Recap on Tour of the Netherlands
Posted by b-unicycling on 2 February 2025 in English. Last updated on 3 February 2025.I’m back home! All the uploads done! Yeah!
Street-level imagery
As I had written about earlier, I was on tour with actually, to be precise, one of the bands I’m in under the title/ program “The Dubliners Experience” in the Netherlands from Jan 15th to Feb 1st. The GoPro Max was our constant companion on the roof of the tour bus. It covers mostly motorways and the areas around concert venues, of course. I also walked around the campsite we stayed at (band life isn’t as glamorous as they make it out to be in the movies after all) with it, but that imagery is not super useful, I’m afraid. How much can you map in a fen, when there are not even leaves on the trees to map species…But still, the area got covered.
I was especially keen to upload to Panoramax, because the coverage was quite poor which does not mean to discredit the people who have already contributed, of course!
I’ll give you some before and after screenshots, some of which I had already shared on Mastodon yesterday.
Before I started, this was the situation in the Netherlands for both flat and 360° images.
And this was yesterday:
This was the state of 360° coverage on Jan 14th 2025:
And this yesterday:
EDIT: I forgot to mention that I tracked where we were going and what I had captured using OSMAnd, so I could prevent duplicate sequences. There are still some duplicates, because of the foggy conditions during the first week and because I didn’t want to risk the camera turning off while inactive on a long drive.
As I had mentioned in the previous diary post, I “lost” (i.e. deleted) sequences where the camera had tilted, because I did not know how to correct that. Stupid me. If anyone knows how to or knows of a tutorial, please comment. I don’t even know what to search for.
Mapping
While on the way to concert venues, I added a couple of notes along the way to be resolved after the show. Some were resolved by other people in an amazingly short time. So, dankewell you to those folks!
Thatched buildings
I have an interest in thatched buildings, so that was something I mapped being driven and walking using roof:material=thatch
. I added a couple more last night, bringing the total to 101. While mapping that, I noticed that many of the buildings are not squared off. Is there any good reason for that? It made adding building:part=yes
for roof:material=thatch
a bit awkward. Of course, I also added a couple of missing buildings (mostly sheds or maybe car ports, hard to tell) which had not been covered in the last import by the Dutch mapping community.
Defibrillators
Around the theatres, quite a few defibrillators were missing, even though the mapping density of them in general seems to be good in the Netherlands. Many a time, I got OSMAnd out to map one only to find that it was already mapped. But maybe mappers don’t go to the theatre much, so it’s good I came along. I added 25 in total, some also just spotted from the band bus.
Backstage prefix
I continued on with the backstage
prefix to map amenities (showers, washing machine etc) for artists found backstage. I don’t expect this to take off in general, but we map amenities for babies, wheelchair users , why not also this. I know it’s not easily verifiable, but there is no harm in doing it imho. And to be fair, I added nappy changing tables wherever I saw them. I made a point using every bathroom I could to survey that. ;-)
Loading ramps and artists’ entrances (name=artiesteningang
) into the venues were also added to make it easier in the future to know where to go, because there are a lot of one-way systems and pedestrianized areas around the venues.
Obviously, I added missing shops, pubs, street lights, street cabinets, details on restaurants and whatever else I fancied.
I must say, I really appreciate always having a mission, so the waiting around doesn’t get too draining and you “force” yourself to explore your surroundings, if time permits. I wish I had had more time during daylight, because we mostly played in small towns which probably don’t get too much attention from mappers on a regular basis, but we usually arrived for soundcheck at 16:00 with the sun setting around 17:00, so it was quite limiting.
And I made it to #56 in the statistics for the Netherlands on neis-one!