Solipsism Gradient

Off early into Spain, to Santiago de Compostela, where we arrived just before noon. The weather was extremely unstable but – thanks to a suggestion from a helpful local – we found a convenient parking spot just behind the cathedral. It’s really worth an extended visit. The rest of Compostela isn’t too easy – the usual winding little roads, all alike, and very few parking spaces.

Then later in the afternoon the weather cleared up, and we had a very nice drive southwards back into Portugal. We’re now staying overnight at Viana do Castelo and tomorrow we’re going slowly downwards to Lisboa, where we have to arrive Sunday morning.

Whew, 3 tiring but excellent days in Lisbon. Tomorrow we rent a car and go off into Northern Portugal. On the list are Sintra, Mafra, Óbidos, Santarém, Fátima (maybe), Coimbra, Porto, hopefully a fast look at Salamanca and Compostela, and Marvão on the way back down.

We’ll be back in Lisboa on the afternoon of May 25th and the next day it’s off to Hamburg, Germany.

Progress. Had two very nice days driving northwards in Portugal. Cascais, Sintra, Mafra and Óbidos on the first one and we slept in Leiria. Then very early today we went to Fátima where we managed to get in ahead – and leave – of the first major wave of pilgrims in for the Pentecost holidays.

We then drove northwards through Coimbra and Porto and are now ensconced in Valença, just off the Spanish border. Unfortunately the weather decided to go bad and we mostly just drove, getting some snapshots during brief pauses in the rain.

Tomorrow it’s about 100Km to Santiago de Compostela and then we’ll leave in the afternoon to do a more leisurely drive back down.

Arrived well in Lisbon, Portugal, and already did some tourism. Hotel Internet access is a little unstable though. More anon…

We’re packing for an extended trip to Europe. As usual, this will be a working vacation – I’m taking my MacBook Air along and hope to get some things done underway.

From coming Sunday, May 18, to May 26 we’ll be in Portugal – not only Lisboa but the interior as well. May 26 to June 15 we’ll be in Germany, visiting friends and relatives; it’s a long list but hopefully we’ll have time for everybody. June 15 to 27 we’ll be on a bus roundtrip to Poland, starting out from Berlin. June 28 to July 20 we’ll be on a cruise ship, visiting Norway and Iceland, with short stops at Northern Scotland and some of the Baltic capitals.

I’ll have very limited Internet access during the cruise but otherwise I hope to be able check email and post news and pictures almost daily.

I just fixed some errors in the French localization of Quay. English-language users need not re-download.

In such a case it’s not really justified to change the version or even the build number, so I just did a silent update of the disk image…

Quay 1.1 is out.

There are very few bugs left, but lots of feature requests. I’ll start work on 1.2 almost immediately, and have great plans for it. Please post suggestions on the support forum, or e-mail me.

Whew, Quay 1.1fc1 is finally out. Too tired to explain details just now. Film at 11.