On Sunday I got up early and got a train over to join in with the Milton Keynes Mapping party.

It's a funny old place. Or rather it's a funny new place. Built in the 60's. Very spaced out, with lots of car parks. Built for the motorcar, but also pretty good for the bicycle. Francine and I (yes I dragged my long suffering girlfriend along too) were on foot.

I had planned some unambitious POI mapping around the city centre. This had several lazy advantages: a) less walking, b) stay out of the rain in the all the massive shopping malls, c) keep Francine happy by making occasional clothing purchases. We did this in the morning, and also went and took a peek inside what turned out to be the XScape indoor ski-slope centre. So that explained the funny shaped roof!

But even Francine realised, when she saw the monstrously huge cake diagram printed on the wall, that this wasn't going to help finish the whole of Milton Keynes, and so she volunteered us to map one of the suburban cake slices too.

Other flickr photos from the event

I have to say this was really rather tedious. Plodding around each cul-de-sac in turn. Definitely worth having a bike for. We did the keep-turning-left thing which was quite disorientating, and left me with no idea how much of our slice we'd actually managed to map. Turns out about half of it. We couldn't walk much further though. Absolutely shattered at the end of it.

We are the meagre orange contribution on Ollie's Animation from the GPS traces

As you can see, there were quite a few people there, doing an amazing amount of mapping! Would be great to get-together and attack some of the other UK Mapping Priorities in this way.

For now though, it's back to London mapping parties. Were in Kilburn tonight!