Day 1 – Mach to Dover

A heat pump lecture over ran making me panic about missing my train and so a mate kindly gave me a lift from CAT to Mach in time for the 2:07 train to Birmingham (which was then delayed). It was my last module of my MSc and as we pulled out of the station and away past the PV arrays of the Eco-parc shining blue in the sun I felt both sad and excited and thought about the ending that started my volunteering at CAT and the end of that which marked my starting on the course and my job and the ending of the taught modules and the start of my thesis and soon the end of that and the start of what else? Endings are always beginnings too. I've started writing my final essay on what happens when buildings are handed over to the end user who then behaves in a completely different way to how it was predicted and over rides all the controls. Basically focusing on how we think it's the end of a job but it's only the start of the building's life and the beginning of it's contribution to our carbon emissions, and what we can do at that point to keep them as low as they were designed to be (although that's not even particularly good). I'm writing on my new Samsung net book – what a bad environmentalist I am – that's a PC, a laptop, a net book and a work PC all in my name. I have justified it to myself by saying that I will write a huge chunk of my thesis on it whilst I am away these two weeks. Thus far I've hardly touched it – sinking with ease into the Wales induced incommunicado status that I usually adopt. I've had 71 emails in the last four days! But now I'm appreciating it although my internet dongle keeps cutting out which is frustrating as I've signed up to www.couchsurfing.org and was going to optimistically try for a couch in Dover tonight – I know it's late but those that don't ask, don't get (or 'shy bairns get nowt' as Lindsay is fond of saying) and I thought I'd try it anyway, on the off chance......
....that was a few hours ago, I got distracted by 33,000 football fans from Gillingham on the train heading nosily back from a one nil victory against Shrewsbury town at Wembley - by the time I got a connection back it really was too late.

Challenges to carry out on my trip so far are to take a photo of the river surfers in Munich complete with the no-surfing sign and train at the Iwama Ryu dojo in Augsberg.