Imagine a virtual grid of squares over a map. Each of these is a “tile” that’s roughly one mile square. Tiles can be collected by entering the space a tile covers using a GPS device to record the journey. The GPS file is uploaded to one site, the activity is picked up by another and your collection of tiles is calculated and displayed. The largest contiguous area of visited tiles. The largest square in which all tiles had been collected.

It was an activity that led me to going to places I’d not been before. Mostly cycling. On and off road. I like exploring and I like seeing collections grow.

About ten years ago I started to collect “Explorer Tiles” using Strava and VeloViewer. I was on a mission to collect every tile covering Kent, to grow my largest square and to extend overall tile coverage. I wrote a couple of posts about this back in 2016 and 2018.

As time went by more and more virtual activities appeared in my Strava feed. These are activities created by using an indoor cycling machine paired with a cycling app like Zwift or TrainerRoad. I have no interest in looking at these activities and preferred not to have them in my feed. There was no way to filter them out other than to unfollow anyone who uploaded them. After a while I’d had enough of that as well as a few other Strava related quirks and decided to close my account. It was a shame to lose all the good aspects of Strava and most of all the Explorer Tiles. VeloViewer only connects with Strava.

I kept on the lookout for a platform that supported some iteration of explorer tiles and even put in a request with RWGPS to introduce the feature. The closest they have come to that is personal heat maps. Not the same.

A year or two ago I came across rideeverytile. That would have done for me aside from having to manually upload rides. I was not going to do that every time I went for a ride.

Last week I discovered Squadrats. The concept of explorer tiles adopted and developed. The main addition is that each of the tiles can be viewed as an 8 x 8 grid of 64 smaller tiles. This means more tiles can be collected over a smaller area, Very handy when not having the time to go further afield to collect more of the bigger ones.

In the short time I have been using the app I have visited places in my local area I never knew about before. Neighbourhoods, woodland trails and parks. I have lived in Medway for over twenty years and thought I knew my way around pretty well. You don’t know what you don’t know has never been so true.

I’d been looking to change up my cycling habits over the last couple of months. I was in a bit of a rut. Clocking up regular miles on autopilot, following loops and routes I know like the back of my hand. Collecting tiles again is quite literally a breath of fresh air.

There are some limits to the tiles I can get locally due to military sights, prison estates and other restricted areas. It was a bit disappointing to discover this but decided it was good enough to simply collect all those that I could get access to. I’ve been creating and riding routes that make no obvious sense at first glance. Following roads down dead ends, riding round crescents and squares, cutting across fields, hacking through woods - the shortest, quickest or most obvious route having little sway over which way I go. Having a lot of fun with it. Feeling excited again about getting out for a ride and bagging a few more tiles.