Welcome 2017 – I haven’t been blogging for a while, there hasn’t been much to blog about anyway – having been rather busy with (international) travel and finally some well-deserved vacation, this entry is somewhat of a quick re-cap of the last few months.
After my TWIKE-related accident it took surprisingly long to get rid of my crutches – I was getting worried I’d have to take them with me to Sri Lanka, a two-week escape to a warmer place, spicy food, beautiful landscapes, highest-quality tea and laid back beaches, beginning of December 16.
Being back to Asia means that our most trusted form of transport throughout the country has three wheels, too!
We love this kind of transport!
Back in Switzerland just before Christmas, it’s just a little over one week until new year. The traditional moment to see just how much fun I’ve had driving TW560.
Other numbers to follow are the amount of energy that has been taken from TW560’s battery pack and the total km driven so far. Both numbers are impressive!
My last days in 2016 and 2017’s first week was spent at home on the finishing tasks of a new room created for the sole purpose of housing my rack, servers, UPS, SAN, receivers etc. – in short, a new room/home for emissionless.ch/emissionslos.ch after treating my family to the noise of multiple servers running in our cellar for years without adequate noise reduction measures. Emissionless.ch has been hosted in “the cloud” during the change-over phase (ongoing) and I’ve been very, very disappointed with the service levels of the Swiss-based hosting company i chose – charging 6x more than companies elsewhere (but, hey, it’s Switzerland First, right?). As soon as I’ve migrated my internal IT to new access media (900 mbit uplink! – superfast emissionless.ch! Just to remind you: the 120-year-old house I’m living in was built without any electricity or central heating…) emissionsless.ch is going to come back to where it belongs – in my cellar and 100% under my control.
Most people from outside Switzerland I speak to imagine a wintry white country in December and January. Unfortunately, and totally not because of all the fake news, we’ve had less and less cold temperatures and snow lately. Typically, we get a freak cold spell sometime end of February which brings us a few days of snow cover. (15 years ago, Christmas and new year usually saw a persistent snow cover, even around Zurich.)
Anyway (again, this is a non-political blog – I’m inclined to start one soon, just to counter post-factualism and help keeping reality a fact š ), just after new-year we had a very brief moment at which we had the weather we should have had during this period:
January saw me flying to Berlin for a few days and staying with friends for the week-end – Berlin is a cold, grey and uninviting town in January. ZERO electric cars – what i can report is a politically motivated sticker:
Mid-January, I was invited to a Kick-off in Cannes, France. 4 full days in Cannes – how many BEV I saw? Zero, nil, null. I saw, however, many hyper-cars and a rusting old-school charging station.
Arriving at Cannes, I get a frequent-traveller welcome to my room:
My stay in Cannes is not only business-related:
The first day is very nice – a few moments of free time allows me to visit Cannes.
We’re offered a selection of activities – the only CO2-neutral option is a Segway tour…(many years after my own events)
A very relaxing afternoon.
Another thing every Central-European/Swiss owner of a vehicle has to do at the beginning of every year… remove the various motorway toll and charge permission stickers – to make way for 2017…
January is typically the time to start planning my trips throughout the coming year. My youngest daughter has been very keen to start planning a “take two” of last year’s trip which was cut short.
This year, we have more time – full 11 days – and are expanding our plan to the Balaton Lake, Hungary and driving back to Switzerland from there – visiting Budapest, Bratislava and staying at our extended Austrian family in Vienna, Linz and Gmunden on the way back.
More on this trip shortly.