Well for the most part, the lengthy trip preparation involved a lot of “geeky stuff” related to our travel blog and route planning tool set.
Exercise/Workout
First and foremost, we have viewed our daily cardio/weight training exercise as an essential pre-requisite activity to better support us in tackling another cycling adventure while we have both crossed over the 60 year old threshold (- a few years already).
Foreign language introduction
As we planned to visit in an “off the beaten path” way two non-English speaking countries, we thought we would attempt to learn some very rudimentary Korean and Japanese vocabulary. Hence, in January, Jenny and I both started Duolingo lessons. Jenny opted for Japanese while I took on some Korean. The last time we tried Duolingo was for our 2016 trip to Portugal. The experience was truly disappointing as I stumbled to speak Portuguese at a train station ticket booth. the agent lost patience and said to me: “Why don’t you ask me if I speak English”. We can only hope the fun time under Duolingo will help us at some point along the way.
Travel logistics
Readying our travel and cycling equipment and clothes was probably the simplest tasks of our trip preparation. We continued to enhance and leverage our three important travel spreadsheets: (1) – itinerary planning, (2) – expense tracking and (3) – packing list/steps.
Getting there
We bought our airline tickets about two months before our planned departure. We opted to secure our airfare for both the start of our cycling route (Seoul) and return tickets between Osaka/Rome.
Blog upgrade
It was in the summer of 2016 during our Portugal trip that we first started posting blog entries of our travel journey. In order to ave such a travelogue operational, it took us almost a year of free time to develop a WordPress theme from scratch. The use of a theme is a central component of any WordPress website and as such it defined the look and feel of our own travel blog. In 2019, the development team of the WordPress platform, which powers 43% of all websites on the internet, introduced a significant change dubbed Gutenberg. The introduction of Gutenberg changed the way the content (blog) was defined in the application. Thankfully, like many WordPress enthusiast users, we opted to continue with the Classic way of doing things. Fast forward to 2023, once again we spent a considerable amount of time learning the new WordPress Block design and managed to upgrade our travel blog theme to the latest and greatest. Looking back at our blog upgrade, we had to admit that the new features promoted by the WordPress platform were significantly easier to develop and maintain. In essence, if no one noticed any changes to our blog look and feel, we will have been fairly successful in modernizing our travel blog.
Route planning tool set
And finally, another geeky enhancement that took up a fair amount of time. Building on the mapping tool set we used on our EuroVelo 2022 cycling trip, we made significant stride in managing and producing our daily cycling routes in KML format. We used LibreOffice Calc (similar to MS-Excel) to manage our route’s geo-location data (x, y coordinates and altitude). In doing so, it made it possible for us to visualize, on a Calc graph, the elevation profile of our daily cycling route. And from the same spreadsheet, we had the ability to generate on-demand KML files of our cycling routes and import them in either “Google Maps” and/or within our offline mobile app: “Organic Maps”. Along our spreadsheet enhancements, a few Python scripts were developed to simplify the amount of map coordinates we needed to store as well as allowing us to retrieve elevation data from Google Maps.