the hotel certainly has seen better days. i’m by far the youngest eating breakfast and even jc says that the people here are too old for his liking! this does not disturb us however, for us it is the first day trying to stick to the pre-planned line and our first challenge is to climb from 300m to over 1500m within 14kms. le mont du chat, waits for us with 14% and stunning views. motor temperature soars but we make it to the summit just in time before we would have had to stop for overheating. at the top, we […]
TDE2012 Day1: Rain & EV’s – Glattfelden, Switzerland > Aix-les-Bains, France
jc and i quickly fall into our travelling routine – since tw231 belongs to jc, he gets to drive first 🙂 rather quickly after beginning TDE2012, we hit bad weather – heavy rain and wind. after some 20kms of this we decide to check switzerland’s weather radar system. according to the data presented there, we’re to expect bad weather throughout switzerland. this makes us decide to temporarily abandon our quest to follow the blue theoretical line as closely as possible for the swiss part of the TDE2012. not much fun to sit in a TWIKE driving on very small roads […]
TDE2012 – all systems GO!
After some hectic finishing off yesterday evening, we started TDE2012 today, 715 am. Rain and unusually low temperatures are our companions for the first leg to berne. TW231 has GPS tracking capabilities – follow us by the minute!
TDE2012 – preparations
above you can see all the cables and adaptors we’ve chosen to be part of TDE2012. this is – according to our experience – what you need to be sure to be able to connect anywhere you are. in our small grey box, (click to zoom) you will find our trusted multimeter and some leads. all other cables are more or less standard, except the IEC2, for which i will dedicate an own post when we’re ready. most of the cables are seasoned travellers – we took about 90% of all connectors with us on wave india 2011! if you […]
follow us on twitter: #TDE2012
during TDE2012 we’re going to update you continuously via twitter – look out for hashtag #TDE2012. newest messages are going to appear either on twitter, here in the sidebar or via your mobile phone twitter app. you may interact with us instantly – we’re very happy to know you’re out there!
Zurich Airport parking buddies
parking around zurich airport is usually prohibitively expensive, except for motorbikes, twikes … and CREE SAM’s. today en-route to the french part of switzerland, i parked TW560 besides a beautifully kept CREE SAM these vehicles are very rare – i’ve had the chance to drive one with a large lithium battery last year – interesting, but, as with most speciality vehicles, i would not go from driving a TWIKE to driving a SAM anytime soon! 🙂
it’s nice to be able to choose
being able to be the main sponsor of events though my company, i have the unusual freedom to choose what activity or thing is going to be sponsored. instead of boring roll-ups or other corny give-aways i usually decide on something more interesting or memorable. this year for a conference i decided to take some of my customers on a segway tour around switzerland’s captial, berne. although i had planned to do something with electric cars, i had to abandon that idea pretty quickly, since it seems still very difficult to get more than just 1-2 electric rental cars to […]
proudly presenting: our TDE2012 route, work in progress..
A quick update: I’ve started planning daily stages. If we could follow the theoretical line 1:1 our daily stages would be around 147kms every day. Every red pushpin on the map represents a ‘virtual’ stage. The red line between these pushpins represents the real-world road we’ll be driving on. Interestingly enough, our real daily stages somehow are exactly around what we usually experienced as relaxing (200-300kms). Check out the full screen map by clicking the link below the map! Currently, i really like day 4 and day 6. View TDE 2012 in a larger map I’d like to re-iterate my […]
good news, indeed
i had already wondered how i would ensure the same type of granularity regarding gps positioning updates and blog entries like during wave india whilst travelling through france and spain on TDE2012. my peers in those countries had already been tasked to find me suitable pre-paid data-sim’s so that we could be online anywhere. but then, today, my favourite carrier of all – swisscom – sent me a text message We have some good news for you: on 25 June 2012 your NATEL BeFree subscription becomes NATEL infinity XL. So for the same price of CHF 169.-/month you can now also […]
TDE2012 – planning update
finally, jc and i have found some time to continue planning! jc has bought ridiculously detailed maps of spain and france. we went along the theroretical line and assessed where there might be problems to follow the line closely. there are lots of such instances > see for yourself below! (fully zoomable > try changing to terrain mode…) View