It was an off-day for Victoria’s Strava artist and a sad day for his daughter, whose high hopes for a Strava armadillo went woefully unfulfilled.

As every artist knows, there’s often a gap between vision and output – between what you conceive and what you actually create. Sometimes, that gap is chasmic.

My daughter asked me to Strava-doodle an armadillo. (She actually requested an arma-dee-yo, since she’s really quite tickled by the Spanish pronunciation.)

I studied a few armadillo images, and then on my map of Victoria I sketched out what seemed to me to be a pretty fair likeness of a “little armoured one” (which, I learned, is the translation of armadillo from Spanish to English).

That, unfortunately, is the only thing I was able to translate with any degree of accuracy. After 26 kilometres of Strava-sketching, I could only laugh (and thank the universe it didn’t happen on a mermaid-scaled project) when I saw the outcome.

Instead of an armadillo, I’d drawn a pudgy, pouty-faced sewer rat in a frilly flapper-style dress.

Charleston, Charleston, gee how you can shuffle –
Every step you do, leads to something new.
Man I’m telling you, it’s a lapazoo!

See it on Strava