René's old blog

René's old blog

Whatever I feel like posting, whenever

This site goes back some twenty-five years, so it is bound to be full of stale links and irrelevant information. It is, at best, updated irregularly.

  • I’m in Palermo now. I spent a couple of days in Fertilia, first to make up my mind, then to figure out what to do with all the gear I had there. The first night I slept in the open…

  • As mentioned previously, I have had some problems with my Telecom Italia Mobile prepaid mobile phone account. It ran out of money, I put in €50 and was told my account was still at €0. My assumption was that the…

  • I have a TIM sim card in my mobile phone here in Italy. It’s a pre-paid card, so I have to ‘recharge’ it regularly. I did that today. I bought a €50 card, scratch the field to get the number,…

  • I have the dubious pleasure of using a Vodafone Wi-Fi hots at the Jolly Hotel at Cagliari. It must be the lousiest hotspot I have ever used. I am consistently thrown off every few minutes and association attempts fail three…

  • I have decided stop my journey around Sardinia here in Fertilia. My primary reason for embarking on this trip was to recover from a depression I had after a marital crisis last year. I wanted to get away from everything,…

  • Wendy and I have for some time had disagreements, mostly on questions of time and speed. Our disagreements has proven irreconcilable, and yesterday at Porto Ferro we decided to go on separately. Wendy left before me this morning. I have…

  • We’ve had a hard day on the beach today. The sun was relentless, but we did manage to send several text messages, shave various body parts (apparently Wendy and I have different predilections there), do some laundry and cook an…

  • I’m on a three month kayak journey around the Italian islands of Sardinia and Sicily. Our only computers on this trip are two N800 tablets which we use daily for email, checking weather forecasts and for blogging. They keep us…

  • Paddling is not just aching muscles. It can also be waking up to a beach full of sand looking at derelict old edifices: or being forced to have your morning cappuccino in the wrong kind of cup, eating Sardinian cakes…

  • I have a history of back problems. It is a growth problem from my childhood, my vertebrae are slightly deformed and therefore more at risk of dislocation. When that happens it is pain beyond words. The whole back locks up…

  • We’ve had a very short but active day on the water. We started from Vignola Mare at about nine, in moderate weather conditions. We had a good NE wind, around F4, and some following waves of 1-1½m. We had a…

  • Wendy and I have been blogging quite actively during our time in Sardinia. We’ve been blogging on the beaches, we’ve been blogging in the streets, we’ve been blogging just about anywhere. There are few internet cafés in Sardinia, home internet…