woke up refreshed to the sound of the church bells ringing from the church just outside my room. checked the computer before heading for breakfast to find it at about 85% of the tasks I gave it the night before and that it was still transferring! *urg* I have a 20mbit/s uplink at home, uploading gigs of data usually takes not much longer than copying it to a local disk! from Limoux we start a long climb up to 1443 meters. the whole feel of our surroundings is distinctly alpine – when we arrive, we are greeted by a sign […]
TDE2012 – day 4: Grand-Canyon & the plateau – Le Vigan > Limoux
after a very restful night we start out earlier than yesterday. we are looking forward to a new day with lots of new landscapes 🙂 we start at about 150m above sea level and headed up to a plateau at about 800m. vegetation is completely different here: only small trees and shrubs seem to survive. the plateau greets us with small windy roads and eventually with one of the sights on TDE2012 I was looking forward to: a real canyon cut into the plateau. it looked very impressive on terrain view and then even more so on street view…but to […]
TDE2012 – day 3: Privas > Le Vigan
after a very refreshing night’s sleep, we can hardly get on the road, since the lady has seemed to have put it in her mind to keep us as long as possible: long discussions about where we are heading to, long breakfast, photos and goodbye wishing… it all adds up to us leaving at 0930 instead of 0830 as we had initially planned for. right from the first meter we are forced to climb meter after meter up a quite steep hill just to descend on the other side again. this will stay our itinerary for the whole day. we […]
TDE2012 – day 2: first taste of the red line > Aix-Les-Bains > Privas
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!
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 […]