I walked to the Chateau De Bossey today. It’s an easy walk from one village to another and another after that.
Sometimes you look at the sky above you and you think that walking underneath it is not wise because a storm could break but you remember that you saw that rain should not come before 1800 so you take the risk and you go for a walk. You look towards Geneva and you see that it is dark and that it looks as if it may be raining. You feel the wind coming from that direction and you worry that the weather forecast was wrong so you change the course of your walk.
The wind blows against you as you walk and you hear one or two sounds of thunder. You are not far from home and you know that if you had to you could run to shelter, whether it’s underneath a bridge, at a petrol station, fountain or other.
At the same time you don’t worry that much. Usually it rains for a few minutes at a time and then it stops, so whether you’re caught in it doesn’t matter. That’s why I didn’t have rain equipment with me. If and when I am worried about the rain I dress for the weather. Today I had a dry bag if I needed it but nothing more. It would have been more interesting to film for a few minutes, than to worry about. Weather in Switzerland is boring for the most part, expect for that flood and mud in one town, and hail in two different cantons.
That’s why you don’t run, and that’s why you don’t rush if the weather changes. Even hailstorms are over within minutes so you could easily shelter under some trees for five minutes and stay dry. I miss the rain that could last for hours or days in a row. The Swiss weather has rain like we have showers, quick two to five minutes and then that’s good until the next day.
A few days ago it rained every day for months and I got used to walking in the rain. I thought nothing of it.
They did advise for people not to walk in wooded areas because of the risk of trees either falling or destabiliing. They said to keep to the normal paths. Hail has already caused millions in damages in Switzerland, just weeks after the Swiss voted against laws to mitigate global warming and weather weirding.
Usually I would be prepared for any weather, if I had planned to walk, but I had planned to run so I was lighter than usual. No water, no rain coat etc. Without a phone call I would have avoided the rain easily.
Yesterday I spent some time looking through Apple Health Data Sources. I see that there are plenty of data sources. These are the Apple watch, the iphone, Alltrails, move, connect, stepsapp, pacer, Suunto, Ingress and three more that are marked as inactive.
Move is the app that gets data from some Casio watches. Connect is Garmin connect and gets step data from Garmin devices. If I take steps and they are logged with a casio or a garmin device they do not count in iOS apps but if I take steps with Garmin and Casio devices without also wearing the Apple watch the same steps are not counted.
The Apple Fitness and Health apps have access to all the same data. Everything goes to a central database on the iPhone. It’s from the iphone that the data is not shared transparently between all other apps.
In practice whether you have a suunto, Garmin, Apple Watch or other fitness tracker each device should feed, or retrieve data from Apple health, and each should display that data, regardless of which device you wear.
Whether I wear my Garmin, Suunto or Apple watch I would like all three to access health data transparently so that I can choose which individual watch I want to wear on a specific day. I don’t want to have to wear all three of them. Not that I do. I only have two wrists. 😉 I can only wear two at once.
The privacy argument is moot, because each app can be granted access to Apple Health, and Apple Health can be granted access to each app. This means that all the data is already transiting both ways for all apps.
When you buy a Casio or other watch the battery is expected to last from three years to ten years, and you are expected to replace the battery when it dies. With the Apple watch, now that it is four years old, the next step would be to swap the battery. The Apple watch is now at 70 percent. The battery costs 79 CHF to replace.
When the Suunto battery got low on the Ambit 3 I got a Spartan, but when I replaced the Spartan I went for a Garmin, so I lost the ability to keep my old log going, and had to migrate to the Garmin app. With the Apple Watch we’re on yet another silo. Every brand has a silo. With the Apple watch it’s worse, because you have the fitness app, but then you have all the third party apps. Everything would break at once if you stop using the Apple Watch.
I would love for Garmin, Suunto and Apple wath to allow the free flow of tracking data in both directions, so that I could choose the best device to wear, and the best app to fiddle around with. Strava is the giant in the room, but I don’t want to use an app where I have to pay a premium for added functionality.
The Swiss travel an average of 30 kilometres per day in their cars, according to a new survey shared by the Radio Television Suisse.
I walk 14 to twenty kilometres per day, and if I go for a bike ride I travel 30 kilometres. I use the car twice a week, for food shopping and that’s mainly because of the 15 minute rule for refrigerated food, rather than laziness. During the pandemic I would do food shopping with the car but pick up the drinks by going for a walk. It’s a one hour trip to the shops and back for me.
My single biggest frustration with walking as I do in Switzerland is the network of roads that lead from everywhere to everywhere, with no pedestrian paths for walkers or cyclists. Some villages and streets are designed for cars, with no pedestrian option. No pavement, no cycle path. No limit to 20 km/h. It’s assumed that people will use the car, rather than walk. This is astounding.
When I drive I show respect for walkers and cyclists. I slow down to pass them, on narrow roads, and on wide roads I go to the opposite side of the road to pass cyclists and walkers. To reduce the need for cars people need to be able to get from their homes to walks and cycling lanes, without risking dangerous drivers. For five years I have walked more than driven. For five years I have seen how cars behave with. pedestrians and cyclists. For five years the toxic behaviour has encouraged me to drive with humanity, but also to desire a switch away from cars. We should not automatically get into a car to do things. We should automatically get our walking shoes on, or get on our bikes.
“Il y a un énorme travail à faire. C’est une question d’horaire, pour qu’on puisse se déplacer le soir et le week-end dans les heures creuses. C’est aussi une question de destinations: il faut que les transports publics soient facilités à destination des régions touristiques”
In brief, Vincent Kaufman says that public transport needs to be spread across the day, not just at peak times, but also that transport needs to be later in the evening, when people who want to go out socialising need to have transport. That’s what I have said for years, or even decades. We see how London makes it easy to get around even at night, whether with tubes until midnight or later, now, or night buses.
In the video interview he also speaks about how the Swiss transport network is geared towards commuters rather than pleasure seekers. I find this both paradoxical and ironic, since so many adverts encourage people to take public transport. Having said that, transport is to the tourist traps, rather than areas of unique and outstanding beauty, which is why I suffered so much, without a car one summer, and without the ability to drive a second summer. That’s why I pivoted to local walks and bike rides.
If there is an alternative to the car people will use it. If the alternative to cars is cheaper, then people will use it. I have happily explored every walk and bike route from Geneva, and even Yvoire to the West, and Lausanne to the East. I think that I know almost every road, via biking. For walking I think I know most paths within a two hour walking range of my current home. I used to go to the mountains every weekend, like described in the article, but with the pandemic, job insecurity, a broken arm and a summer without the car I have learned to walk and cycle.
My two frustrations are, first, that dog walkers don’t keep their dogs on leashes, so at least six times I have been attacked by dogs. People love to say “If you’re not afraid of a dog then it won’t attack”, that’s great, but then I am being attacked, precisely because I am scared, which is why I am scared in the first place. A few days ago I thought that my fear of being bitten would be realised but I had the right response. Principally I froze.
The second frustration is that cars do not respect cyclists and pedestrians. Every single day cars drive too fast by me. When I drive by people I either give them space, if there is space, or I overtake pedestrians at slightly more than walking pace.
And finally
I went from using the car seven days a week, for almost anything, to using the car just twice a week, and only because I need it for shopping. I have gone from driving one or two hundred kilometres a weekend, and 50-60km a day, to zero. I am the change they want to see.
Today I saw a queue of tractors without drivers. Tractors with trailers full of beat were parked by the on loading dock at the railway siding. There is a machine. The tractors come up to the machine, back, and then start to pour the sugar beet into it. The machine then transports the beets from the receptacle along conveyor belts before they are dumped into a train wagon, ready for transport by rail to where they are needed. I filmed it a few days ago but did not get around to editing the sequence.
Autumnal colours are here. Some trees are further along than others with their reds, oranges and others. Wind or rain is needed to remove the leaves from the trees, as a last step.
I am leaving Autumnal Switzerland behind, and going back to summer, by going to Spain. People say that they miss the sun, but for me the sun is not absent at the moment. We have the sun every day. I am taking a break because a, it’s the right time to and because a change of context will be refreshing. I have spent two years walking around in circles. I need to go a little further, and find some other circuit walks. It will also give me something to document in blog posts.