Time goes by really quickly – especially if you’re absent. Welcome to a quick re-cap of 2023, the usual stats and an outlook into 2024.
The good news first: TW560 had no major technical problems during 2023. Only following parts had to be serviced:
- New set of rear tyres
- New set of ball bearings for rear axles
- Bleeding of front brake
2023 started with me heading back to Singapore for another 4 months – extending my total stay there that started late 2022 to a total of 8 months. After some relaxing days back home over Christmas and New Year I headed back to Asia. My wife visited me for 2 weeks of vacation in Malaysia before I finally headed back to Switzerland in April.
As our kids didn’t want to join us for vacation this year, we decided to head to southern France early June and escape high prices and tourist hordes. Driving along the Cote d’Azur in our TWIKE was magical and I strongly suggest you try it, too!
The rest of the year went by very quickly – a few short drives here and there, the rest of the time I spent mostly in the home office, as most of my calls were to Asia or elsewhere on the continent…just not Switzerland and the weekends were spent in the garden or just busy with the family.
As hinted at here and announced here, one of the important next projects is the restoration of the wooden console with both main display elements.
Eventually, the console just gave up and was no longer fit for use – see for yourself.
This console is in a very bad shape overall.
It has definitely been repaired multiple times.
Also, I need to remove all the leftovers of previous repair attempts.
And it’s impressive that there are custom-made brackets to handle the problem of the various parts of the console coming apart but not to address the underlying static problems.
I’m tempted to explore how to 3d-scan the console and then machine it from a block of aluminium – let’ see.
In the meanwhile plans changed again and I was off, back to Singapore in November.
I’m getting used to the 13h flight and have learnt to strategically stay awake and strategically consume Melatonin at the right moments to avoid too much jet-lag.
My days consist of meeting customers and prospects in offices with a view!
I’ve visited the Singapore Fintech Festival since 2017 – the event has grown by leaps and bounds! This year there were over 60k delegates present!
My weekends were full of exploration and fun. With me coming past a Christmassy Swiss restaurant – which I didn’t visit. Next time I’m going to be in Singapore, I will, however, visit CouCou – just 300m from where my co-living place is – the menu sounds very (french-) Swiss.
Back in Switzerland, just 3 weeks later it’s time for the traditional yearly stats.
With the many months of me not driving the TWIKE, I’m still fascinated with the amount of distance accumulated during the year. It feels like I’ve hardly driven my TWIKE this year!
Over to the inverter: I’m now at 318899 km and 114398 km on the new battery since 08.08.2016.
The new battery has been a brilliant investment beside the dual-external chargers allowing me to rapid charge the battery in around 2.5h.
On the first day of the new year, there are two traditional things I like to do:
Buy a new motorway sticker for my TWIKE and…
Take my TWIKE on its first drive of the year – typically somewhere in the Black Forest. The views higher up are beautiful and this year’s drive didn’t disappoint either.
I’m looking forward to 2024 – if everything goes well, I’m going to be travel to much further pastures on a new epic TWIKE adventure. Stay tuned!new battery