I *still* blame my good friend, it’s all her fault…. 🙂
I am so enamored with the place that I want to go back, and spend the time taking some of the shots I missed. (principally due to light being wrong – i.e. the sun in the wrong place in the sky)
Having thought about it quite hard, I think I have decided that I am going to ride the route, yes, ride, by bike, and not the Harley I don’t have, but pedal power, human (sorta – it is me we are talking about here) driven.
I’ve already plotted the route, all 33.7 miles of it, here.
Scary thing is, as you can see from the link, that I am likely to burn through 5500 calories, and that is just with my weight.
It doesn’t take into account the weight I will be carrying camera wise – or even food and water.
Camera-wise, my 7D coupled with the 24-70mm f/2.8 lens on it’s own is 2.5kgs.
I may even take my EOS 1v, and potentially with a 24-105mm f/4 on it – which is another 2.5kgs.
I am also going to need around 750-1000ml of water per hour if it’s a nice sunny day.
Each litre of water weighs a kilo, so, depending on how long this is going to take me, remember I’m not going to be doing this as a single non-stop ride, I’m gonna need a lot of water.
Lets put this into context – 33.7 miles, it would theoretically take me no more than 2 hours to do if I’m riding my racing bike at my normal decent clip (about 90 minutes should do) – thing is though, I’m going to be stopping regularly to take photographs, so my pace is going to be well off a “normal” ride, as low as 6mph – maybe even as low as 4mph.
I’m also not likely to do the whole thing quite in the order that it is listed as a “route” – as I will need to be in different places at different times of day, and that route plan doesn’t take that into consideration.
Remember here, I am going here to take photographs, and to do so requires light, and more importantly, light in the correct direction, hence the to-ing and fro-ing.
It’s no good to try and take a shot of some wooded area, with a narrow slice of sky in the background, which is nice and bright from the sun, but the wooded area is shaded from light, because the sun is the wrong side – as the contrast between the two gives you a shot that is basically a completely blown out sky, or a wooded area so under-exposed, you may as well have taken a shot of a black piece of card.
Anyway, back to that distance at the minimum, those 33.7 miles is therefore going to take me 5-8 hours maybe, so that’s 5-8 litres of water, or another 5-8kgs to carry.
And I’ve not touched on food….
6000 calories is a helluva lot of food, one site says 76 hard boiled eggs.
Hell!!! I’m not gonna carry 76 boiled eggs !!!!!
Or even 20 McDonald’s Cheesburgers………..
So, whatever the food requirements are, I am going to have to take them with me – lots of high density energy food is going to be required, but again extra weight.
To carry all this gear, I am either going to need to be a little mad and have it all in a backpack on my bike, or better, in a little trailer I can hook up to my bike, they really ain’t designed to have a trailer hooked up to them.
That means my mountain bike – which is about a billion times heavier than my racer…. more weight..
More weight = more calories = denser food…
Or just say to hell with it, and understand that I am going to be in a proper calorie deficit that day…
Damn – too complicated to figure out the calories, so buy myself a bike trailer and just do it with what I “feel” will be right.
That, I think is my final answer….
Now – when is this crappy weather going to break so as to be decent enough for me to do this at a weekend ?
That is the bigger question.
