmarthen and within Newport. I was particularly impressed with the diversion signing to avoid the landslide.

There is one part of the whole route that I found particularly difficult though. Most of the high-level tracks were fine. I wasn't expecting a perfect surface in the hills. But one section (the location for this posting), perhaps a mile long and uphill, did rather exhaust me:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregorywilliams/3504392766/

I ended up pushing my bike loaded with four panniers, a tent, sleeping bag, etc. up that bit. It was worth it for the views though. And the mapping of course...

Spent yesterday gathering missing names for country roads south of Canterbury. Also gathered boundaries of speed limits and width / weight / vehicle type restrictions for better routing.

I've spent a few hours this evening improving the quality of Canterbury's data for routing. I've been adding speed limits and access restrictions for the city centre inside the ring road. I've also been filling in the crossing types where I'd previously neglected to gather these.

I had a very productive day of mapping today and enjoyed the first signs of Spring whilst doing it. I surveyed most of the historic market town of Faversham in Kent. I plan upon going back tomorrow to get the last few roads and paths, then I'll survey some of the neighbouring countryside, to make the best use of my journey over there. It's great now that the days are getting longer again -- I can survey even more in a day.

On an unrelated note, I've finally managed to finish entering my mapping data from last weekend's 2nd Medway mapping party. I don't like having such a backlog of data to enter.