Our trip today
This will mark the end of our fantastic voyage from Zurich (Switzerland) through Almere (the Netherlands), then northbound through Germany, Denmark and Sweden, all the way to Honningsvåg and the Real North Cape (also the commercial one), and then meandering down south through Norway, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and finally, the return dest which is Wien Austria. But before I get ahead of myself, let me tell you about this last day of our roadtrip.
Our lodging in Hungary is top-notch, while not too expensive (I used a Hotels.com voucher to cover the resort fee, so I ended up paying a whopping EUR 4,89 for the two of us). Paul soaked in the sauna yesterday and we both took a nice relaxing swim. As you may recall, I hitched Tessa on a 22kW charging point which I could activate with my room key (!). That’s all been wonderful, but it’s time to leave. The breakfast here is a bit so-so, there’s normally lots of interesting things on the table, trays of eggs, bacon, breads and things to put on the bread. Except, for the moment we’re in low-season so all of it is empty. A lady rocks up to our table and offers to make us eggs any style, although she strongly suggests eggs sunnyside up with ham. Works for us!
Shortly after 9am we jet. I have two things on the list: Firstly (and more importantly), I still have to get a geocache in Hungary as I’ve never logged one here before. I scout out a few down South of here, there’s lots of them up North, but unfortunately that’s another country (Slovakia, above the Danube river). The first one is quickly in hand, some kinder-egg shell in a signpost. The second one is a bit harder, easy to find, but hard to extract the log without wrecking it. Then, seccondly, we go to the tri-state point (Slovakia, Hungary and Austria) where there’s a bit of a stone garden, and another geocache although we have no idea in which country that one falls, precisely :)
After that little morning exercise, we notice that while normally the distance from either Almere or Zurich to Vienna is 800km / 500mi or more, now all of the sudden it’s more like 60km, and we like that. It does kind of rob us of the opportunity to talk a lot about what we’ve done in the car today, because matter of factually we weren’t in the car for long. By 10am we rock up to the 25 hours hotel that Paul had booked. Early checkin is not available but we can park the car in the garage, so we lob our luggage back in Tessa’s trunk and explore the city.
Vienna is beautiful, and on every street corner there’s a gargantuan stone building. The inner city with all of its museums and palaces kind of reminds me of Washington (DC) which is funny because if one looks like the other, it’s going to be Washington that has copied the architecture from Europe, not the other way around. But I’m not here to bash the Americans (more so than I usually do, of course) … But hey, look, scooters from Tier! A few euros later, we have a high speed (compared to walking anyway), low friction way to see lots of these buildings:
- We start at Schloss Belvedere and see a statue of a rather round-pointed creature
- Traveling in what is a reasonably straight line NorthWesterly, we visit Karlskirche
- The Wiener Staatsoper we have to see from outside/across the street, it doesn’t have an easy angle to make great pictures (from the oudside anyway)
- Going a bit further, Hofburg cannot be missed in all of its glory, including the castle gates at Heldenplatz
- We finish off taking a look at the exterior or the Rathaus der Stadt Wien, after which we’ve seen enough buildings for a while.
We go to the hotel to check in to our room, drop our stuff there, and take a look at the TU Wien (the local technical university) which will be hosting Euro BSD Conference this year. Today is all about trainings and educational sessions (which neither Paul nor I have registered for, although there’s a handson Ansible series that maybe could teach me a thing or two …), but Paul is on the board of EuroBSD Foundation, so he makes the rounds and says “Hi!” to the local organizing crew. I meet doublep there, which has been maybe 15 years or so since we last spoke.
In the evening, we figure there’s really only one thing to eat. Paul reminds himself that he did not eat that thing yesterday in Hungary, so we’re all green to go eat Wienerschnitzel and Apfelstrudel. I liven it up with one of my favorite bouillion style soups: Fladensuppe (beef/veal stock with strips of pancake, ommnomm!). Something weird happens to my laptop - Paul and I had checked out Stable Diffusion which is an open source AI model that generates images; while doing that (which was not that spectacular), I noticed my screen was a bit smudgy, probably from writing all those blogposts en route. So I cleaned it, as I always do (with water and a soft micro fiber cloth), and after dinner when I came back to write the blogpost, my screen was completely messed up. Lots of vertical pixel lines missing, and from time to the the whole screen would just mess up royally and go dim. It was an unworkable mess :( I can’t help but wonder if the GPU got messed up, or the screen got messed up from the cleaning, or something else. But the day is over and I decide this is a problem for Future-Pim
What’s Next?
Tomorrow we’ll take another look at EuroBSD Con, and then Pim will drive home while Paul stays in Vienna to take a flight to Amsterdam on Sunday (he’s sticking it out the whole way, I’m only going to BSDCon 2 days, Thu + Fri). I’ll then take the short 720km drive home to Zurich. When I’m done, I will have driven 10'040km or 6'235 miles, and this will have cost roughly 1'800 kWh of power (most of which I did not have to pay for becuase I’m one of those lucky cats who has an older Model S which comes with a lifetime of free charging, thanks Elon!)
It’s really nice to see the cost savings here, but I also know that the power generated in Norway and Sweden is super clean: Norway has the highest share of electricity produced from renewable sources in Europe, and the lowest emissions from the power sector. At the end of 2020, the total installed capacity of the Norwegian power supply system was 37 732 MW, and normal annual production was 153,2 TWh. I’m very glad to have been able to use a bit of that on this epic roadtrip :)
