quick update on TDE2012. cruizing around alicante and creating quite a stir anywhere we go. JC & I have been planning the next leg of TDE2012 > a map with the exact route will be posted here shortly. jc is staying until thursday and then will head up north towards the atlantic. the GPS tracker will be active, so the global positioning page and location badge on the first page will be accurate during the next few weeks. jc will send me photos and videos and i will publish them here. text-wise, however, there will be less content… i’m looking […]
TDE2012 – day9 – TDE2012’s first leg over! el font de la figuera > alicante
we depart from la font de la figuera – very aware that this is the last stage of TDE2012 with Andrew and JC driving together, but more on that later. the blue line takes us, yet again, from hilltop to hilltop. one thing we’re sure of is: today we will end up at 0 metres – sea level. heading towards Alicante we take a wrong turn (since the smartphone had already overheated again and was temporarily cooling) and headed down from our 900metres towards jijona. jijona is the home of 1880 turron and delicious jijconeca ice cream. so this is […]
TDE2012 Day 8 – 45°C, FIRE & heat! Rincon > La Font de la Figuera
after a very nice cup of tea with some toast and home made jam we head – yet again – towards a nature reserve and some promising climbs. even though it is still early, we immediately notice that today will be much hotter than the other days. after just 20kms, we arrive at a larger, flat valley with some rather high hills in the distance. the hills look odd, since normally they are beige with some dark green spots. these hills, however, are dark! as we come closer, we see what happened to these hills: wildfires! everything, and I mean […]
TDE2012 day 7 – back to the nature reserves: mas de barberans > rincons
we leave quite early – on our way out of the village, we wave good-bye to the people who helped us the day before. such a small place! one lane roads winding through the village barely wide enough for the TWIKE and everyone knows everyone > better not be in trouble with any of your neighbours > they are about 2.5 metres away from your front window! just as we leave the village behind us, we get our first glimpse of the sea in the distance. there is still a lot of dust in the air and would it not […]
TDE2012 – day 6: hello catalunya! andorra la veilla > mas de barberans
a new day awaits us and we are looking forward to driving towards northern spain today. big black clouds are pushing over the mountain tops and are getting cought in andorra’s valley – best to be on our way, before the rain starts to fall! we keep rolling down Andorra valley towards spain and keep on coming past one petrol station and shopping place after another. it’s getting boring and we ought to get out of here on those grounds, too! again, rather unceremoniously, we leave Andorra and enter spain where, after just a few hundred meters, TW231 takes a […]
TDE2012 – day 5 > Maximum climb day – Limoux > Andorra la veilla
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 […]