Never knowingly taking the shorter route

Thought people might like to know my itinerary, at least as far as it is planned. To be honest this is also for my own planning - I need to have a definitive where I am when written down.

(See http://www.seat61.com/Russia.htm#St%20Petersburg)

Sunday 19th August - traveling:

• 18:47 from Waterloo to Brussels. Gets in at 22:07.
• 23:41 to Berlin. Gets in 8:11 on Monday.

Monday 20th August - day in Berlin.

Tuesday 21st, Wednesday 22nd August - traveling:

• 15:24 from to St Petersburg. Gets in 6:18 on Thursday

Thursday 23rd to Tuesday 28th August - time in St Petersburg then Moscow

• Train from St Petersburg to Moscow - probably get an overnight train, taking about 8 hours - book it in St Petersburg

Tuesday 28th August to Monday 3rd September - traveling:

• Leave Moscow at 21:35 on the Tuesday, get in to Beijing at 14:04 on Monday

Monday 3rd to Sunday 9th September - Beijing and Hong Kong.

• Get train to Xian when traveling between the two.

Sunday 9th September - Emily flies home

• May stay a couple more days in Hong Kong, or go back into China for a few days - then heading to Vietnam on the train.

So after that its all to play for, I’ll make it up as I go along.  The next step will probably involve Laos, Cambodia and Thailand, then its off through India, Pakistan, Iran and so on.

So I’m going travelling, then I’m going to be working in foreign parts, so I guess I’ll write a blog. This is, therefore, my first blog post. Well I wrote a travel log when I was away in China etc, but I’m not sure a blog really existed then so I edited the HTML by hand using ssh. Ah, those were the days, all fields round here and so on.

So, what’s my blog going to do? I guess I need to upload text and pictures and people comment and so on in the standard blog manner, but in addition I’d quite like to have the ability to “geotag” my blogs and make some sort of map to say where I’ve been and where I’m going and how I travelled there. It would be good to geotag my photos, particularly if I use flickr, which seems to be the default option.

Well, I’m using wordpress as it seems to be pretty simple to set up and has lots of plugins, so someone will have hopefully written what I want and I won’t have to bother, which would be really useful. I’ve found a reasonable theme which nice and blue, like my eyes (well, bluer than my eyes, but you know) - and it has tabs. Might do my own at some point, but I feel the time investment is probably not worth it right now.

Anyway, I’m obviously only writing this to test out the software as no-one has the link to this yet, so I’m going to stop here. Unless I use the edit feature later. Wonder if I will?