If you’re looking for an interesting food experience then you should drop by Laguna, a tropical restaurant a few minutes out of Geneva. There’s a meal there that’s really good called la plancha. The concept is simple. Food is laid out buffet style so you chose the ingredients you want and chose from onions, lettuce, coriander before selecting the types of meat. The meat on offer when I went to was lamb, beef, horse, pork, and chicken.
Once you’ve filled your plate with all the ingredients you go over to a large metallic platter where the chef will prepare the food you’ve selected as you wait. Once it’s ready you go back to your table and enjoy the meal. You can repeat this process as often as you like.
The clientele is also interesting, being a mix between parents and young children, couples, and more. It’s in a relaxed atmosphere where you hear the birds tweeting and nature rather than urban sounds. You’re also surrounded by furniture from tropical locations.
The food is good, the atmosphere is good and the type of people make this a nice evening place where to get a nice meal. I’ll be thinking of going there more than once.
Some watches can do a lot and others can do a little The Origin watch, model number GW-B5600 can charge itself with daylight and mark GPS coordinates within seconds, and that’s about it. I tested it while driving from Switzerland to Spain.
There are a few motorway stops that I was curious about so as I drove I could short press the bottom right button and it took the date, time, and GPS coordinates at that point so that I could review points on the map later on. A watch this as this is highly specialised and fits a narrow niche. Casio says “This is a good watch for pilots to mark which city they were in but I think differently.
This is a good watch for people to mark where they took a picture, or to mark a waypoint during a walk or some other event. Once you press the button the watch and phone do the rest. You can then provide the location with a memorable name.
Casio watches come with a battery life of between 2-10 years and the solar watch advertises that it has a battery life of 22 months so this could be shorter than many.
More info: The G-Heritage Story — Evolution Of The Casio G-Shock Origin
The watch gives home town time, world time, alarms, stopwatch and countdown timer. It has good backlight illumination and provides us with quick GPS location marking. It is limited in what it can do but that is the case with most low end Casio watches. Each one fills a different niche.
Solar Charging
Battery information and charge information is not that useful. We don’t know whether it is charging fast or slow, and what the battery charge percentage is. What I do know is that after walking with the watch exposed to the sun on a bag strap it indicates that it is either almost full or full, quickly.
Watches that don’t need to be charged every day, or every week are nice, because you can forget about them for months at a time. I think that this is the type of watch that I would strap to a bag. When I want to store location data I can just press the button and continue walking.
Use Case
If you know where you’re walking, or you’re exploring without the need for a GPS this is a cheaper alternative to a GPS like the Garmin Etrex 32x. When you get to a point of interest or a location that you want to add to a map you can get the coordinates, for later use. This is lighter, and less hassle.
Today it was meant to rain for the entire day but there was a brief window which it stopped raining so I went for a walk. I expected not to be rained on but within minutes I could feel a small spray of water falling on me. I walked anyway. It was nothing to worry about. I did the usual walk and although groups of people were walking they were easy to avoid. The rivers are nice and full today so rain is having an effect. Rain has melted the snow that had covered the landscape and filled the rivers. In some places there are traces that the water is slightly polluted.
Reading and Projets
I am listening to The Age of Wood as I walk. I am struggling to get into it. I did read about the Chemin De La Mature and that does sound like an interesting place to visit. It is a path cut through the rock. They didn’t cut through the rock from top to bottom though. They cut through it horizontaly. It looks like an interesting experience to walk along that path. In some images it looks narrow, but in others it looks comfortable to walk along. I need to find more information about the GR-10 walking route, to see whether it would be interesting to see the larger context.
Tracking, Without Charging
I tracked the walk the usual way, with a gps watch, but I also tracked it with the Core-S4 and so far the results are good. I have tracked two walks over two days, without charging between the two walks and the phone is still fine. I don’t need to charge it every day. I like this. I like that I have a watch that I charge once a week or less, and a phone that I don’t need to charge every evening. This means that I could travel away for a weekend carrying less weight. I could go without chargers for the first time in years.
Switzerland is a land of mountains, rivers, and lakes. it’s a great place for skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking, walking, and sailing. Those are all sports I’ve done. When I was several years younger we had a day’s racketing: Racketting is walking with rackets attached to your feet across the trees up in the mountains. It’s fun, although occasionally tiring sport.
At one point we took a break for lunch. During this time a few of us were jumping over a young tree and someone was taking photographs. Within a period of weeks, one of those photographs was blown up to poster format and used in several shopping centres. it was also used for the cover of a local tourism magazine.
The picture was of a younger me in a ski suit with rackets attached to my feet. Many people have seen that photograph and I was a cover boy for at least one issue of the local magazine. Recently that picture was in a shopping center much closer to where I live and we recuperated it. It’s now sitting on my desk at home.
I’m thinking about going raquetting if there’s enough snow for it to be worthwhile. I haven’t done that sport for many years and I think it’d be interesting. It’s simple. No need to drive to where the snow is good, Thirty minutes and I’d be where I may be able to raquet.
If there’s snow that’s what I may spend a few hours doing.
During a pandemic one of the safest places to be is on a bike on quiet rural roads. The only people you meet are sporty so there is a higher likelihood that they are sporty.
Today I had to be respectful when passing two horses. They can often be afraid when they see cyclists, as we look strange. Bright colours, a strange machine underneath us. It can also be that the rider is also a little afraid. I always pass or let horses pass with caution.
A few bike rides ago I was told that they get spooked when they don’t know what is behind them. In this case I was in front of the horses.
I take the paths because I want to avoid dangerous roads and cars. The weather was good for cycling today.
Today I played with the Iphone 3g and was left indifferent. That’s because aside from having the same design as both the ipod touch and the 1st generation iphones it doesn’t offer anything innovative. What really interests me is the idea of more data.
Last month i did quite a bit of data streaming. 100 megabytes inclusive of my current setup. I also used quite a bit of extra data. With the Iphone 3g Plan I’d get 1 gigabyte of data per month, ten times more at relatively little extra.
When I can get the Natel Liberty Grande paired with the Nokia N95 then I’ll be happy. Until then I’ll feel that they could do better.
Garmin allows you to select the number of steps you want to take in a single day, or let it be set automatically. For a year or two I allowed the goal to set. The result is a step goal that fluctuated from 12,000 steps per day to 15,000 steps or more. This was fine, because I ignored it.
A few days ago I decided to set it to a fixed ten thousand steps a day. Many will say that the 10,000 steps per day doesn’t matter, and I agree. I took 21,000 steps today so I overshot the mark by a little.
I run every two days or so, and I walk for an hour and a half or more each day. Although I do this sometimes I undershoot the goal by a few hundred steps and the streak is lost. The streak, too, doesn’t matter, because it is meaningless. What I find interesting is the number of steps taken in a year. Once it was five and a half million. Now it is currently about 4.3 million.
These numbers too, don’t matter. If you run, or if you cycle you’re either making more effort, or your steps are not counted. In both cases the step count tells one story but other metrics tell another.
Last night I read about how you can increase your Vo2 max up to a certain point, and after that it doesn’t increase. What does change is your resistance to fatigue. You go from being able to run for 2 kilometres to being able to run for 2.3 kilometres, and more.
Today I walked for two hours in drizzle. I passed by two Camino stamp opportunities and collected them in a booklet that is not designed for this use. I collected them as a curiousity, and to give this walk a different purpose.
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