Just for me and family, but if anyone wants to take a look here it is (it’s a big’un though so might take a while to load). You can even buy it, but I wouldn’t suggest it unless you want to buy pics of me for some strange reason! Oh yeh, it’s a book of our travels around Iceland. Better say that too.

http://timminter.com/resources/public/icelandbigbookwebedition.pdf

To view it properly you have to select “Two-Up” and “Show Cover Page During Two-Up” as shown below.

This is going to be first two pages in my little book project (a personal combination of diary and photo album) of our travels, I might well add some more historical posts here as I get going. Some people seem to still take a look at this site now and then! Just looking at the search stats and there’s no way you’d guess what people are searching for to get to this bog. People are strange! Right up there is “around the world itineraries” which is predictable maybe but ”Abandoned Theme Parks” and “Dog Meat Market”, “Rucksac Injury” and “Leg Irons” are right up there too, also “Pictures of Boobies”, my personal favourite!

Click the map for a full size version! and here for the itinerary.

No messin’ about here, hopefully it’s going to look pretty good. National Geographic is what I’m aiming for but we’ll see! Already started on the graphics though and I reckon I’ll have a host of graphic stuff for sharing by the end. Writing of which… if anyone ever wants one, I’ve created a film negative frame that you can just layer your own pics in. The full Photoshop file is here. JPG version here. Free for non-commercial use but it would be great if you could leave a comment saying where or what you’ve used it for if you do. Cheers! (commercial use: please contact via this blog)

1. Get your GPS track into GPX format (other formats are supported)
2. Copy your GPX file to the folder containing your images to be tagged
3. Download and open this zip file
4. Save the single file in this zip file to your Windows directory
5. Rename this file to exiftool.exe (instead of exiftool(-k).exe)
6. Open a Command Prompt and change to the directory containing your images to be tagged
7. type “exiftool -geotag nameofgpxfile.gpx FolderContainingImages” eg. exiftool -geotag trip.gpx c:\Images\

exiftool creates duplicate files so you end up with the original file and the file with the newly added geotags just in case anything goes astray!

I’ve only tried one device of course (GlobalSat DG100) but I’d imagine they are all similar, the software you get is pretty much only good to save the data to your PC (in various formats), the main battle then is getting the data to show up on a map like Google Maps\Earth. In between collecting the data and getting it to display there’s a whole world of pain including connecting all your individual data files together, sorting out duplicates in the files (if you’ve been an idiot at least once and not cleared the memory after saving the data etc!) and figuring out what format to work in in the first place. It’s taken ages, about 5 different software downloads and tries at using on line tools too but I’ve finally found the missing link. The missing link I found is free software called GPS TrackMaker (downloadable here). This is what I used to gather and connect all my separate tracks and then export them to Google Earth. I didn’t complain about the file sizes (which seems to have been a problem with other programs) and you can even edit the tracks by dragging points around. It doesn’t have any maps built in though and doesn’t seem to be connected to Google Maps – maybe that’s the difference betwen this and the commercial version.

I tried out Google Maps, Google Earth and Everytrail.com to actually display the tracks and the only one I could get to work originally was EveryTrail which all seemed very nice but looking at it closely it seems to really reduce the track resolution right down. I kind of thought that would have to be the way it was, maybe I just had too much data. Tried Google Maps until I went slightly deranged and got nowhere. All these programs you can download\buy use Google Maps data inside them but try uploading a track direct to Google Maps and it just looks stupid. There are other sites that take your data and write them over google maps (like GPS Visualizer, that worked really well but doesn’t allow more than 3Mb files so that was no good for a worlds worth of data). Lastly I tried Google Earth and decided against it due to it being harder to share with others. Got over that now. So in the end I used the GlobalSat software to go though the files and remove duplicates (just a really horrible manual process), then save the files as GPX files. I split the trip in two (UK-Cook Islands and NZ-UK) to avoid the problem that none of these things seem to be able to deal with going over the date line, then used GPS TrackMaker to merge the GPX files for each part into two KML (Google Earth) files. I then just opened the file in Google Earth and it worked!

Here are just a few results…. making it all worthwhile and really bringing back the memories. To see the whole trip in as much detail as you like you can check out the GPS Route Tracking section

Our Route down the Amazon River, Teotihuacan Temple of the Sun and Moon (Mexico), Chichen Itza and Angkor Wat

Just one day left of our around the world trip now and it’s quite surreal. We had to forget the last and, for me anyway, possibly greatest, last two countries on our trip… Nepal and Tibet. But there’s plenty of time for them some other day.

I’ve got so much more to write about but that’ll have to wait for a little while. We’ve got a flat to put back together, phone and internet to sort out and a new job to start. So much more to write about … Vietnam,Cambodia and Thailand. I really wasn’t going to write anything about Thailand as it’s got to be one of the most traveled places ever and another load of info could be nothing but boring but I’ve seen loads I wasn’t expecting. Some of that was due to staying a while in Mae Sot on the Burmese border with our friend Claire who is VSOing (and can speak Thai!) and the rest is just because there is so much to see in this place!

Anyway, hope some people stay tuned a bit longer, might be a while but also might be worth it hopefully.

To catch the train, whatever you do don’t ask anyone where you get it, or follow the signs. The signs just kind of end and people were directing us all over the place. Find the railway track…. and wait a bit.

The passenger station might not see another passenger. Instead, it’s a slightly unlikely tourist attraction for the few tourists who venture this far.

it’s only 79 years old, plenty of life left in it yet.