An early start today, left home at 8:30am, it was good weather no wind and the sun was up! I started the route on my normal circle up to Pembury, past Kent College and down to Capel, but this time turned left toward Golden Green, East Peckham and Paddock Wood.

Spent about an hour in Paddock wood, in Everden Cycles and Barsley’s Coffee shop. I need to get some Summer kit as it is starting to get much warmer when out on the bike. Also I am seriously considering getting a Garmin Edge GPS for my bike. I just don’t know which to go for! I have narrowed it down to either the Edge 305 or the 705.

The 305 does not have street maps programmed into it so it is primarilaay a training device which measures a lot of data. (The advantage over a traditional cycle computer is that you can plug them into your PC and see maps of where you went, graphs of speed vs altitude vs heart rate rather than just an average speed) If you cycle a route regularly you can even use one of your previous cycles as a pace. To navigate you can pre program GPS coordinates with the relevant marker eg turn left. As there is no map you see a compass arrow directing you to the next waypoint.

The 705 does all of the above and have full street maps in colour so that you can say tell me how to get to…. and it would give instructions. It is also £150 more expensive.

I am leaning towards the 305 as I don’t think I am buying to navigate my route at the time but to see my stats as I cycle and more importantly download them after and analyse them.

After a coffee I headed back, again in a roundabout way through to Rams hill, Castle Hill and Matfield.

Here is the map of today’s route, again made with Memory map. This time I used the route function which was a lot quicker as I could free draw it but therefore I made more mistakes!

I am still only just scratching the surface of Memory map but another cool thing I found was the elevation graph.

The stats (Incomplete, I accidentally stopped recording for about 2 miles)

Distance 20 miles,

Max 33 mph

Time 2 hrs 5 mins

Av 9.5 mph

I think this is very wrong. Was playing around with the cycle computer and I think I turned off auto stop, so the stop watch kept counting all the time. But had a good morning on the bike. I hope the weather lasts but I know it probably won’t