Day 38: Short day and some needless nerdy tech stuff
Today options are a very short 27km day or a very long 110km day. Given I didn’t realize these were my only options and it was nearly 9 am before I rolled out of bed, option 2 was already out of the question. Was a very easy day cycling. SLO seems like a nice town and I enjoyed rolling through it. Also Pismo beach also seems like a cool town. These were connected with flat mostly car free back roads.
The camp tonight isn’t at a hiker/biker camp so paid a full 25usd for this campsite so feel a little ripped off. There is a new German couple at camp tonight. I immediately forgot their names when they told me but they are heading north from San Diego to San Fran.
Before starting this trip I was scared and the closer it got the more scared I got. Now that I am on the road, everything is good and the problems are solvable and those initial emotions seem silly. I say this as I am now starting to feel nervous/scared about the Baja Divide, which is the next big unknown of the trip. The German guy at tonight’s camp has experience biking across parts of the Saraha desert and thinks my bike/tires would be able for the Baja Divide. This is a nice vote of confidence.
Given I don’t have much else to talk about here, maybe it is a good point to nerd out on my tech setup. Sorry in advance..
Have a small foldable Bluetooth keyboard that connects to the phone so I can write or do basic coding on a proper keyboard rather than my phone keyboard, which would just be a nightmare. I simply take out my foldable keyboard and then prop my phone up against anything available and have a great writing setup. This is pretty cool and I have not met anyone else with this kind of setup. It always seems to gets compliments on the setup from other bike tourers or random people in coffee shops.
I then have termux as a linux terminal emulator on my phone in which I have ohMyZSH and Tmux running and some of my usual Linux tools which gives me my nice and cozy home Linux computer feeling on the road. I have a full ruby environment installed here so I can spin up the local (to my phone) dev server if something on my site (https://kev.bike) needs to be debugged and fixed. So yes, I have ssh keys here too to push to my git repo. Have considered putting AWS IAM keys in the terminal emulator so I can spin up aws EC2 instances and ssh into them from my phone but I couldn’t find a non ridiculous reason to do this, other than it sounds cool.
Another cool thing about this is there is the termux widget app. With this any scripts/code I put in a specific folder (~/.shortcuts/*) in termux will be executable from a widget on my phone home screen without opening any apps. So I have a simple little script that samples my phone’s GPS location, then adds that location to a list and pushes that list to my GitHub pages site for this tour. So every evening at camp all I need to do is push this 1 button on my phone’s home screen and I end up with a map on my website of all the places I have stayed which is now turning into a cool big picture route of my trip to date.
I am sure there are tons of other cool bikepacking specific automation I could do but haven’t thought much about it. Would be interested to hear from any other Linux heads if they are doing anything cool with their phones on tour. Or if you have ideas, let me know.
Tomorrow will be a tough 105+km day with over 3000 feet of elevation gain. Add on 15ish kms if I don’t want to stay in a “shit campground” (words of other tourers, not me).
