Monday, September 26, 2011

Surveying the path

My sister recommended an iPhone app to track my walks with Ollie. It works amazingly well in my neighborhood.

It never occurred to me to use it on Aspö, however, until Tony mentioned it at dinner one night. The next morning, I turned on data roaming, and Sooz and I walked the whole path.

The app worked just as perfectly out in the archipelago, and it produced the map above. The starting point is our house, which is close to the junction of the main path. The walk from home to the Waxholms dock at the south end of the island is exactly a half-mile, making it an even mile round-trip to drop off trash or pick up mail.

The circumnavigatory path is 1.75 miles around, making the total length of the pathways two and a quarter miles. The elevation information was also interesting:

The first mile shows the big drop down to the dock from our house, with the corresponding steep rise on the return (which I braved many times with our wheelbarrow crammed full of goods).

Back at our house, there's a gentle rise until we drop back down to the shore at the northeast. Then it's a pretty long uphill, past Janne's house towards the center of the island, and a downhill stretch past Tony's house, back to our home. The little app calculated the tallest part of the path is 78 feet above sea level. Pretty darn cool for an iPhone!

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