Our stay in Lucca was much too short. Today’s drive will take us to Massa Marina, just 80km from Lucca. My family will enjoy the town for another few hours whilst I start bright and early. My plan for today is to drive from the coast inland up some hills and back to the sea again. Off we go! Temperatures soar and I’m happy to climb continuously. Every 100m up means about 1°C less temperature. A first pass at 1300m brings me to a plateau at around 1000m, complete with mountain lake and many, many people escaping the heat. For […]
TDI2020 – Northwards along the Ligurian Sea
Time has flown by in Terni & Rome. We’ve had a great time as a family with all our friends and we’re very grateful for their friendship. Today I will drive to Lucca on my own – my family wants to spend less time on the road – rather a long and relaxing lunch at the sea somewhere en-route. Me, however, am looking forward to the trip. Today will be a very hot day and I’ve planned to take TW560 up some hills to get a reprieve from the heat. TW560 was charged slowly at 0.02C to allow the […]
TDI2020 – Terni & Rome
After arriving in Terni, we’re ready for a week of time-off, Italian-style! We live with our friends whilst our kids live distributed across town with their grown-up children or stay with the extended family. Most of our days consist of sitting at long tables and eating fabulous food or visiting other parts of the family – very relaxing. With Covid Lockdown1 over, most of public services are back – with the hot weather we’re loving the fact that we have a swimming pool just around the corner from where we live! We spent a few afternoons here. Our kids, however, […]
TDI2020 – Southwards along the Adriatic Sea
After our two days with our friends, it’s time for us as a family to spend some time at the sea on our own. We’re all looking forward to 3 days in Lido di Dante – it’s a trip down memory lane: as a young family we came here a few times when the kids were all in their single digits and it was just perfect – kid-friendly Italian restaurants – pizza and pasta universally loved by our children, beach fronts with playgrounds and shallow water…and tons of other kids. Our new vacation setup sees us parents getting up and […]
TDI2020 – Two Days On My Own
A new TWIKE adventure! Post-Lockdown1 relaxation of travel restrictions to Italy meant that we – at short notice – arranged to visit various of our Italian friends and stay a few days at the sea, both on the Adriatic and Tyrrheanean side of the Italian peninsula. The first two days will see me driving on my own to Brescia and staying there with friends and their family before my own family joins me on late Sunday. I really need the time-off and two days on my own as I’ve been extremely busy lately. As always, it doesn’t take me long […]
Pre-TDI2020 battery spa
As always, the time until a major trip seems endless until…the trip is just 2 weeks away and the agenda is still full with calls and meetings and weekends are chock-full with other stuff. Equally important is balancing a pack before setting out on 3 weeks of full-cycle discharges during long-distance daily trips. Thanks to the fact that I have multiple battery workstations, balancing the 42 strings takes only about one day in total and – as mentioned previously – this exercise is also a very good indicator for cell ageing and cell health in general. TW560’s pack is nearing […]
Omnibus update 2018/2019/2020
During the last few days I’ve been publishing ‘old’ entries on my blog and a few readers reached out to me as they were wondering if something was amiss. All is good (…as someone else tweeted regarding something much more serious) – These entries were just overdue and I’m posting them with the correct date for them to show up in the correct order in the timeline as one of my new year resolutions are to post a little more regularly for this blog. Below is a preview of the entries that will be published during the next few weeks. […]
Hello 2020
At the end of 2019, I look back at a very nice and fun-packed year with my favourite of all vehicles: TWIKE 560. 2019 was a very busy year. It saw me travelling around 80% and being away for weeks at a time. Most notable was November where I enjoyed full two weeks in warm Singapore instead of grey and cold Switzerland before flying to Spain for another 9 days. 2019 was also notable as I went on two longer TWIKE adventures TDI2019 to Italy My first long-distance solo TWIKE adventure driving to Austria and onward to central Italy and […]