April 26 to May 8, 1998
This is a daily log of a bicycle trip from New Orleans, LA to Nashville, TN. The trip will be logged to this web page each evening from our motel room. The general plan for this trip is to follow the Mississippi river, on the west side, from New Orleans through Baton Rouge up to Natchez, MS. At Natchez we will cross the river and ride up the Natchez Trace to Nashville. The route along the Mississippi in Louisianna is mostly on the the levee after Baton Rouge. In the 1970s I rode from Baton Rouge to Vicksburg and it was really a great ride -- hardly any traffic and interesting country. I have no idea what it's like now. During the trip, we can receive email at: rpoore@mdbdesign.com. If all goes as planned, I will post the first log on the evening of April 26. Technical Stuff All photographs on this we page were taken with an Epson PhotoPC 600 digital camera. It has a maximum resolution of 768 x 1024 at 72 dpi. I use it in "Fine" mode, which holds 16 pictures in the built-in camera memory. I have a 4MB CompactFlash memory attachment which holds an additional 16 pictures. You can find all the other technical details at www.epson.com. One reason I bought the PhotoPC 600 was because I can turn off the flash and it stays off after turning the camera off and on again. Most of the other digital cameras turn the flash back on each time you turn the power on. The other reason is that it has 768 x 1024 resolution at 72 dpi, which when converted to 240 dpi, makes a publishable (although small) picture. Updates to the web page were made with an Apple Macintosh PowerBook 1400c using the phone line in the motel room. Both my internet providers (Netcom and Mindspring) have an 800 number which was used to access the web page area. Each day's log was put into a FileMaker Pro database along with the photo captions. After the day's narrative was entered, a database script was executed which caused the database to generate the HTML for the day's web page. The HTML and the photos were then uploaded to the web page area. This was reasonably painless. It had to be after a day of bicycling. One other note: If you are looking at this page often, make sure you tell your web browser to RELOAD (Netscape) or REFRESH (Explorer), in order to get the most recent posting. Otherwise the browser may use the previous view. (c) Ray & Connie Poore, 1998