Planning the first few days

Having chosen to go west from Frankfurt, I've had to cancel my reservation at Bad Rappenau and make one near Trier, at a small town called Kenn. This will be the first night's destination on the bike, and will involve a ride of about 250 km from Saalburg, which is in turn about 50 km from Schierstein where I pick up the bike.

I'll be catching a train at about 7 from Frankfurt Hbh to Wiesbaden-Schierstein, about 80 mins, and may have to switch to bus at Wiesbaden; I can't yet get info re the direct VIA train. The Motorad Tullius, where I rent the R12RT, is only 200 m from the station at Schierstein. I'm hoping to take my own 49 litre top-box; transport issues are not yet resolved - we have a tote large enough to hold the box, but not if it has 2 layers of bubble-wrap around it.

From Schierstein I'll head back East 50 km to Saalburg, a Roman fort reconstructed about 1900, for a couple of hours of education in context.
I plan to ride from Saalburg to Koblenz WNW across country. There's no bridge across the Rhine south of Koblenz until you get back to Schierstein, so I'll cross to the West bank at Koblenz before turning South, then ride up the left bank of the Rhine for about 50 km, turning west at Bacharach (45 km from Koblenz) to connect with the B50 at Rheinbollen, then 90 km to Kenn, on the edge of Trier. If the day allows, I could follow the B50 to the Mosel at Kues, then follow the winding Mosel on the B53 to Kenn, adding 20 km.

So that's a fairly full first day, but I don't have to get to Kenn till late.
Rail from Frankfurt to Weisburg, then to Schierstein 8 AM till
Bike check and sign-up to 10 AM?
Saalburg 11 AM, leaving 2 PM
Saalburg to Koblenz 3 PM
Koblenz to Kenn 6 PM


R&B

Location:Cabbage Tree Rd,Grose Vale,Australia

And now it begins again for 2011

The planning for the 2011 Europe trip is well started, with a flight to Frankfurt via Singapore booked for 8-10 May. This is a test of the blogging capabilities of the iPad, which we found deficient in NZ.

Using Blogger.com within Safari doesn't work for photo inclusion. I've tried uploading to Picasa first, but not OK. I assume the lack of Flash stops the photo selection process from working.

So now I've switched back to the Blogpress app we used in NZ in November, and will see how it works with photos from Picasa, uploaded via the WebAlbums app. (The other big problem with BlogPress was that when you wanted to edit a post that included an external photo, which has to be coded by html img, it would only show you html to work in!!! That may have changed with updates since November.)




Blogpress works but ignores the existing Picasa album - the photo inclusion step uses photos from the iPad (which would be normal for a blog, and easier once the iPad has a camera) and makes a new Picasa album to store them. That means you can't include photos from the web unless you code them in html, which is what I was doing in NZ. That method works but it's slow and messy once you try to dress up the page, and tiring at the end of a day of travel, so after a while I stopped doing it.

Let's get a photo from the Picasa test album I created earlier. I'll let Picasa do all the coding, by selecting the option "link to this photo" and copying the code.

From Blogtest

And that seems to work as well as it might. The HTML appears in BlogPress in the midst of the normal text, but the other post elements are not disturbed, and it seems I can add other iPad photos OK.



That's enough for now; be back soon.