I Would Walk 1000 Miles

Tomorrow I shall take my leave of my kind host, Daisy, wave bye-bye to the menagerie (9 dogs! I ask you…) and work my way back into France and up into Nancy, Metz and then Luxembourg. I hope to make it to Luxembourg City by this time next week. My initial plan for Stage 3 quotes 15 days to get to Metz, but I think I can knock that in half with some hard plodding.

I’ve also uploaded some new videos to YouTube, including one of the ones I couldn’t get to work before (Day 2 / Vid 2). Please note that some of the videos are cut short or slightly garbled as a result of the damaged memory card. Hopefully this won’t happen again and the most recent videos, more for the Tour Blog are fine.

Graham Mac from TFM also called again this morning and there will be more from me on the show tomorrow (Thursday 23rd) if you’re in a position to listen to it.

So… more as and when I can manage it!

I couldn’t make it up. As of right now, the donations received and pledged stand at £666 plus $445 plus 1000 Slovakian Crowns. In addition I’ve been informed that a missive I sent to Tharg the Mighty, editor of the Galaxy’s Greatest comic, 2000AD, has made Letter of the Week. I think one of the donations I received today is as a result of that, which is a great start. UPDATE: A nice person on the 2000AD mailing list scanned the letter in. You can see it here. The 42 is kind of spurious. I need to calculate how many miles I’ve done so far as it won’t be quite the total expected by now, though I hope to find it in excess of 200 miles. For safety reasons (horrendous roads, incoming bad weather), I accepted a lift over the Pass de Grand Saint Bernard between Italy and Switzerland all the way to Montreux. In a bid to increase the miles in compensation, I walked along the north shore of Lake Geneva / Lake Léman, crossed on a boat as I neared Geneva itself and walked some more on the south side. I’m fairly sure there’ll still be a shortfall, but I’ll calculate this and add some more miles elsewhere accordingly. I ain’t getting on that ferry in Holland until I have at least 993 miles under my belt! The videos from my camera seem to be kaput… I have rescued two very short none-walk-related ones and nothing else. The photos, in the main, seem to be OK but it will take me a while to go through and weed out the corrupt ones. Does anyone know of a utility for repairing partially corrupt AVI files?

Just so you know where I’ve got to, I arrived in Geneva / Genéve earlier on. Posts will be updated as soon as I have rescued all 2000 or so pictures and videos off my damaged XD media card. Thank you Adam for the recovery program!

EDIT: Most of the photos seem to be recovered, though I can’t figure out how the Windows thumbnails look fine even for the ones which are corrupt full size. However, none of the videos have survived. I cannot play them in Windows, and if I upload them to YouTube, I get the first few seconds of each before they end prematurely.

Unless someone out there knows a utility that can load and repair dodgy AVI files?