There’s a selection of pictures on my Flickr stream and I’m caught up with all the posts. Hopefully you’ve found some of it interesting.

Plenty more to go of course, is it still possible? I’m fairly confident it is, but it’s looking pretty tight on the number of days holiday I’ve got to play with. I’ve had to reel in some of my more ambitious plans but I still think I can get a decent visit to somewhere in each of the remaining countries.

It’s over a quarter of the way through the year, and I’ve visited four new countries and seven countries in total, that’s just under where I should be if I’m covering everything equally. I just have to keep on plugging away.

Anyroads, here’s the list:

With 102 non-working days left I still need to visit 16 countries (20 to do then in all ’08.)
Countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom.
Countries I’ve visited pre-2008 are in grey, countries visited in 2008 are linked to their posts.

For the number crunchers amongst you, and those concerned about my carbon footprint, here are some stats:

In 2007 I visited 8 other countries, taking 18 flights (2 long haul), travelling around 35,750 km (33,000km by plane).
In 2008 I’ve visited 7 other countries, taking 4 flights (all short haul), travelling around 6,200km (3,400km by plane).

I’m back from my travels and I will get round to posts for individual places (promise) so this is just a collection of thoughts.

Glance up and you’ll see one of the first of set of all new header images for 2008. It was pretty disturbing going through my photos to find images to use — there’s a handful of photos with me in them and I look progressively more haggard as you the week goes on. Scary stuff.

Anyroads, some advice after the jump.

Guidebooks, good but don’t rely on them
I’m travelling with a fairly new edition of The Rough Guide to Europe and it’s got some good points and bad points.

For most of the trip I used it to find tourist information points, left luggage offices, post boxes etc. All perfect except when I get to Poland and need to leave my bags somewhere for a few hours, but there there’s no listing for left luggage in the book. You’d think this means that there isn’t any but there were tons of left luggage places (at all the major stations, and the major tourist sites). Clearly it’s just a mistake but it does add to my impression that the editing/fact checking isn’t as good as it could have been.

The book covers a lot of places but most of the maps are only of the very center of town, to make matters worse the scale keeps changing meaning you have to be check that a ten minute walk on one map isn’t three quarters of an hour in a different place. I know they’re trying to cover a lot of places but I’d rather have had maps covering more of the town and all at the same (smaller) scale. Still it’s easy enough to grab a map in most places so it’s not a big deal.

While the Rough Guide gets the details for attractions mostly right it’s a lot more hit-and-miss for eating and drinking. Places change and move around so even a year-old guide has some listings wrong and since there’s only a handful of places listed per place you rapidly run out of recommendations.

I’ve also been using WikiTravel which is excellent for some places and dreadful for others, sadly you can’t always tell which is which before hand.

They’re good resources but even some of the places listed in both WikiTravel and the Rough Guide weren’t there any more …

There was a lot of free WiFi in the town centers and I did wonder if I’d have got away with carrying a WiFi enabled PDA/mini-laptop and using the internet as my guide.

Money, take cash and don’t rely on ATMs

I was travelling using my Cahoot credit and debit cards, I’d dutifully informed Cahoot that I’d be travelling and provided them with a list of exactly where I’d be each day of the holiday — they’d requested this so they would be able to avoid blocking my cards.

They still blocked the cards and I had to phone up when I got back. Apparently there’s no way to say “this card is regularly used abroad”.

Same with my Virgin credit card which I’ve used across Central America with no problem but was blocked in Poland.

I know it’s a fraud prevention method, but I just can’t imagine that every traveller in the world phones up their bank with their itinerary before travelling. Do they just carry cash? It’s a shame, I’ve never been anywhere where I couldn’t find a cash machine to use but the whole fraud thing means you can’t rely on your cards alone.

The lessons to learn are, talk to your bank, carry extra cash and pick where you use your cards carefully. It seems that cards are more likely to get blocked if you’re using a chip-and-pin machine (in a shop or a restaurant) or one of those squat little stand alone ATMs, the fixed in the wall machines that banks have seem to be more tolerated.

But keep a note of the phone numbers of your banks fraud department for when they ultimately block the cards anyway.

Use trains, but always double check you’re on the right one (and in the right seat)

The trains in Europe were pretty good, if you’ve got the time then they’re a fantastic way to get around Europe, you can do the longer journeys overnight and save a nights worth of accomedation costs.

One of my all time favourite websites, The Man in Seat Sixty-One…, will help you work out how to navigate Europe by train.

I’ll add a bit of advice from experience: remember to check if a train splits partway through the journey — if it does then make sure you’re in the right part of the train otherwise you may find yourself a few hundred miles off course …

Plan, or at least book, less

I had around half the trip pre-booked and the rest (mostly the inter-country trains) I bought as I went along. This meant I could change things up a little, but only a little. If I’d booked less in advance (or reserved, rather than paid in full, the accomedation) I would have had a lot more flexibility, I’m not sure I’d like to try finding a hotel in high season but in February I don’t think it would ever have been an issue.

Buying train tickets was simple, check the main routes beforehand and then use the timetables at the station. An InterRail pass would have cost slightly more than I eventually spent on travel but it would have meant that I didn’t need to worry about buying tickets for each leg although you still sometimes need reservations.

I imagine there’ll be at least one more multi-country tour this year, so I’ll have a chance to follow some of my own advice. Until then they I’ll use long weekends to keep on ticking off the countries one by one.

This post is the 185th post on the site, almost one post every four days, which is sounds so unlikely that I had to check the figures three times to be sure.

Today is the one year anniversary of the the first phone call I made to get my bathroom sorted and refitted. It’s still not finished, but it’s a damn site further on than it was a week ago so I’m mostly happy. I expect there will be at least one more bathroom post when it’s all finished.

There are currently 109 posts and 34 comments.

Not including this post, so that’s around 2 a week which isn’t bad. I started the site as part of my regular January flurry of doing stuff. The majority of those good intentions are normally tossed aside by the end of February so I’m quite impressed we’re still here, posting may have been sporadic but I’ve generally kept it going.

I’d expect everything to continue in much the same way this year, hopefully I can find some more interesting content and have to resort to blatant filler less. I must get more pictures sorted out, I’ve tons lying around (in a digital sense) that I’ve not sorted through yet.

So to all of you, from those just joining us to those that were here a year ago, thanks for reading.

Those looking for deep insight may want to skip this post.

I’ve known for a while that my webhost (the wonderful, and cheap, DreamHost) offers video streaming bits and bobs. I’ve only just discovered that they’ll automatically convert your videos to YouTube-style embedded Flash. So lets try one, this is the first video I found (warning: has sound, although it’s just noise really):

That’s pretty spiffy, and the process is just press a button, wait, cut-and-paste the result.

Nice. Now I’ll have to see if I’ve any interesting videos, or go out and shoot some.

At my last job I maintained the voice-menu/voicemail server, one of the number that went to server worked as a test number and played that clip when you dialed it. If you heard Marvin then you knew that the server was running. I wonder if the number still works …

And that demonstrates why, despite it’s flaws, wikipedia is great because I didn’t doubt for a second that there would be a Marvin page on there. I wonder what the most obscure/unlikely page on wikipedia is, one that has actually content rather than a stub. Just clicking ‘Random article‘ a couple of times in a journey in itself.

You may have gathered that this post contains little real content, there’s still not that much to talk about. The picture viewer I’ve been rambling about is actually live on the site but I’m still not happy with it, so no fanfare until I’m satisfied or I admit defeat and decide to put up with it as it is.

If you’re looking to create an Earth-shattering kaboom of your own I can recommend this page on How to destroy the Earth (with handy current Earth destruction status page, in case you’re worried that there was a kaboom and you just missed it.) Although it might be better for all of us if you devoted your time to solving this puzzle which has been annoying me for almost two weeks now.

Why? Because I can, and because it’ll allow the lj peoples to keep track of the posts via their friends list. But it’s mostly just because I can.

Hopefully.

Edit: Hey, it worked. First time. Sorry about the lack of posts this week, been a bit hectic, hopefully more soon.

Anyroads I’ve changed the comments so that they’ll post without requiring me to authorise them unless they look particularly spammy. So it should no longer look like your comments lurk in the ether for a random amount of time.

Just to prove I do listen to the comments I’ve added a contact form to the About page. I’m not going to post an e-mail address as I get enough spam to various UnorthodoxY addresses already, and that’s without any of them published on the web.

I’ve rejigged the links page to use that, so you can now see exactly what sites are distracting me from work.

I might get round to splitting them into more categories and restyling the links page, or I might not — I kinda like the braindump-esque format.

Now to see if the RSS feeds pick up this post …