Saturday

I wanted to get to know my new neighbourhood better and try some new tools . So this weekend I tested Opencamera to take photos and good old OSMTracker for GPS traces. I took a peek on to the map, set camera to burst mode to click every 10s and set out to the direction of Bellandur lake. After passing HAL airport, the terrain seemed to change quickly. I went from paved roads to dirt roads and tracks (later I realised I cut right through the dried part of the lake). I wasn’t checking maps and ended up on the outer ring road, took a U-turn and managed to reach to the other side of the lake.

Spent some time enjoying the view and started back. It was nice to see calm and green place not far from the city, but felt sad that construction and pollution is eating it up.

After 4 hours of cycling I reached home loaded GPX on JOSM, and I was more sad. My phone didn’t let osmtracker update location information in the background and most of the tracks were just straight lines. First I thought it was a bug (like one which causes osmand to crash on this) but later figured out that it was a power saving feature 😑 . But was lucky that I had geo-tagged photos, and recreated the track from them :)

After a small break I set off to Indiranagar to play cricket with friends. I was happy to know that I covered around 37 kms on cycle that day. 🚴

Sunday

So learning from yesterday’s mistake, I turned off power saver for OsmTracker and locked the app from being closed automatically. It took around 1 hour for me to cycle to Cubbon park. As roads through the park are not open to motor-vehicles on Sundays, you can explore 300 acres on foot or cycle in peace. The place felt very calm and relaxing, you can engage in various activities there, rent a cycle and go around see kids play at the playground, watch flocks of pigeons feeding or sit and listen to the creaking bamboos. There’s even a fenced area for dogs and owners meet going on, so went in to spent some time with those fuzzballs.

I roamed the park for some more time and left for the day. I loaded the GPX on JOSM as soon as got home and found that they are all well mapped thanks to mappers like PlaneMad ,Praveen, Nagesh_Blr

Total mileage for two days was around 70 kms but usable data collected was low, I am currently adding details from my memory and photos I clicked. Will try to improve next expedition with Mapillary and OpenStreetCam.