Geoff Jones

Category: Personal

  • Scotland visit

    Finally on the move again after spending a few months in Cambridge sorting out the house etc. Honey wanted to see Scotland and I wanted to inspect my square foot of land at Laphroaig 😀

    With both of us now very slow on the bikes I finally decided to get the train to Edinburgh and then rent an Enterprise Car Club car to drive to Inverness via Balmoral and then across to Oban to get the ferry over to Islay islands.

    Our Edinburgh train was cancelled at Peterborough but fortunately LNER held back the earlier train so we could run and catch that. So only a small delay.

    Edinburgh is grey and overcast but not to cold. We had an excellent meal at the Whiski bar incredible service and decent food.

    Gyrosco.pe is not happy with my days eating though 😀

    Todays food input

    so now to sleep…

  • A Morning view

    The mornings here in Ban ThaRuea are so perfect. A cool breeze from the west that’s come over the Myanmar mountains and the lake with a air temperature of 22°C at 8am . OK we have a predicted high of 38°C at 2pm which means I will be ready for my cool swim in the lake at 5pm

    What a great place to live at 76.5 years old 🙂

    Here is the view from our balcony table.

    Balcony view looking west to the National Park

  • Shabushi lunch

    Shabushi offers an unlimited lunch in Phetchaburi 😀

    Lunch at Shabushi

    The gyrosco.pe app approves, its camera driven AI says

    Lunch at Shabushi
    Non stop food conveyor

    Not bad for ฿426 (£9.43) per person we have 1hr 30min before a surcharge is added.

  • Gyroscope

    I’ve restarted using the gyrosco.pe app on the IPhone. I thought I would check how long it thought I would live 🙂

    Not bad for a 76 year old!

    I’ve found it rather buggy and obviously it’s been designed by a 30 year old with very small fonts & low contrast text!

    My favourite thing is the AI calculations from my food photos

    A days food intake

    Will continue with it for a while and see if anything happens to my weight so far not so good 🙁

    Last weeks weight chart from the Weight Diary iphone app
  • The countdown begins!

    The countdown begins!

    [wpdevart_countdown text_for_day=”Days” text_for_hour=”Hours” text_for_minut=”Minutes” text_for_second=”Seconds” countdown_end_type=”time” font_color=”#000000″ hide_on_mobile=”show” redirect_url=”https://rtrt.me/ulink/CCTA/CC-2023/tracker/RH4PGYUS/focus” end_date=”13-08-2023 23:59″ start_time=”1691943437″ end_time=”7,1,0″ action_end_time=”hide” content_position=”center” top_ditance=”10″ bottom_distance=”10″ ]On the PBP[/wpdevart_countdown]
    It’s one week beforeToday I start my first Paris Brest Paris Audax something I always said I would never attempt 🙂 but I succumbed and now we are in Rambouillet

     

    I’m rider O195 with a start time of 19:30 on Sunday 20th August with a finish time 90 hours later on Thursday 24 August at 13:30.

    You can check my progress at this link. Honey’s progress can be checked at this link she starts 30 minutes before me at 19:00.

    Our progress is automatically updated at the control towns:

    The times are my official closing times at each control, I can exceed one or two but the overtime has to be corrected by the next one. So my sleep is going to suffer, according to Autosleep my Sleepbank currently has over 9 hours of credit 🙂

     

  • The Paris Brest Paris (PBP) Audax

    PBP Course 2023We have both qualified & received our places for our first Paris-Brest -Paris ride. We completed our 200km, 300km, 400km & 600km qualifying rides in Thailand. The 2023 PBP for me starts on Sunday 20th August at 19:30 and Honey at 19:00. We have 90 hours to ride the 1219km (757 miles) which makes my finishing time on Thursday 24th August at 13:30, although obviously, it can be sooner hahaha. Stop laughing I did the Isan 2020km ride with a few hours to spare!

    June 23 StravaWe have spent June training in the UK, The PBP course is hilly with 11,750m (38,550 feet) of ascent, or roughly 1%. Checking my Strava it looks like in June I cycled 1923km and climbed 13044m which is 0.7% so getting close. However, my average moving speed was 16.6kph obviously I need to speed up a fair bit if I want to sleep on PBP.

    I managed to get some sort of lurgy in the past few days which has had me shivering like crazy and non-stop peeing. But it seems to be clearing up fast now so hopefully training will resume tomorrow.

    More to

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  • Mini tour to Laos

     

    With the wretched CoVid restrictions slowly getting lifted especially with my 3 jabs and almost certainly a mild bout of it we thought it was time for touring, one of my original ideas for moving to Thailand 2 years ago.

    My truck was booked into Ford Phetchaburi to get the smashed rear light and damaged front bumper fixed so we loaded the bikes complete with camping kit etc and started the ride to Laos from the garage.

    Leaving Ford to start the ride to Laos

    It was a relaxing afternoon after 1.5km we found a Sushi place followed a few km later by a stop at Merci Papa for a gorgeous fruit salad

    In all we rode 43km in an elapsed time of 4.5 hours so less than 10kmh 🙂 so definitely not Audax speeds but very pleasurable. Graham & Frances take note 🙂

    Tomorrow it’s just over 100km to meet the group near Don Mueang the camping starts Thursday!

  • A years cycling in Thailand

    Sabai Sabai I started this post on the 4th of January 🙂

    2020 was a fantastic cycling year for me, blowing away all my previous mileage records :-). Thank goodness I moved to Thailand, in January, away from all the CoVid lockdowns in Europe.

    Veloviewer chart of Geoff Jones cycling 2013 to 2021
    9 years of cycling in Veloviewer

    According to Strava I rode 18,220Km that’s well over eleven thousand miles at an average speed of 21kph (13mph) with 82,456 metres of climbing (27,000ft). Pretty good for a 72 year old who also designed and had a house built at the same time.

    As you can see this year is not looking so good for cycling.  Three months in and only 2,300km ridden, a good 4,500 km behind last year as I said sabai sabai