Last Sunday I got to have extra fun walking thanks to the City of Bradford Metropoliton District Council – specifically, the Countryside division thereof – which organises guided walks around Bradford’s greener bits.

Described as the “Thornton Viaduct” walk, I was a bit disappointed that we weren’t going via the viaduct – it was closed for repairs – but it was a wonderful trip nonetheless.  Lovely sunshine, and the second half of the six-and-a-bit mile walk was via an alpaca and ostrich farm.  Geotagged images are available on Panoramio.

Walk details follow:

It’s pretty snazzy, and integrates well with the Google Maps interface.  You’ve also got the option of running it as a background task in order to keep your location completely up to date: although this functionality only triggers every few minutes and doesn’t keep a packet data connection open it slaughters the battery – I’m down to half charge on my N95 8GB after a single day’s use, although to be fair I’ve been fiddling with Google Maps in general a lot too.

There are slightly creepy, Orwellian overtones to the whole thing – and anyone who thinks Google is probably an NSA shadow op will be putting their tinfoil hats on as we speak – but it’s also bloody good fun.  I’ve got a bunch of friends from work added already, and when the iPhone version comes out I’ll be adding some more.

Whether it’ll end up being anything other than a brief novelty – and how long I keep sacrificing battery life for the ability to tell people where I am at any given moment – remains to be seen.