Since our original plans in 2019 have changed, here’s a bonus-starter-post for you all. Originally, Paul would fly down to Zurich and our trip would start from my place. However, that’s no longer happening, as I have to be in Munich for work, so my roadtrip starts a bit earlier than his. This is not day one for me, although as computer programmers might start counting from 0, let me give you a little prelude on the leadup.
On Monday of this week, I drove from my home town of Brüttisellen (near Zurich in Switzerland) to Munich (Bavaria, Germany) for a work event. Although the event was 3 days (Tue-Thu) I only was able to join for Monday evening and Tuesday all day. It was totally worth it. After the pandemia of the last few years, physical in-person face time has been virtually absent and I have really missed it. So after a full day of learning about and contributing to setting the direction of my team at work, I took a sleep and on Wednesday morning, grabbed a quick sandwich in the office and made my way to Almere.
When I started the drive, I noticed that it’d take me straight past Frankfurt, and I have a router running there defra0.ipng.ch which I had always wanted to connect an out-of-band network into, so I figured now is as good a time as any. So on this nice Wednesday morning at 9am or so, I took off, parked the car at Equinix FR5 (it is very convenient to have a parking spot in the middle of a large city!), went for a quick in and out to connect the OOB, and drive further to Cologne, Essen, Arnhem, and up to Amsterdam. I arrived there just after 9pm, and my trip odometer shows a cool 1'125 km at this point. But, I am at src that is to say the place where our roadtrip will start on Thursday. We will go to dest which is the Nordkapp, tippy of Norway and about 3800km or so drive from Almere.
Paul had already done a little bit of grocery shopping (the essentials like chips and water and such) but we didn’t have breakfast for the morning – so we hopped over to Albert Heijn and we procured a good EUR 72,- worth of … everything but bread and eggs and bacon :) instead we ended up with liquorish and sour candy and coke and pringles and stroopwafels and lemons (you can’t have a roadtrip without lemons!). We turned in at around midnight and ready to get up on Thursday morning, day 1, where our blog begins …
