Chippy's Tour Plan

Running a website as a full-time job doesn’t give me many opportunities to get out of the office. I try hard to get out once a day but it never works. The odd conference, exhibition and mobile blogging device test help a lot but there’s nothing like being given 4 days to just get away on a busmanns holiday.

I did a similar event in 2007 with the Solar-UMPC tour, but that was a single-country event. This time I thought I should try and involve a few more countries so I’ve decided that I’m going to try to reach as many countries as possible in 4 days. Living in the mid-west of Germany gives me a slight head-start on most others as I can drive through 5 countries from my house in about 5 hours. Holland, Belgium, Luxemborg, France and Germany are easily accessible but after that it gets a bit difficult!

I guess the tour is going to go something like this:

19th, morning. Weather permitting. Drive from Bonn. Germany to Trier taking in the Rhine and Mosel then cross over into Luxemborg. Drive north into France and find a nice route up towards Belgium and then a quick dash through the southern-most city of Holland (Maastricht) where I will eat lots of gouda cheese, smoke a joint (joke!) and then drive up to either Duesseldorf or Cologne and try and get an evening meal together with a few mobile tech-heads. After that, I’ll head home for stage 2.

Stage 2 will involve an ‘Inter-Rail’ train journey starting on the 20th (or maybe an overnight train) from Bonn down to the Alps where I’ll take in Switzerland and then do an overnight stay in Munich. From there I’ll head down to Vienna, Austria across to Bratislavia, Slovenia where I’ll probably overnight. From there it will be up to Prague in the Czech Republic a dash east into Poland and then back across to Berlin. After a quick breather in Berlin, I’ll make the last jump over to Hamburg. If that all goes to plan, it will be 10 countries in 4 days!

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There’s an option in stage 2 to take in Italy, Croatia and Hungary but I’ll have to see how the train schedules are before I plan that in!

Stage 3, will be at the Microblogging conference MBC09 in Hamburg where I will team up with Nicole. After that I’ll head back to Bonn.

The tour is not set in stone yet and I’ll be buying an open, all countries, 5-day ticket so there’s a lot of room for changes. If you’re reading this and are located anywhere along my rough route, let me know and maybe we can arrange a quick meet-up. Coffee with mobile device fans, mobile bloggers or even mobile device resellers along the way would be great! Ideas about places to visit would be good too so let me know in the comments please.

And how do I plan to remain connected during this tour? 3G is my friend! I’ll talk in depth about my 3G plans, the costs and options in another post very soon.