I have been following the YouTube channel Itchy Boots about the travels of Noraly for some months and I also started to track her biking routes
in Google Earth and recording them in a KML file. She posts her videos on Sundays and Wednesdays. She just
announced that they will be posted on Sundays only for the coming time. I
guess that there are some troubles with the planning of her trip for the coming
season. The videos she puts on are from a trip she made around August and
September 2025. I am using Google My
Maps to generate most of the tracks. It has an option to export tracks
as KML/KMZ files. Her videos only cover short parts of her biking trips and it
is not always possible to establish which route she took exactly. The current
videos are about traveling throught China, which have complicated things a bit.
On January 25, I already wrote about a program
that I use to correct for the offset between the roads and the satelite images.
For all the Chinese text, I have been using the Google Translate option for
translating texts on images. I have been using the Chinese amap.com for finding locations with Chinese texts. It does not always
works well, because signs on shops and restaurants usually do not contain
names, but just state the type of shop it is. You can search for hotels, shops,
and hospitals for example, just like with Google Maps. I also have not figures
out if amap.com has an English mode and if so, how to enable it. The roads in
Google Maps within China are often outdated or contain errors, causing it to
generate incorrect routes, which require some editing in Google Earth. In the
video of last Sunday, Heading deeper into the land of the DRAGON (unseen China) |S8, EP124, she
and mister Bing, her (manditory) guide for traveling within Xinjiang, visit the shop (selling pig meat) of his grandfather-in-law
because it happened to be along the route. The fragment starts at 6:39. Yesterday evening, I already spend a long time geolocating it,
assuming that it was within the city limits of Hami, a large city along the route. According to the sign at the start of
the road they enter, it must be near a hospital, because the sign talks about
the area being a temporary parking locations for a hospital. I search for
locations near hospitals and also for locations near "pig meat shops", but
failed to find it. This evening, I discovered a location matching that is
actually a bit to the west of the city in a small town. I also succeeded in
finding the hotel they stayed at the end of the trip and the 'shopping' center
with traditional Chinese looking buildings in the city of Balikun/Barköl,
which is in Barkol Kazakh Autonomous County. I felt that Bing maps had
beter satelite images for the city. The map in OpenStreetMap shows most of the roads, but only a few buildings, however,
it does indicate the location of the remaining old city walls, which are not
marked on any of the other maps. In other locations, I also saw the, sometimes
barely visible, remanents of the Chinese wall. I have noticed that
OpenStreetMap often does show trails that are not found on online road maps.
This evening, I decided to biked to the care center where Andy lives to attend some meeting because the weather is quite nice with
(near) record temperatures and clear skies. On the way going there, I followed
some sign for the direction of Oldenzaal taking the road called
Oldenzaalseveldweg, which took me into a forrest area (officialy closed after
sunset) and resulted in some detour. The total trip was about 16.4 kilometer
and took me 64 minutes. On the way back, I took a route along the main roads
avoiding some short-cuts, which was about 16.1 kilometer and took me 67
minutes. The road from Losser to Enschede was rather dark except for the light
of the moon, because it does not have street lights except near some road
crossings. At 21:59, I took the picture shown below approximately matching
this Street view
image:
I wrote a program to generate a page with a list of daily temperature records since August 1981 (the
year I came to live in Enschede) as recorded by the nearest official weather
station at Twente Airport based on the file etmgeg_290.zip that can be downloaded from the website of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. Last Tuesday, the temperature
reached 17.6°C at Twente Airport beating record 17.2°C from 1959 and
today it reached 17.8°C breaking the record 15.6°C from 2013.
The temperature at Twente Airport has gone up to
19.6° Celsius, which breaks the previous record of 18.1°C on this date
in 1989. In the city I saw some magnolia which already started to flower. I
saw some pink and white spots at the top of some of the buds of our magnolia.
This months interesting links
