We have been back in blighty for  a few days now after our wonderful skiing trip to Germany and Austria.  Our base was a flat in the quiet Bavarian town of Blaichach.

The flight from London Stanstead to Munich on Easyjet was fine, apart from the long drive to get to Stansted at stupid o’clock in the morning.

The trip from Munich to Blaichach was a little more complicated.  We decided to get the train using the ultra efficient Deutsche Bahn.  We managed to get a Bavaria ticket which entitles you to any travel, anywhere in Bavaria, for 5 persons on the same ticket, all for £27 which was amazing value.

Luckily, we had the loan of a van to help us get around once we got to Blaichach, so it was really easy to get to quite a few of the good ski lifts at the Nebelhorn, the Fellhorn and Oberjock.  The van we were borrowing, became affectionately known as the ‘Bang Bus’ for obvious male humour.

The snow was really good at the start of the week, but hardly any actually fell whilst we were out there, so it gradually got more difficult to ski on.

I made good use of an app for the iPhone called AutoStitch, which basically makes a panorama out of a selection of photo’s that you take.  Below is a view of the German Alps from the top of the Fellhorn, let down slightly by my wobbly hand.

I’ll write up our trip properly when I get time, but you can view the photo’s HERE if you wish.

We need to shed some weight.

So what gadgets can i do without?  Well ideally, I’d take everything I possibly could, but that is just not possible.

First thing to be left at home is the netbook.  I don’t know if there will be any free WiFi where we are going, so sod’s law says that if I take it, Sonthofen will be a WiFiless zone.  Also with the netbook, you have to include the charger as well which adds a fair bit of bulk.

The same goes for my Nikon D60 SLR camera.  I love my photography, but realistically can get away with Laura’s Canon Ixus, the Nokia N86, the Nokia N97 Mini, and the Apple iPhone, which will all be coming with us.  I could in theory leave the N97 Mini behind, but I might be able to pick up a prepaid SIM with data on it, and coupled with Joikuspot application, it will make a killer device for tweeting and uploading photo’s.

The Sanyo HD video camera will also be in my bag, to hopefully catch some quality tomfoolery racing down the slopes.

I can give my Nintendo DS up, as the iPhone has pretty much rendered it useless so far as a mobile gaming system is concerned.

The last gadget that I will definately be taking is the Proporta Turbo charger.  By just taking this one device, I can leave all but the Sanyo charger at home.  Thus saving a fair bit of room in my bag.

Are you a gadget addict?  What is always in your bag when you leave home?  Leave a comment and let me know.

Or tweet me @steverowlands

I can’t feel my hands anymore, and it looks like it’s about to bloody rain now, but I’m not going to let that irritate me.

I might even give a vacuum once my hands have defrosted.

I’ll even try a photo. It’s if my old RAF beret that surfaced during a tidy up.

Out

All that’s left to do now is to set the alarm for some alarmingly early hour, and we will be off!

Now I wasn’t a front line warfighter, just a lowly electronics engineer, but never the less, some of you maybe interested.

I left off the last post with me just having been deposited into the depths of tent city at Baasrah Airport in Southern Iraq.  Now, you may have some strange idea that everything military related is organsised with exacting precision.  Well, that maybe the case for some of the heirarchy, but for your average Joe Soap on the ground, rarely, does anyone know what the fuck is going on.

The best way, I found to deal with this, is to sit around until someone of a higher rank, or with a handle bar moustache, starts shouting at you.  Easy.  The problem with this technique, is that if you sit around for too long, someone will need something moving.  Known in the trade as ‘humping and dumping’.  The threeee word phrase for randomly moving some shit from one place to another.  Why the Iraqi lorry driver dropped the rations off at the admin tent, rather than the mess tent was anyone’s idea, however, it needed humping and dumping.  Great.  My first few hours in the baking desert heat was more uncomfortable than I had imagined.

My plan was not working.

The more I sat around, the more random tasks would come my way.  It wasn’t like I was the only person sat around, in fact there werre quite a few other lads doing the same, and trying to keep their heads down.

In the terminal building there was a big telly, and some chairs, invitingly lined up waiting for someone to sit down and start watching a movie.  However, this seating area was very dangerous.  Anyone sitting here was viewed as being bored, and would obviously LOVE to go and do some more humping and dumping, hence it was very rarely occupied.

So I had a problem.  How the hell was I going to get from here to Kuwait?  We couldn’t go by road, or else people would try and blow us up, and there were no helicopters available.  Word on the street had it that we needed to “Catch the Wave”.

What the fuck was the “Wave”?

It actually turned out, that the Wave was in fact a civilian operated passenger aircraft, that ferried people around theatre.  We were in actual fact one of the last flights of the Wave, as a couple of weeks later the insurgents were getting a bit braver, and started causing a threat to aircraft around Basrah Airport.  More to come on this later in the series, as it would turn out to have a massive effect on my time in Iraq and Kuwait.

Stepping onto the Wave was such a surreal experience.  Being in a warzone, you rarely get any luxuries.  20 minutes of phonecalls home being about the pinnacle of ‘luxury’.  However, here I was sat on a leather seat, in an executive style aircraft being served a tomato juice, with ice, by a fully kitted out waitress.  How very bizarre.

After an hour or so of flying over sand, we touched down at Ali Al Salem airbase in Kuwait.  This was to be my home for the next 4 months.

Ali Al Salem was a massive cargo hub for the American military.  When we landed there were more ‘Fat Alberts‘ sat on the pan than the RAF has in total!  The scale of the American military muscle was evident just from this first glance.

I discovered this charity whilst searching for bicycle routes around and about near my home.

Sustrans is responsible for the National Cycle Network, and the amazing fact is that half of the UK population lives withing one mile of the network!  That is quite some feat, and the network is growing everyday.

Check out their website, then go and drag your old bike from the garage.

Also make sure you check out the Change Your World campaign whilst you are at it.

Moving house is easily one of the toughest things to do.  Not just the physical side of lugging furniture down, and then back up numerous flights of stairs, it’s the other things that really irritate like changing all the addresses with banks, phones etc etc.  The biggest irritation by far though is trying to get the gas and electric sorted.  It really doesn’t need to be as difficult as it is.

Next up, we’ve been on holiday.  The aim was to be a smidgen more prudent and not go abroad.  Stay in England, and help prop up the local economy.  Well, apart from having a pretty good time, I’ve got to say that everything in Cornwall is out to con as much money out of the tourist as possible.  We ended up spending more on this holiday than we probably would have going somewhere hot.  At least £2 to park anywhere.  Even for 30 minutes or so.  Even if you want to park in a deserted car park late at night!  Don’t even get me started on the complete rip off which is called the Eden Project.  £16 each just to walk around a warm greenhouse, and have hippy middle class, Green Party values shoved down your throat at every turn.

I’m planning a separate few posts for some of the stuff we did on holiday, because some things deserve a special mention.  Others will get a mention, but it won’t be particularly nice.

No new mobile toys for me in quite a while.  I’m actually just waiting for Vodafone and Nokia to sort themselves out, and get the N97 released.  I’m due for an upgrade in September or October, so I’m really excited looking forward to that.

We did however, get a new telly.  40 inches of Sony Bravia goodness, and wow has it made a difference to my TV watching habits.  We have also signed up to the DVD postal service from Tesco.  Whilst it is good, especially the speed at which they turn the DVDs around, I do wish they would renew the disks a bit more often.  A few films now have been scratched, and it’s enraging to get halfway through a film, only to have it start skipping for about 20 minutes.

If one film that I have watched deserved some praise it would be the German film entitled ‘Lives of Others’.  It is a story of the spies in the former East Germany, and how they used to operate to quash any form of dissidence from within.  It is subtitled, but please don’t be put off.  It truly is one of the best, and most powerful films I have ever watched.

American Gangster on the other hand is shit.  I was actually glad when that disk turned out to be faulty, so we had to switch it off.

Check back soon for another post about my time in Iraq, to continue the series.

I have a new friend.  You can see him in the photo.

His name is Dave.

No, seriously, his real name is Dave!  Look!

He is quite tall, skinny, and a bit wobbly.  Don’t put your cup of tea on him, or else he is likely to throw it off.

Oh, and don’t sit on him.  Not because he is weak, but because you have been eating too many chips.

I love going to Starbucks.

Not because I’m a great lover of coffee.  In actual fact I much prefer a nice cup of tea.  However, the tea in Starbucks tastes like it’s been strained through a tramps dirty underpants, so I’ll stick to the coffee thanks.

No, it’s not because of the coffee, it’s because of the windows.

From the windows I can watch the world go by.

Sure, I could watch the world go by from the windows of Dorothy Perkins, but that would probably get me arrested.  Possibly on terrorism charges.  More likely on pervert charges.

The trouble is, our flat doesn’t have many windows, mainly skylights.  Skylights aren’t very good at watching the world go by.  Sure you can see the sky, and thats about it.  The sky is usually blue or grey.  Grey in the UK.  I like windows to look out of.  To watch people trip over the loose paving stone in the street, so I can chuckle to myself.  To watch people get caught out in the rain without an umbrella.  Or a coat.

Basically, I like windows, so I can watch other peoples misfortunes, no, actually, just their stupidity.  You may think that this is cruel of me, but they should have looked where they were walking.  Yes, that dog shit you just stood in was there before your foot was, so bad luck.  I’ll laugh at you.  I probably tutted at the retarded dog owner who let their pooch stoop and lay a cable there, just minutes before your foot arrived, so I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.

If you would have bothered checking the weather forecast before you left home, you would have probably have put an umbrella in your hand.  Sorry you are so stupid.

Maybe it’s my sadistic sense of humour.  Maybe I’m just a tosser.