Our last blog entry, although a little hurriedly written was at least not too tardy, coming after only seven weeks of travelling. But that was three months ago, sorry!

So what the hell have we been up to? When we last spoke we’d just ridden to the Pyrenees from Bordeaux. We set up camp in Argeles-Gazost, a nice little town surrounded by foothills. That was our base while we watched two more stages of the Tour de France, and rode up the Col du Tourmalet, which was amazing and amazingly hard work!

From there we rode up to 900m and stayed a while in Cauterets, which we used as a base to do an an amazing two day walk through the surrounding mountains, including hiking up to 3000m, which is high!

We also rode up the Col d’Aubisque while we we’re in the mountains, another spectacular pass from the Tour de France.

A couple of trains took us from the Pyrenees up to Limoges, where we spent a great week with Jana and Pato and their crazy bunch of friends. While there we visited Oradour-sur-Glanne, site of a Nazi massacre, terrible but an amazing historical experience.

There was also much eating thanks to Pato’s amazing cooking skills, a wee bit of drinking, some climbing at the wall in town, and a great mountain bike ride around Limoges with Fred & Joanne.

After Limoges we headed off east into the Massif Central for some great riding. Never a flat metre but beautiful country, we spent about a week getting to Clermont-Ferrand, including a day walking up the Puy de Sancy.

Another train ferried us to Paris from Clermont-Ferrand, where we spent an awesome week. Our home was a little sixth floor apartment north of the river, which was just so perfect. We did some of the typical touristy things, but skipped some, like the Louvre, owing to the crowds. Great city, go there sometime.

Although by then we’d spent almost two months in France, we would have happily spent another six. Unfortunately I had to skedaddle because my visa was running out, so a TGV deposited us in Strasbourg from where we could ride into Germany. More details of the ensuing adventures in our next instalment, hopefully sooner than three months time!

Welcome to the very long awaited blog post from Mike & Meg’s Europe trip!

We’ve been busy having lots of fun and generally not getting online or updating the blog much, but it’s finally raining so here we are.

The trip started in late April when we flew to Hamburg. We put our bikes together in the airport and from there we rode maybe 150km to Kiel via Lübeck, over the course of 6 days. There are a few photos up here. We had great weather for April, cold but sunny and no rain, though some pretty stiff and cold wind off the Baltic sea. The riding was generally lovely, on nice tracks or quiet country roads.

In Kiel we met up with the lovely Emmy, and stayed at here cute place for a few days. We also met my folks who had driven from Frankfurt. After a bit of packing we managed to get the four of us in their car along with or gear and we started a three week tour of Norway. Originally we thought it would be nice to ride around Norway, but we’re quite glad we didn’t. It’s a beautiful country, but one best driven through!

We had lots of great adventures, too many to write quickly here. But we did a bunch of great walks, and drove some beautiful roads. We took a brilliant ferry ride down a fjord, for 4 hours (slow ferry), and drove way up North to the Lofoten islands, well above the arctic circle, and it was arctic!!

Of course I took a billion photos, there’s a rough selection up here.

After returning to Kiel we split up with mum and dad, and spent a few days riding with Emmy. The three of us set out from Lübeck and after getting me a new pedal (long story!) rode for four days along the lovely Elbe river. It was a really nice ride, and we would have kept going except Emmy had to get back to Uni to catch bats!

After the Elbe we headed to Berlin, where we were put up by the lovely Bosses in their lovely 4th floor apartment, which is bigger and much nicer than our house! We spent a day with mum and dad looking around Berlin and visited tante Hilde, who was in fine form and seemed pretty happy to see us, especially Meg because she’s so pretty.

Mum and dad headed off to Poland and the two of us spent a week camped in the center of Berlin, and generally just gadded about, it was really lovely. It was also Meg’s birthday, which we celebrated by getting her a new pair of climbing shoes, going to a nice cafe, a big chocolate shop and finishing the day with a giant schnitzel and brat kartofeln in a cute little restaurant.

From Berlin we trained too Aachen, from where we spent 4 days riding through Belgium to Brussels. Seeing as we had no idea and no map, the ride through Belgium went fairly well, though we did ride through some of the least salubrious parts of the country it seems.

In Brusssels we were excellently looked after by Tom & Amanda, including a very interesting and fun trip to a local war memorial that ended at the Soccer club drinking 8% trapist beer with the Mayor. Not to mention lots of lovely food excursions, and some great driving experiences thanks to the locals intersecting approach to road safety.

Wanting to get into France in time for the Tour, we caught a procession of trains down to Tours, on the Loire. Then spent a hot but fun week riding along the river past chateaux, and then inland to catch the first two stages. The Tour was awesome to see, and completely hectic and crazy as you would imagine!

After the Tour we rode and trained to Bordeaux, via the seaside town of La Rochelle, which was great to see. Bordeaux was also beautiful, and amazingly busy and seemingly affluent, we fit right in.

The last three days we’ve ridden overland to Pau, on the edge of the Pyrenees, over some interesting country, and over our first decent hills with gear on the bikes.

Hopefully we’ll get around to uploading some photos soon, I’m sure you’d all love to see them! But if the weather stays as good as it has been it could be some time!

If you’re a fan of the Tour de France, and of course you all are, keep an eye out for us on stage 12 and 13, hopefully we’ll have a good posy!

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Another year, another Woodford. It rained, of course. A bit more than usual, and the site was already insanely wet, so it felt like a really wet Woodford, but I think it was only about half rainy days.

Still, as we arrived, thanks to a kindly lift from Mr Scott, it already looked as wet as “the” wet year did after a week. That lead to a last minute change of plan and a camp site up on the hill, out in the new territories, which I think despite the long walk was a good decision. Our camp site was muddy, but only locally, ie. we didn’t have the contents of the camp site up the hill flowing into ours.

We’d also seen the weather forecast and decided to bring the Swedish tent, which as you can imagine is able to handle rain. So there we were pretty comfortably setup, and so ensued a week of music and fun and all things hippyish.

Highlight of the week would have to be beating Scott at his marble game, which he brought all the way from Africa so that I could beat him on it. In fact I think he had it hand carved just so I could beat him on it.

The other highlight would have to be the very cute and funny Passenger, who we might have seen three or four times, but he was very good, writes nice songs and sings them well, with a chuckle and a sparkle in his eye.

Tim Rogers was another standout, his solo show is a bit like watching a train crash in slow motion, compelling viewing. Somewhat surprisingly Tim Freidman was also really good. Kevin Rudd stopped past, and managed to actually be quite good, the whole robot bureaucrat thing is actually an act it seems, god knows why. And of course most of the usual suspects were there, all were good.

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Late last year we managed a trip to Nowra and then Tianjara falls. I think we won the award for latest start at the crag, I think it was 6, pm, when we clipped our first bolt. Still it was actually pretty smart because it was a bit warm during the day.

We went to Hospital Rocks because we were short on time, and climbed I don’t remember what, but it was good fun. The evening light was gorgeous, and we were visited by an Echidna. To start with he was shy, but then he got used to us and in the end ended up walking straight over the rope bag.

After a nice nights camping at the animal park we headed up to Tianjara falls for Sunday, where we met Andrew & Penny & Tim & Tanya.

We headed to the Huskisson Homo and the Hill Top Hoods wall, mainly because it’s the first with a good looking descent gully. There was a big bunch of locals, who were all really friendly and gave us lots of good advice on which routes were good.

In some order we climbed Roger Bourne Identity (16), Bingo Wings (14), Cool Bananas (17), Little Miss Sunshine(11) and Trad dads can’t campus (20).

They were all good, especially the first two. The start on Cool Bananas is not 17, but still a good route. Trad dads can’t campus was quite good, though has a bit of a ledge which made for nervous ankles.

Andrew and Penny put us all to shame by doing the awesome looking Dodecahedron (22). I was keen to top rope it but then the rains came, what a pity!

After we all sheltered under the cliffs for 20 minutes, Andrew had the fun task of climbing the 22 in the rain to clean it, but I don’t think it was too horrendous owing to it being slightly overhanging and so mostly dry.

Owing to the rain we got an early start home, which meant we had plenty of time for gourmet pizza in Braidwood, life is tough!

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Waay back, in September, we spent a few days up at the KAC lodge at Charlotte Pass, and did a bunch of skiing. We were tagging along with uncle Teepar and his annual trip, they don’t let any old plebs stay at the lodge, you have to know someone reputable. I went a few years back and posted lots of photos, oh gee even more. I had such a good time I’d been keen to take Meg up and show her the slopes ever since.

After a bit of a late night on Friday celebrating Tom’s 30th we dragged ourselves out of bed on Saturday morning and started driving down. I drove for a bit but then needed to have a little lie down, luckly Meg was OK and got us to Jindy. We picked up some skis and gear and raced to the Skitube, just in time to get the connection. Unfortunately when we got to Perisher the snow cat was an hour late due to a break down, so we needn’t have rushed, oh well!

On Saturday arvo we squeezed in a quick ski down the valley just to refresh our memories. Sunday dawned sunny but blowy, but it still looked pretty good from the lodge so we started charging up the Kosciuszko road. We wanted to ski up Kosi but weren’t sure we were up to it, but thought we’d see how we went. The skiing wasn’t too hard up to the Snowy river crossing, but from there up to Seaman’s was very tricky (at least for us novices). With the wind really blasting over the pass and a lot of ice it was hard going. After lunch in the hut we decided to head back, which began with a pretty death defying run down to the river, with the wind at our backs and ice under our skis.

I’ve lost track of what happened on which evenings. Every night there was a lovely three course meal, and often pre-dinner drinks and nibbles. After dinner there was usually casual conversation, mixed in with a bit of political commentary, mostly baiting Rohan, and then to escape from that he would turn to the stereo and get half the room dancing. I of course had sore legs and couldn’t manage any moves on the dance floor, but Roh & Nahd and the rest of the “youngies” more than made up for me.

After a good nights sleep you wake to a cooked breakfast, though you do have to be on the ball, if you’re too hung over you can miss breakfast entirely, which is not a good way to start the day.

Monday was windy again, so we did a little tour around the east of Mt Stillwell. To being with we were nice and sheltered, but then we got a bit higher trying to get a view down to the Thredbo river and the wind picked up a bit. Rather than skiing back into the wind we bailed down a ridge to the east, and after some interesting skiing through trees that tested our skills a bit, we were back down in the valley. Lunch behind a rock and then a leisurely ski back had us chilling in the lodge. After a bit of relaxing we headed out again for a quick lap of the valley before dinner.

Tuesday was our last full day, and the weather looked perfect. We hoed into breakfast and got cracking up the road to Kosi. The weather was completely still, and by Seaman’s we were stripping off a layer to keep cool. Teepar had warned us that the stretch from Seaman’s around to Rawson’s pass was a bit steep and tricky, and although it didn’t really give us any trouble it was definitely a bit nerve racking for a stretch, one slip and you’d be sliding for a long long way.

The east face of Kosi is really speccy in winter, with a big cornice hanging above lake Cootapatmba. It also looks rather steep and intimidating, although I think that’s partly because it’s hard to judge the scale in the snow with no cues. In the end the climb up was pretty easy, with just a few kick turns required on the way up and lots of zig-zagging. The view from the top was superb, with snow covered mountains on three sides, and the steep drop down to Geehi to the west. Although it’s no great achievement we were pretty chuffed to make it to the top in winter, and on only about our fifth day skiing cross country together.

Getting down was a bit interesting, but again just a case of traversing the slope and doing sharp turns, nothing elegant that’s for sure! We decided to avoid the steep section along the road by going up and along the top of Etheridge ridge, it turned out to be a good decision, and gave us more speccy views. After lunch in the rocks above Seaman’s we cut across to the Kosciuszko road, and then tootled along through the rocks above the road, eventually catching the summit of Stillwell before heading down to the village.

After one last night of excellent food and company we woke up on Wednesday not ready to leave. Still we had a snow cat to catch and a concert to go to, so we got packing and managed one last 20 minute ski before we had to head off. An awesome trip, only wish it was longer!

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If you like Linux and you like games, then you should head over and check out the Humble Indie Bundle #2!

It’s a collection of five games:

• Braid, innovative and award winning, and previously Xbox only.
• Cortex Command, a sort of resource extraction + action game, featuring disembodied brains.
• Machinarium, a point and click brain teaser game, with great artwork.
• Osmos, where you float around absorbing other blobs, with an awesome ambient sound track.
• Revenge of the Titans, a resource extraction and base building game, think Command & Conquer for the ADHD generation.

What makes it really stand out is they all support Linux, they are all DRM free, and you can choose how much you want to pay.

To top it of some of the money goes to Child’s Play and the EFF. And don’t worry, giving money to the EFF doesn’t make you an enemy combatant .. yet.

They also have data on how much people are paying for the bundle, which is quite interesting. Currently the average amount paid by Windows users is $6.07, Mac users $8.23, and Linux users $13.68. So despite being a band of unwashed hippy communists, it seems Linux users are more generous when it comes to opening their wallets.

ps. Depending on your graphics chip & driver you may need to apt-get install driconf and enable S3TC texture compression to get Braid working, see this bug.

Back in August when it was still chilly in the ‘berra, we headed up north for a few days in South West Rocks. It’s a beautiful area and it was nice to finally get to see what’s there after flying past the turn off so many times on the way to Woodford. But the main reason for the visit, besides the beautiful scenery and perfect weather, was to catch up with my grandparents, Grandma and Poppa (alias Pam and Don), who were holidaying there from the Adelaide Hills.

It was great to get to spend such a relaxed time together in such a beautiful setting. We got the guided tour of the local area including the historic gaol, lighthouse, and all the good places to eat! And they even let us win at cards, what more could you ask for! We happily whiled away an hour watching some migrating whales frolicking beyond the headland, before we headed down to the nearby beach where Mike set about freeing the driftwood. We even got a chance to case out some nice camping spots for any future trips up that way.

Finally, very deserving of a mention is Mike’s early morning effort to photograph the speccy sunrise from the headland. He is now a proud member of the South West Rocks Sunrise Appreciation Club founded by Grandma. No wonder he’s the favourite!

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As hard as we tried to tire Emmy out with our food extravaganza, er, bike ride, we just didn’t manage.

So on the Sunday we drove up to Tidbinbilla with mum, dad, Ange & Rohan, to make an attempt on the South Ridge of Camel Back!

It was still pretty cool, and there was a fair bit of snow around as we ascended. We managed without crampons though.

The knife-edge ridge to the summit proved problematic, we lost the route several times, and at one point the party was separated because we couldn’t hear each other over the deafening roar of cute little chirpy birds.

Finally we made it to the summit, took some photos, and before the weather changed, quickly had a picnic. Oh and we made a snow man too!

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