The marked route took us up an earth track flanked by gorse bushes warmed by the sun but we emerged after a few hundred yards on to a steeper and extremely rocky track with the river on our left.
The only problem, Hickox explained, was that there was no sheet music available and that anyway it would need to be notated and completely re-written to fit the Hello Earth track.
Yesterday I'd been kept up to speed with developments in the Scottish Premier League and cardiothoracic surgery as we had loudly traded banter up and down our jaunty rambling formation, but as the rockily rutted red-earth track rose and narrowed, the eight of us fell into a silent single column.
Instead, it focuses on projects like using Google Earth to track environmental changes and monitoring Web searches to detect flu outbreaks.
One was an American craft called Polar, orbiting close to the earth to track the solar plasma on its way to the night side, where it draws the magnetic field into a long "geomagnetic tail" stretching beyond the orbit of the moon.
Formally known as C/2002 V1, Comet NEAT was spotted in November 2002 by NASA's Near- Earth Asteroid Tracking system in Hawaii.
The town of Riverhead, Long Island, taking a lesson from the Greeks, is also using Google Earth to track down about 250 "unpermitted" pools.
Comments on this one include: "second best song of the earth," "Beefy track this how i feel in side of me," "junkie fuck," and "Shaggin tune" [all sic].
Planetary scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, aim to change that with their Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking project (NEAT).
