Well as I believe I mentioned a few days ago, I have set out to ride my bike the length of every street in Madeira. I finished my route planning this afternoon, and set off on my first ride this evening.

The routes that I have planned out are 10 routes of 6.2, 6.0, 6.4, 5.3, 6.8, 6.7, 6.1, 4.8, 4.5 and 13.6 miles. The thought is to work my way up to the longer one. I can’t be completely sure of the accuracy of these numbers, since I just used Google Maps to calculate them, and it’s probably not that accurate at short distances due to roundage.

The route upon which I set out today was labelled as “Trip I” (I labelled them, in no particular order, from A to J). This one had a posted distance of 4.8 miles. I had some problems finding my watch and nearly gave up on going, since if it couldn’t be timed, there was obviously no point in going. In the end, I borrowed Carolyn’s watch, and counted from the second hand. The ride was somewhat challenging. Lots of hills in this particular area. As Carolyn was pointing out when I got back, you don’t really realize how even a slight hill can be quite big when you’re not just riding over it in a car. I will admit that on one of them I had to get off and walk. That was going up Indian Trail Drive, which you can see here. It’s the black street right in the middle of the map. The street just west of it is similarly hilled, but I got to go down that one :-). Don’t worry for all of you purists out there, because this was a cul-de-sac street, after I walked up part of it, I did ride all the way down it, so no disqualifications on a technicality!

Anyways, the trip of 4.8 miles took me 21 minutes and 19 seconds (from 7:05:06 to 7:26:25). That works out to 13.51 mph. That seems to me a bit high, considering the walking time as well as a few other hilly areas that I rode very slowly. I suppose it is possible that I just underestimated how fast one can ride on a bike – I was thinking around 10 mph. The other, probably more plausible, explanation is that it wasn’t really 4.8 miles. Perhaps I will investigate further at another time.

So the plan now is to continue to ride until I have reached my goal. I will try to see if I can find some less hilly sections however! I will keep you, my faithful readers, informed.