About
Hugh Blemings's Blog, A Diary and Miscellaneous ramblings
Views
PDA Friendly View
Sections
Links
Some random (and not so random) links.
Sun, 26 Jun 2005
Left home on Friday 24th at around 11am, got to my hotel room here in Sindelfingen, Germany at 10am local, some 31 hours later. One of the more anticipated showers I've taken for a while :)
Air portion of trip was uneventful if a bit hurried to start with due to a late departure from Canberra. Rather than having a couple of hours to kill in Sydney as I'd expected, had to run flat chat from transfer lounge to gate. Was thankful for having got my fitness levels to the point where this didn't add a coronary to the days achivements.
Had a delightful fellow passenger for the Sydney to Singapore leg - she worked for Cisco and was taking a well earned coupla weeks off from what sounded like an enjoyable, if full on gig. It's amazing how much quicker a trip goes if you've good company :) Downside of such pleasant company of course was that it made me miss my girls that much more :|
Managed some sleep before arriving in Frankfurt, immigration and customs uneventful before picking up a rental car. The latter required a bit of negotiating to get a vehicle with navigation as I'd requested, hey ho. Quite unable to work out how to switch it to English I still managed to get my destination loaded and off to Boblingen/Sindefingen I went.
This was my first experience driving on Autobahns - pretty impressive roads to put it mildly. With the odd (very well signposted) exception they are very smooth and clearly designed to high speed driving. I was puttering along in the far right lane with the other slow people at 100-120km/h while the fast lanes saw various bits of exotic and not so exotic machinery whiz past at 50-100km/h faster. Don't drift into the left lane...
Arrived at the hotel, much anticipated shower then got organised to drive over to Karlsruhe to checkout Linuxtag, on which more presently. Did manage to get the satnav into English only to find it wouldn't calculate a route to the conference centre anyway. The autobahns are very well signposted so decided to wing it and got there just fine.
Having returned from the conference slept very well indeed, a long, but enjoyable haul.