On the Road Again...

Another day, another campground... After our "hiatus" at Rome, we're moving again for our final push back to Munich and the novelty/luxury of hotel/hostel beds again (and another five nights of not moving anywhere when we get to Copenhagen).

We've now driven over 5000km around Europe. Correction: I'VE driven over 5000km. In 24 days. No, make that 16 actual days driving. I can't really complain, since I picked the itinerary, but my right calf has bad cramp from sitting on the accelerator all day (the remaining rental cars better have cruise control) and the rest of the body feels like it is slowly wearing down.

But we've seen a lot and (in case you thought this was a complete holiday for me) I've made a LOT of notes and taken a lot of "technical" photos that will prove very valuable for future teaching and research. I continue to be amazed at the crap that many parts of Europe call a roading system, both in terms of operations and safety (the traffic engineer "fixer" in me just wants to get in there and sort it out!), while being intrigued by how the locals work around it (e.g. creeping your way into traffic seems to be a fairly accepted form of movement, while I now understand why so many Italians drive very small cars).

The sporadic internet is proving to be a pain; I was sorely tempted the other day by a Vodafone modem stick with a number of hours of data time, to avoid the varying internet charges we've had at each stopping point (if it works well at all...). It doesn't help that my work email system needs to be online even just to read them (unlike the rest of the family's emails). Coupled with the long driving days, I'm finding there's not a lot of time left at the end of each day to get some work done, hence a few research reports are taking a while to knock off (sorry, Simon), not to mention other things like forthcoming conference presentations and University research portfolios. The other challenge is filling in the remaining gaps in our future accommodation in UK and US, which is also somewhat tied to making various arrangements to meet people. Oh, and now of course, the World Cup football is providing another potential distraction...

If this sounds like a whinge session, it's really just to remind everyone that this is a "study tour" for me and my work doesn't stop while I'm on sabbatical. So it's been a hard journey for me and I probably won't fully catch my breath until after August. But it's also been an amazing journey and one that I'm really glad I've been able to take the family along for the ride this time.

Time for a little bit of R&R at Lugano (that's our white campervan in the background)