Welcome to uncle Joni's travel stories

I wrote a trip report about a hiking trip we did with three colleagues of mine. High quality hiking there in northern Spain! Let me know about any spelling errors, bugs etc. in the comments. Now go read it!

My colleague Harri leading the way

Busy times continue! I just arrived here in Bucharest after three days of driving. When I was finally done with moving all our stuff to Hollola and cleaning up the old apartment I drove from Hollola to Helsinki to catch an early 8:30 ferry to Tallinn. From Tallinn I drove to northern Poland through Latvia and Lithuania on day 1 then on day 2 I drove from there to northern Romania through Poland, Slovakia and Hungary and on day 3 from there to Bucharest.

Travel times:
Day 1: 18h (13h of driving)
Day 2: 17h (16h of driving)
Day 3: 7.5h (all driving)

I usually have huge problems staying awake while driving, but this time I had almost none. I decided to try how effective energy drinks are and apparently they worked. And didn't even drink a lot of them: half a liter every day. I only felt sleepy occasionally and somehow the feeling was a lot easier to get rid of than normally.

The Via Baltica road hadn't changed much since we drove back to Finland from Switzerland but now there were almost no road works. I had one of my very few breaks at the shore of the Baltic sea in Latvia and it was as beautiful as ever! Somehow I really like the dry sandy beach with pine trees growing all around. I have to admit that I don't remember much about driving in Poland. I guess I was in a kind of trance while driving :L. The autumn colors in Slovakian mountains were absolutely stunning and I probably should have stopped to take a couple of photos there. Hungarian village roads were in pretty bad condition but things got better when I found bigger ones. Inna's colleagues had told her that the roads in Romania are awful but I couldn't disagree more. Apart from a couple of pot holes I didn't find anything to complain about and I was thoroughly enjoying the brightly colored scenery in the Carpathians.

I flew to Texas in August to spend two weeks there. "What is this madness?!" you might ask, and I wouldn't blame you. ID Software has arranged an event called QuakeCon every year for the last 20 years in Dallas, Texas. This year they decided to give us a Quakeworld 2on2 tournament for Quake's 20th birthday with a prize pool of $25000. It was a no-brainer to go :).

The tournament went according to plan and we won the grand final 2-0 with my Norwegian teammate Rikoll. It was great to meet many old and new faces of Quake there in Dallas and to see the enthusiasm of theirs towards the game we all love.

[ Read more > ]

Our victorious 4on4 team in one of the unofficial tournaments held at QuakeCon 2016

I finally continued the Montenegro trip report a bit and I want to finish it before the end of the week. Go and read it here!

Aaaaand done! At least almost! Go and see how the new "Snake Adventure" photo story looks like and let me know what you think in the comments. It's not 100% done yet, but at least there's a story to read and the comment section should work as well. I hope you enjoy the story as well as the photos!

Ah, forgot to mention it here that at the moment you should use either the left and right arrow keys or swipe left or right to navigate through the photo stories. There's a progress bar at the top of the page that shows how many pages there are still left as well.