The Horseshoe Falls at Niagara Falls.

The American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls at night. More pictures here.

Toledo, Spain. This is where I was last week for an astronomy conference.

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A little noisy, but not bad for a night panorama without a tripod.

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It was a cold day in Hell yesterday. Not quite to the point that Hell had frozen over, but cold enough that you’d want a good coat and a pair of gloves. At least the sun was shining, so it looked pleasant enough for a visit.

Many misconceptions exist about Hell. You’ve probably heard that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Right? Forget it. The road to Hell actually isn’t paved at all. It’s packed dirt:

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With the whole country covered in an unusually thick blanket of snow, train travel has been difficult for the past few days. I can live with that. I can understand and accept that at some point, weather conditions become too extreme for normal railway operations to continue. What I don’t understand is why accurate and up-to-date information is so hard to come by.

I was at Leiden Central Station this morning to catch the 10:22 intercity to Utrecht to visit a friend. I had checked the Dutch Railways’ website before leaving my apartment and it didn’t mention any significant problems. The monitors at the station listed the 10:22 as scheduled for an on-time departure. However, a different monitor warned against major disruptions in and around Utrecht.

Confused, I headed over to the information desk and asked the lady on duty whether she had any details on the situation at Utrecht. She simply pointed at the monitor with departing trains and said the 10:22 would leave on time. I pointed at the text on the other monitor and said I’d like to be sure the train would actually make it to Utrecht. Her response was that all she knew was what was on the monitors.

My jaw probably dropped at this point. I mean, for crying out loud. Really? If she knows nothing more than the monitors, than what is she doing there? I asked her that flat out, which of course wasn’t much appreciated. Well, excuse me for being a dick, but this is simply beyond me. I don’t need her to read the monitors for me, I need her to do her job as a Railways employee and make some effort to help a confused traveler. If she can’t do that, or doesn’t want to, she should have stayed at home. It would have made both of us happier.

I trudged off before I said something really nasty and called my friend to tell him I wasn’t going to risk getting stranded in the polder between Leiden and Utrecht. Being the good friend that he is, he offered to drive to Leiden instead, thus saving our last chance to hang out together before I move to the US.

But the story doesn’t end there. Now, at the end of the day, I was going through the news feed from one of the Dutch newspapers. At 8:37, an hour and a half before I arrived at Leiden Central, they posted an item titled “Train traffic from Utrecht disrupted”. The item mentioned, by way of a Railways spokesperson, that all trains to and from Utrecht were canceled or running at severe delays, and passengers for Utrecht were advised to postpone their journey until further notice.

Why did the grumpy Railways lady in Leiden not know this? If it’s on a newspaper website at 8:37, how can she still not have heard of any problems by 10:15? (Not because the problems had been solved by then, because they weren’t until well into the afternoon.)

So, there you have it. On the one hand, information about major disruptions is available to the press, but not to the Railways employees that deal with the travelers. On the other hand, employees don’t make an effort to actually answer a reasonable request for information. I can live with the disruptions as such; it’s not being told of them that drives me mad.

Last week, I happened upon the website OpenFlights.org while looking for something else related to air travel. OpenFlights is, quoting their about page, “a tool that lets you map your flights around the world, search and filter them in all sorts of interesting ways, calculate statistics automatically, and share your flights and trips with friends and the entire world (if you wish).” I’ve entered all of my flights and since I like sharing, here we go:

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Here’s a 270-degree panorama from the Hohtälli mountain (3,273 m) in the Swiss Alps, taken during a hike two days ago. The peak just right of the center is the Matterhorn (4,478 m). Down and to its left, almost dead center in the picture, is the Gornergrat station (3,130 m), the terminus for the rack railway from Zermatt. Located next to the station is a former astronomical observatory housing an infrared and a sub-millimetre telescope.

Small size

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Det er tid for del to av historien om min sommerferie i 2010! On aika toisen osan tarina kesäloma vuonna 2010! Det är dags för del två av berättelsen om min sommarsemester i 2010! It is time for part two of my 2010 summer holiday write-up. At the end of week one, bad weather had stranded us on the island of Senja. The story picks up on the morning of day eight…

Day 8: Hamn – Bleik

… where we woke up to somewhat better weather than what we went to bed with the night before. We received word shortly after 9am that the ferry from Andenes had once again left port, expecting to arrive in Gryllefjord around 11am. With a good hour to kill, I went for a bit of rock climbing near the hotel to snap a few pictures of the fjord and the wind-surfing gulls.

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My 2010 summer holiday took place in the northern parts of Scandinavia^*, with “northern” in this case meaning “above the Arctic Circle”. Knowing that the Arctic Circle passes through Alaska, the Yukon, Hudson Bay, Greenland and Siberia, this might sound like a winter holiday in summer, but it’s not that bad. The Gulf Stream makes the climate in Northern Europe much milder than it is at the same latitude on other continents. Daytime summer temperature are typically between 15 and 20 degrees centigrade—by no means hot, but just fine for hiking and sightseeing.

The holiday, booked through the Djoser organization, was in the form of a group tour by bus (with parts by train and ferry), with flights from the Netherlands to Finland and back. The group of 17 spanned a wide range of ages, from 27 to 72, and came from all over the Netherlands, making for a pleasantly rich mix. The map on the right shows the route we followed (also available at Google Maps). Starting from Inari in Finnish Lapland (the flag), we first went to the northernmost point of Europe, then descended down the Norwegian coast, and finally cut through Sweden to end up in Rovaniemi.

Below follows a day-by-day account of the first week, spiced up with a bunch of pictures (click to enlarge). If you want more pictures, go visit the full album. For stories of the second week, step through the door on your right.

^* Actually, that’s not entirely true, because Finland isn’t really part of Scandinavia. However, it’s often taken to be, and I’ll follow that convention here. If anything, it’s easier to type “Northern Scandinavia” than “Northern Finland, Norway and Sweden”.

Day 1: Amsterdam – Inari

A mostly uneventful first day to start things off. We flew Finnair from Amsterdam to the Finnish capital of Helsinki, and from there to the small arctic town of Ivalo. Cool feature on the Finnair planes: cameras mounted in the hull—one looking straight down, the other looking straight ahead—which were fed into the plane’s entertainment system. The view ahead during the final approach and landing was particularly engaging.

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Following my summer holiday to Finland, Sweden and Norway (stories coming soon!), it’s time for an update of the map that shows the countries I’ve visited over the years (click to enlarge). The map is colour-coded according to the reason I went there: gold stands for business, blue for pleasure, and purple for both. In case a country consists of disconnected pieces of land, I only painted the area or areas I actually went. The list of countries follows below the map.

Austria
Belgium
Chile
China
Czech Republic
Denmark
Finland
France
Germany
Ireland
Italy
Luxembourg
Mauritius
Netherlands
Norway
Portugal
South Africa
Spain
Swaziland
Sweden
Switzerland
Turkey
United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland)
United States