finally: our trans-european TDB2015-tour starts today! after getting back to villa poska around midnight we both sleep very well. helped by a sunrise around 0400 we get up around 0630 and are treated to home-cooked porridge. our goal for today is to reach riga. tallin looks grand, bathed in golden sunlight – morning traffic is heavy and it takes us about half an hour to cross the city centre. leaving tallin behind us, an important task is at hand: our traditional team picture for the tour, our ninth adventure together! we venture out into the countryside on small roads, as […]
TDB2015 – prologue, part 2
today, everything we planned for tdb2015 is coming together – literally! since jc and i spent the first part of the day separately, it might make sense to see what we were up to one by one. let’s start with JC’s story we left the action with jc on a ferry to helsinki with TW560 generating quite some interest and keeping jc busy explaining what a twike is all about. the ferry arrives on time and finland welcomes TW560 for the first time. we discovered just a few hours before that the ferry ports for finnlines and the one we […]
TDB2015 prologue: go!
First update for TDB2015: JC picked up TW560 Sunday afternoon and drove to Lörrach without any problems. Currently, both TW560 and JC are on a Finnline Ferry to Helsinki – a 29 hour trip. We will meet up on Wednesday evening around 1930 at Tallin Airport, with me arriving from Rome. GPS tracking will be active sometime tomorrow evening. (When it’s no longer tracking me in Italy) We are really looking forward to our newest TWIKE adventure!
TDB2015 t-17: hello russia & good news again!
wow, time is moving fast! hurrah – our russian visas have come through! we’re really happy that this part of our trip is happening. we’re both looking forward to visiting kaliningrad! in the meanwhile i’ve found a way to offer up-to-the-minute gps tracking that looks and works like the map latitude generated for me two years ago. i really liked the feature in the past where people would keep refreshing our site just to see where we were and send us poi’s whilst en-route. hope you will like it again. emissionless’ homepage will be getting a location badge in the […]
clear communication
i love bumper stickers! they are perfect to convey political messages, affiliations or hobbies. not really a thing in europe, i really like the choice available online. for many years i had my trusted “hybrids are for pussies”-sticker, which i got from a SUV-drivers’ association page. classic! but there is a twist: since a twike, technically, *is* a hybrid, the sticker might be just a little bit misleading. since my rim failure last year and subsequent repair attempts (…and bringing everything back to its former glory) tw560 was on the road without any stickers, since i had to replace the […]
repairs: TWIKE broken canopy tube
during the last few weeks, my TWIKE was making some strange rattling noise from time to time. one of the last weekends i started to search more in-depth and found the culprit very quickly: a canopy tube had broken just around the locking mechanism. a few years ago, TWIKE 560 took part at the WAVE 2011 India. during this trip we at one point hit a pothole nearly as big as the TWIKE and were unable to slow down in time. the result was a broken locking pin and tube. this year’s canopy tube failure may well be a result […]
TDB2015…lots of news! (t-53d)
planning all aspects of TDB2015 is a very interesting task. we’re happy to announce that one of the most important parts of these preparations has been completed: how to get TW560 to tallin, the starting point of our adventure this year. you might remember us lamenting the complexities of this task in one of our last blog entries. even after having had the chance to negotiate with a car importer from estonia, we were still at an amount of money we were unwilling to invest in just getting TW560 to its starting point. so, after thinking somewhat out of the […]
plexi-vodoo!
as you might know, older swiss twikes are fitted with a plexi windscreen to save weight. (elsewhere in the EU, the glass manufacturer-lobby was successful in having legislation for cars include glass as the only material approved for windscreens…which adds an uncool 30kgs to european twikes and forces even the hyper-efficient VW XL1 to have a glass windscreen even though all side windows are poly carbonate!) after my vandalism incident last year, and my subsequent purchase and custom fitting of the worlds’ last original twike plexi windscreen, i am obviously even more interested in keeping it in pristine condition! however, […]
fondue in malans – a two-day TWIKE trip
as you might know, the swiss TWIKE driver’s association organizes various events every year. since we’re in switzerland, fondues and related events are “de rigeur” during the cold season. this year, we’ve been treated to a total of 4(!) such events for the club alone – one of the better ones is away from the usual swiss gravitational centres: far off in the grison alps. i’ve already blogged about one of theses events here. this year, the grison event is going to be held in the wine-producing foothills of malans at a winery. both myself and my trusted co-pilot and […]