This is an important concept for a touring cyclist, and even more important for the TC’s eager blog audience.
Here we are, cycling through France in August. In the south, every town is madly busy organising fetes, vides greniers, fireworks, processions, musical entertainment etc etc. And yet we very rarely go to any of them. Not even on the Feast of the Assumption days (14th/15th August). Why is that?
It is due to the mismatch between the Zone of Information and the Cone of Interest, as illustrated by this awesome graphic (c) Doris.
In this graphic our cyclist is travelling along and everywhere they go, there are posters for events. Bigger events are more widely publicised further in advance, smaller events are published just in their village and often with only a few days notice. So the Zone of Information is a circular thing round the cyclist, telling you about things you are going to miss in this village tonight (because you have already booked a hotel 50km away) or things you are going to miss 20km away in a week’s time.
What the cyclist is really interested in, is the Cone of Interest. Is there anything happening in this village right now which we can cycle over to and gawp at, or somewhere that we could bend this afternoon’s route to, or in the village we are aiming for this evening, or in a different village in one or two days time which we could reasonably – or even unreasonably – move our whole planned route to.
If anyone would like to engineer a web search machine that could search the Cone of Interest, you can have this idea for free, and we would happily pay to subscribe to it. Remember that Sid and Doris are interested in very, very tiny events. In Hollister, in California (#placenamedropping) we were charmed to find they were having an exhibition of people’s garden railways. It was advertised with flyers in the local cafe.