The roads I take...

It took me a few weeks as usual, but I now have a reasonable collection of 150 pictures out of about 1200 I took on my US Gulf Region trip, and uploaded those on the website:
Photo gallery: US Gulf Region - November 2009



From rising skyscrapers to swamps, rivers and the Gulf, from museums and monuments to all kinds of stadiums, from live music bars to a Whiskey distillery and a guitar factory, from squirrels to sharks and tigers, I think the pictures show the wide variety of what we saw there - and I'm sure that was only a small part of what the region has to offer.



The hardest part of doing those is always to reduce the vast amount of good pics to a collection that people still are able to view, I hope I managed that task this time again, even though I needed to leave out some other just-as-good ones.

Just to let y'all know, I'm back home from my 3-week vacation in the USA. I'm safe and sound but quite tired and I have a huge backlog to work in the next days, looks like about 1400 bugmails and 120 normal emails that I put aside to really work on - next to finishing up the photo collection and other stuff from the vacation. Oh, and I haven't even looked at newsgroups, planet or hg yet. So, expect to hear from me again, but don't expect me to be very responsive this week while I'm working that backlog.

Nuff said, I guess I should go to bed and get a good night's sleep first of all.

As some of you might know, I've long been planning to go on vacation in November, and this is coming up fast now, so I'll let everyone know where I'll be in those weeks that you'll not see me on IRC or, unless there's an emergency, anywhere else in the online world.

I'll take off together with a good friend (who already joined me for the California trip last year) from Vienna next Saturday, November 7th in the morning and land in Houston, TX on the same day in the late afternoon (thanks to the time shift). From there, we've rented a car and will do a round trip that is only roughly planned and subject to change as we feel necessary.

Our current plan is as follows:
Nov 07-10: Houston Area (Space Center, Galveston, ...)
Nov 11: Houston - Port Arthur - Baton Rouge - New Orleans
Nov 12-14: New Orleans
Nov 15: New Orleans - Gulfport - Biloxi - Pensacola
Nov 16: Pensacola - Montgomery - Atlanta
Nov 17-18: Atlanta
Nov 19: Atlanta - Chattanooga - Nashville
Nov 20: Nashville
Nov 21: Nashville - Jackson - Memphis
Nov 22: Memphis
Nov 23: Memphis - Little Rock
Nov 24: Little Rock - Texarkana - Dallas
Nov 25-26: Dallas (26th: Football match @ Cowboys Stadium)
Nov 27: Dallas - Houston
Nov 28: Houston/Flight

In the afternoon of the 28th, we'll ride the plane back to Europe, arriving in Vienna on 29th around noon (now paying for the timeshift).

A map of POIs we've marked for this trip is available from Google maps (I'd so much love if OpenStreetMaps would support easily generating such things). If you know anything additional that could be interesting to pay a visit to, please tell me about it!

If you want to meet up with us somewhere, note that our plans are not set in stone and we might change them around as we see fit, but I should be able to check email every evening at the hotels, and that will probably also be the only reasonable way of contacting me in that time. I won't read anything that doesn't suggest in the subject that it's important or affecting my trip, though. I'm on vacation, after all.

That said, I'll still be around next week, but don't expect any really heavy work from me - and have a great November!