Cops, Sugar Cane & Fajitas

A day without surprises.

Is a bold face lie.   Today I spent 5-6 hours in the saddle.  I wanted to put some miles down.  So on the highway and shoot straight north.

It's a damn good thing I don't speed.   This has to be the most heavily policed road I have every seen.  I really did not know there were so many ways to get caught.

• Posted speed cameras.
• Averaging speed cameras.  They take two photo's X distance apart.  If your average is over you get done.
• The loan cop in a car on the other side of a rise.
• The unmarked super slow cop.  Using radar on passing cars.
• The roving team.  Cops on side of road tagging cars to be pulled over 1 km up by a group of cops.  Kinda like a breath test station.

Sugarcane

Maybe I once knew that NSW grew sugarcane.  But I found it surprising just how much.  It's not like northern QLD but still impressive.   Coffs Harbour up is cane.   My GPS took me on a short cut through some country roads.  At first I was getting worried that the GPS was leading me down one of those every deteriorating roads.  I needed miles not 40kph pot hole dodging.  At first I was annoyed and starting to debating turning around.  Then I started to pay attention to what was around me.  To the right Rain Forest to the left cane.  And everywhere water.  There is just simply so much water lying around.  I've been in Aus now I think going on 13 years.  I know Aus as dry, dusty, and brown.  But this year is the year of water.  There is just so much bloody water.

The Big surprise

Quite good Mexican style Fajitas.  Just some random little town on the Northern NSW coast and they have proper sit down Mexican food.  Granted some of it is not quite right.  For example the sizzling plate Just does not have enough onion or capsicum.   The black beans were a tad bland.   Missing was a decent jalapeño sauce.  They did however have a Habanero sauce that was very good.  Sol Cantina in Yamba NSW.

Bonus section

So last night and possibly tonight I am going to be working on a little bit of code to properly merge my GPS tracks.  All the tools I have found so far just simply don't work.  The problem boils down to and inherent issue with XML.  It's un-ordered.  So if you have a pile of saved GPS tracks from your adventures and you decide you want to merge them all and show them on the same map, you will be in for a surprise.  It's rather hard.  As the tools read the tracks and once they are merged they will actually be randomised.  It's actually more complicated than that.  But that will suffice.

There is also an issue with the GPS unit and it recording really poor data.   No time embedded on each point. They are just a random collection of points.  I know why.  If they did record that then the data could be used in court.   I'm sure Tomtom doesn't want to be there too.

Anyway as a result I will be able from time to time post a complete map of all of my travels.  You will see every road and track I have been on.  As well I hope each stop.  Trying to figure this part out tonight actually.  This is to augment my real time tracker that is currently having issues with displaying acquired data.