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Today I got to pick up zoomies from the shop. I happened to be out on an unrelated errand so I figured I'd take advantage of the nice weather and spend an hour riding to work. Well, things did not go exactly as planned.

First, the bus to the shop from the train station was cancelled. No problem; got to the shop a bit later than planned, but still could make it back to work by 1 if I hustled. Phone battery at 68% ought to get me close, anyway.

A Diversion

Time for a diversion to talk about bike navigation apps in the Netherlands! When I first got here, I went through a few different apps to try to help me navigate bike routes. Google maps is useless; it wants to take you on the most major roads available.

There's one called Fietsknoop, which is not too bad, but only takes you between points on the fietsknooppunt network. This is, like I said, not bad, since the bike network is far reaching, but oddly enough the intercity bike network here doesn't always pick the best roads for biking. Sometimes there will be an alternate route with a separated bike path but it puts you on a road that's shared with cars. Anyway, it's good if you're going from and to a point on the network, but getting to the first point and from the last point can be a challenge. Also, if you're following the knooppunt network sometimes the signs can be hard to spot.

The fietserbond had an app, Routeplanner, which was amazing. It had different modes, so you could follow a knooppunt route, or pick a car-free route, or plan a circle of a particular length on nice bike paths. It let you specify only routes that were extra wide, or didn't have rough terrain. Perfection. Until...

One day, I went to open my route planner, and I was told that there was an update. It got reskinned and a new name ("Toertje") and became much less usable. Toertje still has the route modes, and it adds some social features, but the map is awful. It doesn't show you the route ahead, and if you're following a knooppunt route it doesn't tell you the numbers you're supposed to look for. It's bad, and I don't like it. Soon you'll see why.

Back on track

So I'm in Leiden at the bike shop, and I have to get to work. I pop open Toertje and tell it where I'm headed and how I prefer to go (knooppunt network is good for long intercity trips, and extra good if you want to preserve phone battery because I don't have to keep the phone screen on the whole time) and start out. But of course the map is bad so I end up doing a bit of a loop before getting on the right path. Then, once I'm headed in the right direction, I look at the notifications and see that my phone battery is at 10%! I have less than 30 minutes before it shuts off! I probably shouldn't have read those blog posts on the bus.

This is bad. It's sunny, and I know I'm going mostly South and West, but I really don't want to stop at every knooppunt map and plot the route to the next one. Further, sometimes you're headed to the next point and miss a turn because the signs are easy to miss, and then you find yourself at the end of a long dirt road. No points for guessing what I mean once you see the map.

It's ok, though. I kill Toertje and switch to fietsknoop. Then I start memorizing numbers, until I have enough in my head to get a decent distance.

Still stopped to take pictures with basically no phone battery though.

What can I say? It was pretty out.

Anyway, after the first 5 or 6 knooppunten, I remember that I can tell fietsknoop that I'm taking the route instead of just asking it to plan it. In this mode, it tells me I'm approaching a node and what the next one is. Even when the screen is off. I don't think I've ever really used it like this before; maybe it's a new feature or maybe it requires a data connection. Either way, this is pretty nice and my battery still hasn't died.

I finally made it to the office, with 2% ("10 minutes") left on my battery and only inconvenienced a few people by being late.

These numbers are from the battery-deprived phone.

Max speed: 43.5 km/h
Average speed: 18.8 km/h
Total distance: 27.5 km

I would not believe that top speed; it was mostly upwind. The distance doesn't surprise me though. The numbers on the bike computer are no good; they bumped the magnet during maintenance and I didn't fix it right away.