I awoke to the sounds of trees being uprooted and buildings flying past the hotel window. No, but nearly... in any event this was not going to be a walking day, at least not this morning.
I tried to put the work flashbacks to one side that washed over my unoccupied mind and reminded myself that in my life so far if I had ever deserved a holiday, it was after this past year and a bit... and I was jolly well going to have one!
Instead I fiddled with my gadgets and amused myself while the world was being blown around outside; I wanted to solve the google maps to google earth and garmin conversion issue. Admitting defeat I finally gave in and phoned garmin for them to tell me that I was missing the bleeding obvious and that to send placemarks from google maps or google earth to my garmin device I just had to do blah. Humble pie at the ready I waited in their annoyingly long UK call queuing system. Eventually a chap listened to my woes and smartly told me to do blah. Ah ha! I thought... I'd tried that, so I politely asked him to try it for me. It failed for him to; he was clearly flummoxed and went away to speak to their guru. After a few hours [minutes I'm sure] of waiting the chap returned and told me that garmin had never been asked this before and that if I really wanted to do it I should go to a few free websites who offered the service. Resisting the temptation to ask why there were a number of websites to achieve what I would have thought should have been a basic mapping function in today's posts google world I thanked him and moved along. Doing a bit more searching I discovered a raft of forums covering the same issue - none had the answer I'd just been given - not even the multiple posts on garmin's own user forum - "never been asked this before" - bunkum!!
As a great lover of call centres [I always choose devices and gadgets that outsource their customer services to some country the other side of the equator because of the ease with which we communicate and the absolute precision and accuracy of their answers - that was a lie] I realised that the UK contact number had actually resulted in a uk resident taking my call... perhaps my problem had been solved.
With a spring in my keyboard fingers I uploaded the file to recommended website... file error. Tried a few further times with different exports from google maps/earth... file error. Oh well... clearly the location of the call centre in terms of the correctness of its advice is immaterial after all.
I had learned one thing on the call to garmin though... what I should be searching from in google. First try and I found a demo of an application that looked like it would completely solve my issue: ge2gpx.exe. The demo only did three points, I had twenty odd, so that either meant a number of partial conversions on spending a few points to get the full version. Now I'm all for paying for services when things work properly - I'm sick and tired of some of my Clients who'd never cough up with payments for my consultancy were I to give them half a chance - regrettably I've leaned over the years that a fiercely maintained 'money first or no calculations/drawings' policy focuses their minds. They wouldn't get away with 'I'll take now and pay when I can be bothered, or if you chase me hard enough' elsewhere and so I fail to see why they should treat Consulting Structural Engineers that way. Cough... rant off.
The paid for version worked beautifully, all points transferred and imported into my garmin basecamp with ease. Should I phone garmin and invite them to read their own forum, should I reply to the forum of this neat little application that you can use [limited] free, or the full version for a few pounds... I think I should reply to the forum... when I've written this though...
From here I was able to clearly see my desired photo locations within garmin basecamp and plans my new few days routes... Today it would be Latrigg Summit :)
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