In three weeks I'm cycling the Sarsen Trail
<http://www.wiltshirewildlife.org/sarsen-trail/bike_it> with a friend.
I don't normally cycle off-road, and my bike is a lightweight tourer,
so I thought I'd better try it out and perhaps borrow an off-road one
if I didn't think my audax would stand up to it.
So today I took off the mudguards and rack, fitted some cyclocross
knobbly tyres and headed up to Oxleas Wood, some ancient woodland
about 5 miles from where I live.
I put my wallet, iPhone, camera, glasses, bike lock and a book in a
nylon stuffsac, which I then put into a seat bag. My plan had been to
reward myself afterwards with a nice cup of tea and a good read in the
wonderfully badly-kept-secret cafe they have up there, with
magnificent views east - I believe it's the highest point in London.
It was a dark and stormy night. The woods were dark and deep. No. It
was a beautiful spring day. My bike looked really cool, the woods were
lush and green. The forest floor was a cliche of bluebells, so I kept
stopping to take pictures. It was a bit of a drag fishing the camera
out of the seatbag each time, so I decided to strap it, in its CCS
case, to my belt, and went off charging around again.
Half an hour later, I realise I didn't close the seat bag. My
favourite wallet, my credit cards, driving licence, Oyster card, £75-
cash, iPhone, glasses, bike lock (£100!) and Marivaux are gone.
Dilemma. Rush home and cancel everything, or try to find it. I spent 3
fruitless hours randomly searching the Ice Age undergrowth, like some
sort of Hansel & Gretel, lost in there. Trees and leaves and sodding
bluebells all look the same after a while but you soon get to know all
the empty beer cans, bits of bog roll and pre-loved condoms in the
whole fucking forest when you're stressed out of your mind.
So I gave up and came home. On the way of course some fuckwit in a car
decided he was the only fuckwit who should be allowed on the road and
we ended up in a shouting match which finished in comedy when he said
"you wouldn't say that if I wasn't in this car", to which I wittily
reparteed "get out of the fucking car then", and he drove off.
Marivaux could have learned some things from me.
I cancelled my cards, and was looking on the iPad for a way to disable
the iPhone when I found this Apple thing called, er, Find my iPhone.
Hmm. Wonder what that does. So I tried it and it showed that it was
still in the woods, and let me set it to lost, so hopefully it
wouldn't let anyone else play with it and find all my dark secret
things. I was resigned to losing the cash.
Now, I hope someone from Apple gets to read this, because it's a great
app, but it would be even greater if it told you the coordinates of
the centre of the circle where your iPhone is, and the radius of the
circle.
So, I opened my GPS programme, which is called ExpertGPS and is pretty
good <http://www.expertgps.com>, and by squinting a bit and finding a
couple of reference points on the maps, made a stab at a waypoint for
the lost phone, as well a waypoint for a reference point on the ground
which marked out a line to follow. I then loaded the waypoints onto my
GPS, and cycled back to the woods.
It took another hour of searching, but this time methodically, and I
found it.
It felt like a miracle. I made a waypoint on the GPS where I found the
stuff, and when I got home again compared the actual position with the
one I'd crudely made based on the Find my iPhone result. They were
only 17 metres apart, which I think is not bad under the circumstances.
So at the moment I love Apple.
I hate Dell though, because the screen on my laptop seems to have
failed. Guess I'll have to replace it with a Mac.
Oh, and the bike performed superbly.
