The weather is changing ...



Wednesday to Friday we had smatterings of snow and I had to clear snow off the windscreen before I could go to work.
Well, at least it gives me time to look at the scene around me ...

Yesterday, it snowed all day long. I had quite a shock when I pulled off the road to let a car pass on the single-track-road: I always knew that wet meadows are not ideal for driving in and even the best 4x4s have problems driving in them ...
I drove off the road and onto a meadow covered in wet snow and, even though I'm using winter tyres, my car just slithered uncontrollably down the hill and refused to be braked until it left the meadow on the other side.
Luckily there wasn't much in my path, other than a wire fence (which didn't survive the encounter and which I hid afterwards).

To change the subject ...

This is what today's weather is doing:






Just in case you didn't really believe me — it is snowing!

The leaves are changing colour again and up here in the mountains, this always goes hand-in-hand with some of the most amazing morning views.



Here is one I photographed on Wednesday morning. Click to see the larger version.

It's that time of the year again ...

If you are passing close to Lake Constance, now would be a good time to stop off in Rorschach.
The anual Sand Sculpture Competition finishes today and the results, which will be on display until the 13th of September, promise to be as good as every year.
'Eat and be eaten' is this years motto. I haven't checked the titles of the sculptures yet, though ...



More to follow ...

Towers & Bay-Windows ...

St.Gallen is an interesting city.
A city of small towers and bay windows.
At the moment, it would seem, it is one big building-site too.
It is still, however, very photogenic.



The best time to take photographs is a Sunday morning between 09:00 and 10:00.
At this time of day the streets are freshly freed of the nights debris (groups of youngsters sit around at night drinking and smashing their empties – the cleaning troops arrive at around 05:00). The citizens of St.Gallen are listening to the sermon inside the cathedral.
You have the streets to yourself.

So here's the second picture, taken with the new lens ...
... not quite in focus, I'm afraid – still working on that!



To see the larger version, you will need to have QuickTime installed.
You will also need a little patience, it is quite large.

Why is it the second picture?
Because the first was taken in St.Gallen – here it is:


Focal length: 12 mm; Apperture: 8; Exposure: 250

There is no larger version of this one online yet, but I'm sure a new gallery will be published soon ...

To be honest with you, it wasn't quite as complicated as I thought it would be ...



It wasn't 36 images after all, it turned out to be 45.
There are a couple of spots with visible double exposures. I left them intentionally because I feel it demonstrates that the pontoon in motion – as were the geese!

This panorama is a little larger than usual: I like the datails.
This means that if your computer and/or your browser were built before The Flood, you might not want to click on the link.

I hope you like it ...

Don't go on holiday with a new camera until you have calibrated it to do what you want it to do!

If you are a regular visitor to this blog, then you will know what one of my hobbies is and for some time now, I have wanted to photograph the Gas Street Basin in Birmingham.

I spent many hours there, with a sketch pad, yonks ago when it was in a in a desolate condition. In the meantime the Birmingham City Council has realised its value. The whole area around Gas Street has been renovated and modernised. Cafés and pubs have been erected and it is well worth a visit.

When I visited at Christmas I took along a camera that had not yet been calibrated for panoramas. The resulting images had to be stitched by hand. The first panorama is now ready to be presented – at long last!



I took a second, 360° panorama, from further along the dock. I'm not sure, yet, that I'll be able to stitch it. It wasn't until I was almost finished taking the 36 shots that I realised, I was standing on a pontoon that was gently rocking while I worked.
I'll take a closer look soon. Watch this space, I might be successful, who knows ...

I've just been flipping through some pictures (can you do that on a computer?) and I remembered putting up a gallery of pictures taken at Fazeley Junction and threatening to put up more …

For those of you, who don't know what or where Fazeley junction is, I'll explain:
Great Britain has a network of inland waterways. The Romans started the idea – they built several navigable canals, such as Foss Dyke, to link rivers, enabling increased transportation inland by water.
The United Kingdom's navigable water network grew massively as the demand for industrial transport increased. The canals were key to the pace of the Industrial Revolution. Roads at the time were unsuitable for large volumes of traffic.
So many canals were built during the 18th and 19th century that things almost got out of hand. Now the country is so riddled with canals that you might ask what's holding the place together.

Fazeley Junction is a junction near Tamworth where the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal meets the Whittington and the Coventry Canal.



I took an interest in photographing the various junctions around the Midlands a few years ago and hope to photograph more on my next visit to the island.

The gallery I'd put up for Fazeley has just been revised and two more have been added: Lapworth Junction, where the Grand Union Canal joins the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal and Fradley Junction, where the Coventry Canal meets the Trent and Mersey Canal.

By the way – if you are interested in touring Britain, you couldn't do it in a more leisurely fashion than renting a narrowboat …

Did I mention that I like this time of the year?
I think I did.
Did I mention that I live on a hill 1000m high?
That's three quarters of the way up Snowdon, for those of you that can't imagine how high that is...

Apart from being extremely quiet, living here has other advantages too. I can, for instance, usually see what the weather is doing down below me.

I took this picture this morning:



Go on – click it!

How silly of me…
… I just logged on to see if there were any new entries on this blog.
Of course, no one else works here…

You'll have to excuse – I've still got my right leg in 'plaster' and don't spend so many hours at the computer as I used to.
I don't get round to doing as much photography as I might, either.

However – a fortnight ago, I travelled with friends from the Fotoclub St.Gallen to Kaufdorf in Gürbethal (near Bern) because there is an Automobile Cemetery there.
Quite photogenic.



Sadly the cemetery will have to close in March next year, so any one wanting to see this spectacular display of automobile history will have to hurry!

In 1975 the authorities in Bern gave the owner of the scrap yard permission to create the auto cemetery, but insisted he would have to hide it by planting a few hundred trees.
The trees were planted and both cars and trees have coexisted ever since. Nature, however, is slowly gaining the upper hand.
In places it is hard to decide if a car is part of a tree or if a tree is part of a car.

Now the authorities have decided that the cemetery has to disappear – the trees do not blend into the landscape and the cars (not one of them a day under 30 years old) are polluting the environment!
Quite paradox.

I shan't go into all of the arguments that have ignited around the topic. Let it suffice to say that they are heated, with the authorities refusing to see that the scrap yard might be of any cultural value…

…look at the pictures and judge for yourself.

I threatened to give you more...

The sand sculptures in Rorschach have been finished for a fortnight now. I went there the evening the winner was decided (I spy...) but there were so many people there that I didn’t venture close!

This weekend after two days of catastrophic rainfall having fallen since the prize giving, I actually managed to take some pictures.
'What do they do if it rains?' Global Librarian asked. Well, you didn't actually mean torrential rainfall, or did you?
If we are talking normal summer rainfall — the surface of the sculptures can get a little rough.
If we are talking medium catastrophe rainfall — the surface gets a little rough and the elements that weren't packed as solid as they might have been collapse...

But here — judge for yourself:



Parts of my two favourite sculptures have collapsed and the base of the sculptures are very rough, but I find it makes them interesting.

BTW – if you want to see what the sculptures looked like before the rain, you can view them here!

Yesterday I made my first excursion on crutches...

In Rorschach, on Lake Constance, a competition is held every year to see who can create the best sand sculpture.
250 tons of sand are dumped on the lake shore, stamped into rectangular wooden forms and then sculpted. Some of the results are amazing!
I took some pictures of the finished entries last year and forgot to show them to you.
The one I liked best was called Daydreams and just happened to win the first prize:


Daydreams, Front


Daydreams, Rear

Ten teams of two people from all over the world compete every year.
Each team has a week to finish their work. This years theme is 'Dream and Reality'.
The first three years saw Swiss sculptors among the winners. Because foreign teams won for the past few years, no Swiss are partaking this year...

I wanted to photograph the work-in-progress this time round and then the finished results.
A lot harder to do, on crutches, than I had envisaged, but here is the work-in-progress (4th day).
I hope to find a chauffeur on Saturday, so I can photograph the finished results...



It is impossible to guess, yet, which team might win this year - we shall know more on Saturday.
If you would like to see the sculptures live, they will be on view until September 14th.

To be continued...

Lazy, as I am, I’ve done nothing this week, except sit around with my feet up...
Yesterday, I discovered my camera again:





We had some wonderful clouds!

There was a moody sky when I arrived home this evening.
Strangely it didn’t rain and everything is back to normal now.



Come to think of it, I’m a bit moody myself. Apple has gone and fixed something that wasn’t broken. They took their Dot Mac services and converted them to MobileMe.
It starts with the name - it sounds really inspiring, as if it jumped right out of Windows.

All sorts of claims were made about the service, such as 'Exchange for the rest of us' and 'Push technology'. There are no references to either now.
With Dot Mac I had syncing for my Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks, and no end of other info between all of my Macs. With MobileMe I still have that, plus my data is 'pushed' (what am I supposed to call it now I'm not allowed to call it 'push'?) out over the air to my iPhone.
Wow! If I make a change on my Mac (or PC), the change automatically syncs to the MobileMe server, where I can view it on the MobileMe website or 15 minutes later on my iPhone - uuhm, if I had one...
If I alter something on the web or on my non-existant iPhone, within 15 minutes the change happens on my Macs. This is the sort of technological improvement, I greet with open arms, I just hope the service gets extended to similar mobile phones, because at the moment there's no way I'm going to purchase a Phone that can't do half of what my current phone can do!

My Calendar is online and I can access it from anywhere in the world without having to publish it - but do I get a choice of which sets of entries I get to synchronise?
It's all or nothing, I'm afraid. So now my personal dates are online, my work dates, my boss's dates, German holidays, Swiss holidays, British holidays, Birthdays...

You are supposed to take the good with the bad, they say...
Gone are my online bookmarks - I'm no longer able to access them from any computer, anywhere in the world.
Gone are iCards and - for some reason - gone is my mail!!
No mail at all has reached my Mailbox for the last two days!!

I'm sure Apple is working on it, but to be without mail during a working week is rather a problem.
To charge for the service (and it's not cheep) is rather a cheek!
Steve - if you're reading this - please switch my mail-account back on...

This Junkers 52 completely spoiled one of my panoramas recently while it took sightseers on a tour of the Alps and Lake Constance...



It was pure chance that had me at the right spot at the right time and a pure fluke that my camera happened to be pointing in the right direction...

Whitsun slipped by with some people not even noticing it...

We had glorious weather here - ideal because, as I mentioned, I had visitors from Germany.
They had a whole week of sunshine, sunburn and all.
We went sight-seeing a couple of times and, of course, I had my camera with me.



The Hohe Kasten - the mountain you've already seen on one or two of my pics -
has a new, rotating restaurant on it's summit.
We breakfasted up there on the Friday after Whitsun.
The resulting panoramas took a little longer to process.
Shooting directly into the sun causes over-exposure. To compensate, I took all of the pictures with three different exposures and combined the results to HDR (High Dynamic Range) images - that means three separate panorama images combined to display the details in both the clouds and the dark parts of the scene.





The new restaurant is well worth a visit, by the way.
It completes a revolution every hour - giving you plenty of time to eat and enjoy the view...

I recently promised Ms.Mac to publish some new 3D images.
Well, Ms.Mac, here you are:





I certainly hope you like them.

A little more 'old-fashioned' is this one, which is 'just a normal panorama image' showing Lake Constance from close to where I live.



It was photographed on Saturday but, looking out of the window, you wouldn't believe it now. At the moment, I'm glad that the weather (cold and wet) is outside and I'm inside...

I am re-publishing an image today.
Not to bore you, but because, at long last, I have achieved something I have been trying to do for twelve months now.

You might have noticed that one of my pastimes is panorama photography.
I started down this road by chance about two years ago.
I was in Wales and stopped at a lay-by near Barmouth. I looked at the scene I'd seen a hundred times before and decided it would be a nice scene to photograph.
I got out my camera and took a series of shots - freehand - wondering if I would be able to stitch them together in Photoshop.
At home I stitched the images together in photoshop and decided:
"Next time, you'll have to use a tripod!"
It took ages to stitch and retouch the finished panorama.

'Next Time' I thought I'd be clever, so I used a monopod instead.
Again, it took me days until I was even almost satisfied with the results.
By chance there was a lot of water in this picture too, which proved to be one of the biggest challenges.
What I couldn't understand, however, was the problem I was having with the perspective.
It was this picture that made me go looking for information on the web.
It took 24 separate cropped images, distorted out of all proportion, just to put the railings together - the whole panorama otherwise only consists of 36 images!

When I finally solved the parallax-distortion-problem with a so-called spherical-panorama-head for my tripod, I thought the logical Next Step would be 'Virtual Reality'.
It has taken me twelve months to get there, but I finally solved all the problems I discovered in that corner too!

Here is my first spherical panorama.
I am very proud of it, so I hope you are duly impressed!



You will need QuickTime to view this one - it is installed on most computers, but you may have to download it.
You can move around the picture by clicking and dragging with the mouse. You can zoom in with Shift and zoom out with Ctrl.

Here you have the result of a mornings photography and two nights of stitching.
A total of 152 images taken within two hours (and four kilometers) of each other, stitched to give you five panorama pictures.
I hope you like them.

On the first picture's horizon, by the way, is the Lake of Constance.

I recently bought a new Camera.
Obviously, the first thing I did was work out the nodal point - the point of rotation on the barrel of the lens to cancel parallax distortion when rotating the camera for panorama photography. Once I'd worked that out, I went out and took my first panorama.

Remember me publishing this image recently?



This was the second version of the scene. With the first version, I misjudged the exposure. Well, you know - new equipment, snow, photographing into the sun ...
Anyway - this was what happened:



Obviously, I didn't think it was worth stitching the images together, so I just left it.
Until today, that is. The snow plough didn't come through this morning (did I mention that?) so I started playing around. Here is the result:



You can send the plough in now, I'm ready to take some more pics!

... have obviously gone on holiday.
I have no idea where they are or what they are doing, but they have most certainly forgotten what they are supposed to be doing.

If you take a look at the entry below, you will see that it was written a month ago.
The picture included depicts a sunny landscape.
Here are two new pictures for you. They were taken here in the village I live in and they were photographed yesterday.
The weather hasn't altered during the whole four weeks except, that is, to get warmer.





If you look carefully, you will notice that the people depicted in both pictures above are not wearing jackets - in fact most people were in short sleeves yesterday - getting their first sunburn of the year.

Now, I don't like to complain, but we are supposedly in the middle of winter.
We are supposed to have a meter of snow.
And I know darned well that if the weather gods keep mucking around like this, they are going to throw a meter-and-a-half of snow at us at the end of April - when we're supposed to have started spring!

I'm not sure I'm too keen on the idea ...

Did you ever wonder how to find out if those electric fences are actually
switched on or not?
Actually it's quite easy - you just touch them!

If you aren't one of those people who enjoy an electro shock every once in a while, use a blade of grass to touch the wire - the longer the better.
The closer your hand gets to the wire the stronger you feel the current.
At 35 cm the chances are, you won't feel a thing. At 5 cm you will - if the fence is on, that is.

So how do you cross an electric fence that is switched on without grilling your private bits?
Easy! You wear your most robust bovver boots and kick one of the fence posts - hard.
Two kicks should do the trick. Just make sure the farmer doesn't see you!

This fence post was taken down by a car ...



... so I had no problems crossing it and no guilty conscience!

Winter began here on December 22nd at 07:18.
According to the calendar.
Meteorologically it began on December 1st so it snowed.
It snowed again on the 7th - only about 30 centimeters.
It has been quite cold since, with temperatures averaging around 0°Centigrade. We haven't had had any fresh snow but what we got stayed with us.

It is still a little strange somehow.
I remember winters in Birmingham when it snowed. We had 2 inches of snow during the night; it was turned grey by the buses by 7 in the morning and had most likely disappeared by evening.
Here the snow plow comes through at 5 in the morning and clears the roads.
If it's a sunny day the remains of the snow on the roads will melt and dry. If the temperatures don't rise above somewhere round 10°C the rest of the snow won't be affected.

I had visitors over Christmas. Their children were thrilled to be able to get the sledges and toboggans out of the barn, drag them up the hill and hurtle back down again. Every day for a week - for hours on end.
They ruined my virgin snow, of course, but they certainly had fun!

My Dad built me a sledge when I was a child. While I very much appreciated it, I never got as much fun out of it as he would have liked me to.
There was just never enough snow.
I've got the snow now - does anyone remember where the sledge got to?

Just a month ago, I looked out of my window and was impressed by the colours that a brilliant autumn day presented me.
I tried to capture the vibrance of the scene but was unhappy with the results.
A camera does not always see what the human eye can observe. While a digital picture can be quite striking it is just not alive.

Today, looking out of my window, I spotted a slight difference in the scene I was presented.
I wonder if you can spot it too?

Yes, you are right of course ...
... the fence posts have been removed!

This is just to prove that I'm still alive ...

I've been playing around with my camera this week.
Adjusting a new panoramic head to compensate for parallax distortion.
Of course once I think I have the settings, the weather turns to rain.
There was a short break this afternoon.



I think I might have the settings!

I'm still playing around with the compositing on this one, but you can take a look anyway, if you care to ...

A sentence that Heidi wrote reminded me of something ...

Whilst visiting Denver some years ago, I decided to drive up to the Rockies and visited an old mining town there.
The Lady who showed me to the my motel room noticed that I'm not a Yank and asked me where I came from.
I told her Germany because, technically I did.

"Who's the mayor of Germany?" she asked.
I enquired, if she actually meant the Prime Minister or the President?
"What!" she exclaimed, "Germany has a President too!"

After recovering from her shock, she asked me, if the Germans have color-tv.
I couldn't resist telling her that a few old folks still used TVs, but they went out of fashion very quickly, when holographic projectors were introduced.

At her request, I described how the newscaster nowadays stands in the middle of your living-room, visible from all sides and how the cowboys and indians, in those good old John Wayne films, chase each other through the center of your living-room too ...

... she had a tough time getting her head around that one!

This post is more specifically for Mrs. Mac who was taken to Appenzell for Mothers Day this year.

Three pictures; three angles of the same hill ...


... the view from a place called Nord (North) just outside Appenzell ...


... the view from the main road leading into Appenzell ...


... and then a 360° panorama from just below Nord.

As you can see - Appenzellerland, Little Switzerland, is totally overpopulated!
I hope you like the pics, Mrs Mac.

I was out the other day, taking pictures again.

There was a strange light that made the grass greener than usual. Quite kitschy.
It rained the next day, so then I knew the reason.
30 Liters of rain per cm in under an hour.
The worst (rain)storm in the last 100 years, or so they say!
When my radio-alarm-clock woke me that day, it informed me that a house had been washed away in Engadin, Grisons.
Then there was news about trees blocking roads and motorways.

I drove to work without noticing anything. So I didn't give it another thought.
At about 10:00 the storm reached eastern Switzerland.
It started to bucket down with rain - it looked like one of those scenes from a cheap catastrophe film, where you get the impression that the camera is being sprayed with a hose.
It turned out that four windows at the place I work are badly sealed!
Of course, one of them is in my office.
By the time I noticed the fact, a pile of papers I'd had on the window-sill and the carpet below the sill were sodden.
The loo, two doors down was literally flooded!
I read in the news that the storm caused somewhere around CHF 10.000.000 damages - I'm not sure our loo was taken into consideration.

So what about the pictures?

I was out locally. The first picture is of the mountain range called the Alpstein (Alp-stone). It stretches from the Hohe Kasten (Tall Cupboard) - the one with the mast on the left - to the Säntis - the one with its peak in the clouds.



The second picture was taken with a tele photo lens so it's quite long.
Looking in the opposite direction to the first, you can see the village of Stein on the left, St.Gallen, in the valley just left of center and Teufen on the slopes to the right.



I shan't bother you with the fact that it took five hours to put the second one together!

Sorry to have kept you so long ...

I have visitors from Germany here at the moment and, whenever the weather has allowed, we've been out sightseeing.
Some of the results have now been put together and you may see them by clicking on the images below.

The Lake of Constance, the Bodensee is known in southern Germany as the Swabian Sea and is the third largest lake in central Europe after Lake Balaton in Hungary and Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

Two of the pictures below are 360° images and were taken in the harbour in Arbon, the third is 180° from above Rorschach.
The opposite coastline, visible in all three pictures, is that of Germany.

You probably weren't ...

... but just in case you were wondering if I took any other pictures of the Splügen Pass, on my way to northern Italy -
I did!
Here is the finished composite of the picture you saw below:


Click!
It is made up of 36 shots, stitched together.
Here are the middle twelve!

It rained all the way from St.Gallen to Freiburg in the Black Forest.
From there I took the motorway to Strasbourg, where the sun was shining.

Strasbourg is a bustling city of 650'000 inhabitants (Metropolitan area) sitting between the rivers Rhine and Île directly opposite the German town of Kehl.
It swapped hands between Germany and France numerous times in the past few centuries - at the moment it is French!
The locals speak Alsatian, a wonderful singsong concoction which mixes both French and German.

The seventh largest city in France, Strasbourg is the capital of the Alsace/Elsass region and houses, amongst other things, the European Parliment, the European Council and the European Court of Human Rights. Yet amongst the hectic there is a quarter that - even when full of tourists - always seems to be idyllically quiet.
It is called Petite France.



You can see some of the Pictures I took by clicking the image above.
While looking at them, please consider the fact, that they were taken on a Saturday afternoon - the rest of the city, just two streets away, was jammed full of people.

I strolled around town for an hour or so and then met up with friends at a local restaurant. We had decided it had been just too long, since we last ate Tarte Flambée!
Tarte is a wonderful experience. A wooden board with a sliver of pastry, not unlike that of Pizza but much, much thinner, topped with cream, Onions and bacon - fresh from the oven. Just large enough to serve six people. When it has been devoured, another appears, as if by magic, in its place.
Cut it into six, eat it, wash it down with Pinot Noir - the local red wine, and ...
... another appears.
If you are fast enough you might catch the waiter as he places another board on those already emptied. If you do, you may order a variation ...
... Forestier - with mushrooms, Munster - with Munster cheese or variations with goats cheese and, when you feel you just couldn't eat another slice, with Apples!

This is the signal for the waiter to stop. Along comes the tarte covered in slices of apples and cinnamon. The waiter has a bottle of Calvados (apple brandy) in his hand. he pours a generous portion over the tarte and ignites it - a wonder the place doesn't go up in flames!

After the tarte flambée aux pommes it is just impossible to move.
I recommend a Marc du Gewurztraminer (The alsatian version of grappa). Afterwards you may try standing up and taking a very gentle stroll to the car.

But not before the waiter has counted the empty boards and bottles ...

One of the nice things about living here in Appenzell, is the fact that it is so central.

A drive of twenty minutes will get me to Austria, Thirty minutes and I'm in Germany and - depending which direction I set off in - two hours will see me in France or Italy.

Last weekend I drove south, crossed the Splügen pass and had a plate of Spaghetti with mussels and a glass of red wine in a village on the shores of Comer lake. The weather was marvellous, just like the sunburn afterwards!

The Splügen pass is a narrow road just wide enough to let two cars pass. It is closed in winter because it is just too expensive to move the two to three meters of snow - especially as someone was kind enough to drill a hole through the mountains. The hole is now called the St.Bernhard Tunnel.

The pass winds its way up one side of the mountain in numerous extremely tight bends and down the other side in a similar fashion. It is an adventurous drive because the Italian drivers think nothing at all of taking the bends as wide (read 'fast') as possible, forcing oncoming traffic to brake hard and sometimes even, to reverse!

The spectacular thing about the drive this time, was the fact that the dam on the Italian side was still frozen in places. With temperatures around 24° Centigrade, there were still stretches of water with 30 cm of ice on them!



So what do you do, when you encounter a sight like this?
You buy italian ice cream, pretend to be on holiday and take photographs just like any other tourists.

I'm off to France today (Elsass, to be more precise) for Tarte Flambée and Pinot Noir.
I hope the weather bucks up - it's raining right now!

I am, it would seem, a jerk.
Kate says so, anyway!

My trip through France took me over their motorway system. Most of the motorways in France are privately owned. The Swiss have their Vignette, the Austrians their Pickerl - annual tickets to stick on your windscreen, that cover all motorway mileage (the Austrians also have a bi-monthly option). The French prefer pay-as-you-go.

Taking the shortest route through France helped me to get acquainted with almost all of the French toll roads.
This, when travelling by motorbike, is most impractical - I felt like a jerk.
Drive up to the barrier, put the machine into neutral, take off your gloves.
Take the ticket that is automatically proffered. Think, for a second, where to put the ticket, so that it may be found easily when needed.
Put your gloves back on, ignoring the horns, that are being sounded behind you and the barrier that has been open for almost a minute and drive on.

After about 100 km the motorway owner changes, so it is time to pay.
Drive up to the barrier with the shortest queue (the one for credit cards), put the machine into neutral, take off your gloves.
Undo the press studs and the zip of your jacket, fish your wallet from your inside pocket, push the ticket into the ticket machine, take it out again and put it in the right way round, push your credit card into the machine, take it out again and put it in the right way round.
Ignore the fact that the barrier just rose. Put your credit card somewhere you can get at it easier next time (why didn't I think of that in the first place?), put your wallet away. Ignore the horns sounding behind you and try not to feel like the jerk Kate says you are. Do your zip up and fumble with the press studs while working out, that 100 km at approx 14 € actually costs more than a bi-monthly Pickerl in Austria - and drive on!

After 20 km of public motorway i.e. no toll, the cycle starts again.

Somewhere in Wales the magnetic strip on my credit card got zapped! Due to this fact, I decided to take the longer route for the home journey, avoiding as many toll roads as possible. The stretch between Luxembourg and Strasbourg was the only stretch I had to pay for.
The identification of those Euro-Cents, smirking at you from the depths of your wallet, is worthy of an entry of its own!

I just got back from GB where I spent a fortnight touring with my motorbike.

You'd think that British plumbers don't go abroad for their holidays and have never seen the bathroom fittings on the continent.
I had forgotten all about British bathrooms!

After spending most of my life on the continent, I am used to turning on a tap and being presented with hot, warm or cold water, as I wish.
The hot water system is part of the central heating system (always in the cellar) and - probably due to the fact, that heat rises - hot water is almost instantaneously available.

The system in GB is different - the boiler for hot water always seems to be on the top floor, or in the attic. This allows water to trickle through the pipes unaided, instead of having to use a pump.
The hot and the cold taps are generally a minimum of 30 cm apart and when you open the tap with the red marking, you have to run off 20 litres of cold water before you can be sure, that it really is the hot tap.
This alone is a waste of water but then, if you wish to use warm water to wash your hands, you have to run a further litre into the sink - twice the amount I need to wash my hands under running water.

On those rare occasions when you find a tap where hot and cold water flow from a single nozzle, you get the shock of your life: when you hold your hand under the flow of water, the left side of your hand freezes, while the right hand side is scalded!

Then there are the showers.
Step into the shower-cabin, open the tap and have a shower?
You would have thought so.
But no, first you have to search for the switch to turn on the boiler - a so-called continuous-flow-heater. The switch is usually attached to a cord, dangling from a corner of the ceiling.
You will most likely have to experiment for ten minutes, until you find out which knob on the heater does what and which combination of settings sets the heat closest to your preferences. You may now carefully position yourself under the trickle of water from the almost-adjustable-mini-shower-head.

And then, in one case in Wales, someone bangs the door to attract your attention.
"We forgot to tell you - you can't use the shower in your room - the drain leaks and most of the water ends up in the dining room!"
And all that for just £30-a-night bed and breakfast.