I'm sorry to say that my nights are so short that I cannot find the time to blog in English...

Reports and adventure stories have to follow later :-/

Don't worry, pictures will follow as well :)

--
Martijn

Saturday is the day of the "Prologue". Each equip starts in order in batches of 5 (motorcycles and quads), 4 (cars) or 3 (trucks) vehicles.

Immediately in the first batch, one car turned over completely in a corner, it was quickly put on it's 4 tires by a bunch of people.


After a while, it was our turn (in the "cars" section) as number 248. Slowly, we were getting anxious as we have been watching people on the track and there were some nasty surprises. At the start, 3 vehicles were to the left of us, all of them small and much faster than ours.

The referee counted down: 5, 4, 3, 2, eins, GO! We reffed up and sped to the first corner, a rather nasty curve dug in the soil. There happened to be quite a few nasty surprises: slippery concrete, gravel with large rocks, small steps and alternating small hills. The Unimog squeaked and cracked but stood its ground.

We were shaken, but enjoyed ourselves a lot.

For us, the prologue ended in just over 19 minutes, we were glad, excited and thrilled that we finally were able to participate in "Die Breslau". And we made it through the first day (unlike some others). Tomorrow, it's the show-start in the middle of Dresden and then our first connecting stage and a few more laps on a track, but without the speed factor.

On Monday, this will all start for real with long stages and increasingly difficult navigation. We can't wait!!

We decided to start loading Wednesday evening and leave at 06:00 on Thursday morning. We finished loading just after twelve at night, went home, took a shower etc and went to bed. It took me a while to fall to sleep and I remembered that I had to change something in a small web-application that I made. At 05:00 I got up, fired up the PC and started programming. Unfortunately, I ran into a bug/missing feature in IBX and got the dreaded "unknown SQLDA" thingy. I finally fixed it and all was well.

We went to Frank (from the other car) and noticed that quite some stuff had to be done :-(

Eventually, we left at 07:00 but ran into problems with the trailer. At 08:00 we managed to get out of town, for real this time.

Due to the heavy load, our top speed was 80 km/h, truck-drivers got a bit annoyed, but hey, we couldn't help it.

At about 300 kms to go, one of the tires of the trailer blew, damn. Our spare-tire turned out to be of a slightly different size, so we tried to get another good tire but none was to be found in the towns nearby.


In the end, we attached the slightly bigger spare anyway and drove to Dresden where we arrived at 21:30. Time to set up the tent and start the barbecue!

The rallye camp site was still quite empty and it was getting dark soon. We were pretty tired, but found time to say "Hello" to a few friends before we went to bed.

There's never a silent time at such a camp, we learned that when we went to visit the Prologue last year. I got up at 08:00 and it took me a while to get "fresh" after that. Breakfast was good so we were off to registration... It was slow and they had mistaken us for a "LKW" (Last-Kraft-Wagen) while we are a "PKW" (Personen-Kraft-Wagen) so some things had to be changed there.

We got a small selection of sponsor-stickers that we put on the car. The "technische abname" was no problem for our car, everything was fine, including required equipment. After lunch and finalizing lots of small things there was some time to take some photos. And a few more. At about 18:00, we got our starting number: 248. Franks number is 201...

While going through the heavy road book, we saw that we're crossing the border either Sunday evening or Monday morning and have to break up from Dresden at Sunday morning for a connecting stage of 90 kms before reaching the new site.

The rallye camp is filling up and more people that we know from our short visit last year or otherwise showed up.



On the camp-site picture, you can see our "flag of Brabant" (red-checkered flag).

Time to go nighty-night and catch some sleep for tomorrows prologue!

We're packing, sorting, selecting spare parts, packing, gone grocery shopping, preparing and getting ourselves ready.

My living room is a total mess, on the other hand, the two sheds have been cleaned out a bit :)

We're leaving on Wednesday to Thursday night, we hope to arrive in Dresden somewhere late in the afternoon. Then we've got plenty of time to unpack, set up the tent(s) and prepare the vehicles for the technical check on Friday afternoon.

Ooh, are we excited? Yes, we are!

For (more) pictures, always check the Team Brabant-Breslau website!

Laters...

Although the weather is starting to get better outside and we're getting the summer-feeling, we're still inside working hard.

At what? Well, lots of things.

Expect an update for Database Workbench Pro 3 soon, including Sybase Anywhere support as well as other features and a list of bug fixes.

Next, the Firebird Conference 2008 is coming near, as well as the deadline for the "call for papers". We're trying to be there alright so we can have fun, learn and teach things. It's in Italy this year, a country I've never been to so far.

Also, the Advanced Data Generator has received a few feature requests and we'll be working on that as well.

On a personal level, "Die Breslau 2008" is closing in, an 8-day off-road rallye that I'll be participating in. More on that later :)

With regards,

Martijn Tonies