When I arrived at the campsite this evening, the tent area was empty. About 30 minutes later someone turned up on a recumbent and, as you do, we started chatting. My 25KG bike is usually a good conversation starter!

Manfred is 63 and from Constance, where the Rhein river starts. He had just finished a 120km run and was on that last leg of a tour he started at the beginning of August. He had already been down the Rhein to Holland and was on his way back! We went for some food together and he was telling me about his career in computing and I tried to explain a little about what I was doing. Of course we had lots to talk about but I held back on saying too much about UMPCs. On the way back he was telling me how pocket PCs don’t have the right OS, how the communicator has the same problem and how he wanted a small windows XP (not Vista – he still has some DOS programs that need to run) machine. When I showed him the Q1b back at the tent he was amazed and when I connected to the Internet on the spot he couldn’t believe it. I passed my card over and smiled saying that I hadn’t expected to be promoting UMPCs face-to-face on this tour!

I’m settled in the tent now and I can hear Manfred snoring (yes Manfred, if you read this, let me tell you that you snore!) The Q1b has about 20 min’s of battery left and I’m going to switch to the external one soon.

Tomorrow I will have to see how the weather goes. If its as good as today I’ll take a nice long lunch break and load up as much as I can because the forecast for Tuesday isn’t as good.

And that is about as good as its going to get I think. Time is running out fast and a good weather window is approaching. ‘Only’ 20-30% chance of rain. 6 hours of sun per day. 28th, 29th and 30th don’t look too fantastic but I’m afraid I’m going to have to take the risk. The Solar UMPC Tour is under starters orders!

After this blog post I will be emailing my PR contact at VIA Technologies and awaiting confirmation. I want to start on Sunday 26th of August and go through to 3rd Sept where I will finish on the Rheinufer (Rhein River promenade) in Duesseldorf and drink a huge Krystalweizen beer!

My decision was made only hours ago and I’ve just realised there’s a lot to do in 3 days. Posting frequency will be picking up here now so stay tuned!