Miscalculations on the Edge

I was tidying up parts of my Around the Edge of England blog when I realised I'd miscalculated one of the journey distances - and thus the cumulative distance of the trip so far. It was only a small error, but significant enough to warrant correction. Becuase of the way I've structured that part of the blog however I had to go through it and also correct all the "cumulative distance" figures from that point onwards. Fortunately, or so I though, the error had occured towards the end of the trip, but in the course of putting things right I uncovered another mistake.

There was nothing for it but go back and add up all the 183 bus journeys, 11 ferries and the trains and trams again to achieve a correct total, this time using an Excel spreadsheet, which was what I should have done in the first place.

Interestingly, at first the various errors all seemed to cancel each other out and for a long time I was only 1km adrift, but then  I noticed that I'd entered the distance of the bus 149  from Grain to Strood as 8.6km, which was clearly wrong as bus 148  Rochester to Grain - an almost equivalent journey - was 22.1km!  

Wareham, Dorset. 2,000km from Lancaster via the Edge of England

After correcting this - and some further mistakes - I found I'd done 40km more than I'd thought and I'm now 3341.2km into the journey.  It also meant that the "landmark" distances of the 1000th, 2000th and 3000th kilometres  (I'm measuring in metric to annoy any Brexiteers reading this) all occurred in different places to where I'd thought (Mullacott Cross, Devon; Wareham, Dorset; and Westcliffe-on-Sea, Essex if you're interested).

Hopefully I won't make the same mistakes in recording Days 35 to 40 of the trip which, starting tomorrow, will take me from Harwich to Kings Lynn - a stretch of the coast I'm really looking forward too, even if the connections on the first stretch are so dubious as to require a "back-up plan to the back-up plan"!