Halloween

The weather forecast for tomorrow is a bit horrible, so if I was going to manage a long ride this weekend, it meant I needed to make an early start today. As happens far too often, things didn't quite work out that way. I still hadn't set off by lunchtime, so I wanted to find a fairly short afternoon ride, that got me home before darkness fell, and the ghosts and ghoulies came out.

I decided to map the bits of Binfield that were still missing from OSM. Around here, Bracknell is one of the few areas with relatively low coverage on OSM, but taking on the town itself looked a bit daunting. Binfield is a village on the edge of Bracknell, and it looked a more manageable size.

A half day outing, and a 25 mile ride got me out there, around most of the areas that were missing from the map, and back home again. The journey there and back was very nice, with the trees looking particularly gorgeous this year. But if anyone from Binfield reads this, I hope they will forgive me for saying that, while it seems pleasant enough, it's not a particularly interesting destination. The biggest novelty was discovering how many houses had been decorated for halloween. There were huge spiders, gigantic webs, gravestones in the gardens, and stuff like that all over the place. I don't remember seeing anything like it before.

Now I am home I've added the traces of the roads (but not the spiders) to Open Street Map. At the level of detail that I collect, I think Binfield is pretty much complete. So next time I feel like a half day filling gaps on the map I fear it will have to be Bracknell itself. Unless I come up with a better idea by then.

(PS the picture has nothing to do with Binfield, but it seemed appropriate for the date)