But I did know then…

As I climed up the viewing tower in the Killesberg Park I remembered the last time I had assended it.

That was back in 2005 and a couple of days of increadibly hot and humid weather were just about to very spectacularly end.

I can remember getting about halfway up and watching the thunderstorm race across the sky.

At the time, in my diary I even wrote “With even my a basic understanding of science I realised that standing at the top of a large metal object in the middle of an open space during a thunder storm is not particularly cleaver, so I quickly descended”

Which in hindsight is actually a silly thing to have done.

True, I managed to make it to the café so I didn’t get absolutely soaked, but in terms of physics I actually put myself into a more dangerous position.

I would like to take this opportunity to point out that I am fully aware of Faraday Cages and standing inside a structure made entirely out of metal during a thunder storm is actually about the safest place to be as anything that does strike it is deflected away from you by the structure:

Wikipedia definition of a Faraday Cage

However, the fact that it’s completely open to the elements would have meant I would have gotten a soaking!

The rain in Spain falls mostly on Jerez de la Frontera

OK, once was odd, but twice is really rather strange.

Yesterday the weather in Jerez was pretty poor, in fact it was dire, with the rain ranging from heavy mist through drizzle to downpour every 20 minutes or so. By the time you went anywhere you were soaked, and the sandy soil in the Alcazar was closer to quicksand than paving material quality.

However, by the time I got to Cadiz in the early afternoon it looked as though it had never rained, the skies were clear blue and the weather was warm.

Perhaps is hadn’t rained out here?

Well today the same thing happened again, weather in Jerez very wet, weather 20 miles away in Cadiz gloriously sunny.

Well it looks pretty

I’d admit that the snow looks pretty, but unfortunately, it’s a bit difficult to see the beauty of the snow when it’s completely ruined your travel plans.

15 minutes after it was due to depart BA officially cancelled my flight, though with the cunning use of the internet I’d found this out 10 minutes earlier, and as I was leaving the terminal they had only just started the announcements that the flight was cancelled.

So, instead of enjoying a Bratwurst and some Glühwein in the Christmas market in the Römer, I’m having an Indian takeaway and some Orange juice at home.

Still, I’m not going to be defeated.

Part two of the trip was Birmingham, so I’m heading there in the morning (assuming that Southern can be bothered to run a train service to get me into London), I’ve got a really good deal on a last minute hotel room in the city centre

I’m suspecting the deal may be because someone who should have been spending the weekend in Birmingham but is trapped in Germany because we can’t handle the snow. In which case, can I recommend the All Seasons Hotel in Frankfurt. Not actually been there, but the staff were really helpful and friendly when I had to cancel my booking!

So, it’s less a tale of two Christmas markets, and more a tale of slightly longer in one than I was planning.

Still, it could be worse. I could have gotten stranded in Germany for Christmas if the weather had continued this badly

I could still get stranded in Birmingham…

When carol singers go bad

On the way up to the station I had to pass the Carol singers who have been standing outside East Croydon for the last fortnight or so collecting for charity.

They were singing the same part of a carol over and over again

“Let it snow, let it snow”

Well they got their wish

Within a couple of minutes of going past them it was merrily snowing.

And City Airport where I was flying from was merrily closing its runway.

Remind me not to give to Carol singers again…

What a difference a day makes....

...24 little hours. At 20:30 last night I was walking along the edge of the Piazza San Carlo trying to avoid getting soaked looking at a completely empty square.

Tonight, with the last of the evening sun having faded away, but the warmth still in the air, the square was heaving, with lots of people sitting at the cafe’s and restaurants, including me at a particularly pleasant (if slightly expensive) restaurant at the southern end.

This feels much more like Italy!

Thank you for the architecture

Turin is a grand city, full of arcades, piazza’s and squares.

However, on a particularly foul Friday night, I think it was the arcades that I found most interesting, or should that be useful.

It’s incredibly easy to get around the centre of Turin in a hefty downpour without getting absoultly soaked thanks to all the arcades. The only time you actually have to get wet is the short dash across a road on a green man.

Despite all the arcades it doesn’t stop the local street merchants trying to sell their wears, which tonight appeared to be exclusively umbrellas.

I can only assume that there is a warehouse somewhere on the outskirts of Turin which has weather appropriate items in store for the vendors (though it should be pointed out that I don’t think these are licensed by the Torinesi town fathers!) and that at some point this afternoon the cry went up, rain clouds coming, fetch the umbrellas.

Still, they appeared to be doing a brisk trade, which seamed a little pointless, given all the arcades.

An ode to chambermaids

This morning when I left the hotel I opened the window in my room to try and let some air in to try and keep it a little bit cool, given the weather was forecast to be slightly warm.

When I got back late this evening I was slightly concerned as I approached the hotel to see that the window in my room had been shut. How boilingly hot was my room going to be.

So imagine my surprise, and delight, when I opened the door and stepped into a veritable fridge.

At some point in the morning when the chambermaids had been round to make up the room they had obviously realised that having the window open wasn’t going to help keep the room cool, so they had closed the window, drawn the curtain to keep the sunlight out and then whacked the air conditioning on arctic.

I dread to think what it has done for the carbon footprint of Ibis, but frankly, after a day of 35C+ temperatures and humidity bouncing around the 90’s I couldn’t really care!

So to the chambermaids at the Ibis in Bonn, thank you

An average is just that

The average rainfall in Malaga in March is just 62mm (just over 2 inches). This compares favourably with a number of other places such as Bergen in Norway which has 109mm.

However, what you never get from these figures is that you can achieve that monthly average in one sitting.

Today I was given a demonstration of this with a quite spectacular downpour in the early afternoon.

Call it an inbuilt British sense of impending rain, I had taken the decision to stop for some late lunch rather than go directly to the Picasso museum and within a few seconds of sitting down in the dry the skies absolutely opened.

It is a horribly schadenfreude thing to do, but it is quite fun to sit in the dry and watch everyone one else suddenly have to dash for cover.

Of course, it took nearly 40 minutes for the downpour to abate, which meant I just had to have a largish lunch, with some tapas, and a beer, and some coffee, and think about desert...

Heavy Snow

Is falling somewhere in Britain tonight, but its not in North Wales.

As the train entered Wales the clouds started to clear, and as we ran along the edge of the North Wales Coast sunlight was sparkling off the still sea and the distant wind farm.

By the time I got to Holyhead this had turned to haze rather than full sun, but it was still better than had been predicted.

Of course, I know I am just being lulled into a false sense of security and by tomorrow evening will be suffering from acute trench-foot.

However, this evening, with the blue sea lapping gently on the beach, the sun setting behind Holyhead mountain and the light breeze rustling the ropes on the masts of the sailing boats in the Marina it was easy to forget that less than a week ago it took me more than 10 times the normal length of time to commute into work because of the snow.

And then I was woken out of the relaxing picture of the sun, sea and light breeze by the sound of a jet fighter roaring overhead as it headed back into RAF Valley on the edge of Anglesey.

Why Holyhead in January?

This is a question which I have started to ask myself over the last week or so as I’ve been keeping an eye on the weather.

I booked last June based on the last couple of years when January has been crisp, cold at times, but generally very dry.

I thought that there might be a pattern developing, that January might be becoming a very good month to visit the UK.

Then the Met Office started to jinx it all

First they predicted that 2009 was going to be a barbeque summer with long hot days.

“The UK is "odds on for a barbecue summer", with no repeat of the washouts of the last two years, according to Met Office forecasters.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8026668.stm

Queue one of the dampest summers on record.

Then they predicted that the winter was going to be mild, queue the worst winter in 30 years.

So I shouldn’t be surprised that the weather has taken a turn for the worst, and earlier this week the predictions were for “Continuous Torrential Downpours across Wales with the potential for serious flooding”

As my train leaves Crewe the weather forecast has been upgraded to light showers and some sun later in the week, so I’m expecting snow drifts!

The British Disease continues

Today, wandering back to the hotel through the station, I noticed that again the trains were all running with massive delays (actually what I first noticed was the massive long queue to the information kiosk which alerted me to the fact that something might have been up).

I really wasn’t expecting there still to be problems, I would have thought that they could have got it sorted out, but obviously no.

The idea of Privatising the railways in the UK was to make them more responsive and more like the German railways, Deutscher Bahn now even own a couple of the companies that run trains in the UK. Sadly, it looks as though the process is working in the wrong way, and the UK’s inability to cope is now spreading through Deutscher Bahn and back into Germany itself.

The British disease is spreading

It’s heartening to know that it’s not just the Brits who can be crippled by some wintry weather in, well winter.

Normally I would have thought that snow is so common in Germany that they would have the infrastructure in place to be able to deal with even relatively heavy snowfall.

So it was somewhat surprising to see that Dusseldorf Airport had been closed for the whole of the day, and when I got to Nuremberg, that most of the trains were running with delays in excess of 30 minutes, in some cases up to two hours late (yes, that’s right, a German train running spectacularly late!)

Of course, the UK grinds to a halt when there is 2.4mm of snow, it was almost 24cm of snow that had fallen on Dusseldorf.

Glad I chose Southern Germany

For the last two years I have been going to Belgium for my pre-Christmas trip. I had originally been planning to go again this year, but back in February I got an email from Air Berlin with a spectacular offer on flights to Nuremberg just before Christmas, so I changed my plans and decided to go there instead.

And now, as I sit in the departures lounge at Stansted Airport I am feeling very fortunate that I did make that decision

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8422978.stm

If I had gone to Belgium I wouldn’t have been on one of the trains that got stuck for 16 hours, but I would have been caught up in the ensuing chaos, if not on my journey out, on my return.

And if that didn’t vindicate Nuremberg as a destination the fact that all the airlines are merrily cancelling flights to Dusseldorf and Cologne because the runways are closed (and there were people in the queue as I checked in trying to get there to get trains back into Belgium!).

My flight, on the other hand, is currently running 7 minutes late on its arrival into Stansted, so I’m hopeful of a, as close as possible, on time departure. Of course, this could be massive hubris and I am about to spend the night camping in Essex rather then in Bavaria!

I might have fibbed when I was 17

But I didn’t actually Lie, so why, when I go to Bath, does it always rain on me?

Earlier this week I had to go to Bath for a work meeting.

This is the first time I have stayed overnight in Bath since my fateful visit in 2002 when the online booking site had got a mix up between BA2 (the postcode for just outside the centre of Bath) and BS2 (the postcode for the outskirts of Bristol) and ended up with me trudging through the streets of Bath late on a Friday evening trying to find a hotel.

Thankfully, on this occasion the hotel not only existed, but they also had a note of my reservation.

What they couldn’t change was the fact it was raining, drizzly slightly on the evening, but still damp.

By the following morning it was bucketing it down, and for a few patches where it eased down to a drizzle (which thankfully coincided when I had to leave the hotel to go to the meeting and then again when I left the meeting for the station) it did it for the whole day.

It rained all the time when I was in Bath in 2002.

It rained for the 20 minutes I visited Bath whilst changing buses on my way back to Bristol in 2007.

I am obviously destined to only ever experience rain in Bath.

Though thinking about it, there might have been a couple of lies...

Advanced Meteorology

Not much to blog today, I’m trying to dry myself out after another day of getting soaked.

Some important facts learnt today:

• The top deck of an open top bus does not provide much protection when the heavens open, and in the time it takes to run from the back of the bus to the stairs and down them you can still get soaked.
• The sun deck of a river cruise boat does not provide much protection when the heavens open...

You get the drift.

On the plus side though, I have started to be come very good at spotting when a shower is brewing up, looking at the clouds to see how they are forming and, more importantly, seeing when the local start diving for shop doorways and other cover.

You can tell the tourists who have only just arrived, they are the ones in the shorts and t-shirts who look at you strangely as everyone dives for shelter moments before a cloudburst.

You become an expert by day two.

Meteorology for beginners

Water evaporating from the sea rises into the atmosphere and condenses back into clouds. As these clouds move from being over a cool ocean to warm land the cloud becomes unstable and releases its water content in the form of either Rain, Hail or Snow.

When you have a large body of water (picking something entirely at random, lets say the Atlantic), and it hasn’t met any land for a long time it’s likely to have built up into quite large clouds.

So with this knowledge, why did I come to Galway, about the most westerly city in Europe (ignoring Iceland as its so much closer to North America there isn’t nearly as much ocean) without either a rain coat or an umbrella.

In the space of 5 minutes it went from clear blue sky to torrential downpour (the only saving grace being the conveniently positioned bus shelter and the sense as I walked past it to look up and think, this probably isn’t just a few spots).

And it keeps happening. In the less than five hours I’ve been in Galway I’ve had to dive for cover from half a dozen hefty showers, and delayed leaving the hotel because it was coming down so heavily that I could barely see the other side of the car park.

Still it is my own fault; I did know it would probably be a little damp...

Weather to agree...

Last night I caught the weather forecast at the end of the local news programme for the “BBC in NE and Cumbria”. The forecast appeared to be relatively OK, except for the massive rain belt that was hanging over southern Scotland, making Edinburgh look like it was in for a very wet day. Not what I really wanted to see, but as the regional news programme stopped at the border, nothing north of the border is discussed, especially not on the weather, I just resigned myself to getting wet.

Straight after the regional news and weather the BBC have a national weather forecast. At which point I started to get very confused.

The national weather forecast for the NE region was the same as the one on the regional news, but the massive downpours which had been deposited across southern Scotland on the local forecast had disappeared on the national. Instead it was going to be grey and overcast, with the odd spot of rain, but not the torrential downpours forecast just moments earlier.

I can only assume that in the NE region they get quite protective of their good weather and try and make it look like nobody else is having any.

That or the weather presenter had let the Work Experience trainee plot the graphics for them.

You’ve got to feel sorry for the Swiss.

It’s the Swiss national day, and after four weeks on unbroken sunshine with glorious temperatures and light winds, you would have thought they could enjoy another beautiful day.

But, it hasn’t been, certainly not in Interlaken, and looking at the weather forecast, not anywhere else in the region.

The rain has varied between just about liveable drizzle to the kind of torrential downpours that normally only happen once every few months, not four times in one day.

But, being the hearty Swiss types that they are, they are all out celebrating, and getting damp.

The fireworks start in the centre of Interlaken in about two hours. I’ve already checked. I should be able to get a pretty good view from my room’s balcony, where it is dry, and warm, and not a muddy field.

Still, they all still appear to be happy, if the number of fireworks being set off is anything to go by.

If you didn’t know it was National day, you would swear that civil war had broken out, but then again, this is Switzerland, and they have never had a civil war...

An Ode to AirCon

I’ve just wandered down to breakfast, and on the way walked passed an open door. I thought for a moment that a heater must be on the blink as the wall of heat that engulfed me for a second or so was un-imaginable.

Just in case I decided on a closer look and discovered that the source of the heat was approximately 8 light minutes away being the large glowing object currently rising high into the sky.

On walking back into the hotel I was hit by the cooling sensation of air-con set to “freeze” mode.

I dread to think what it has done to my carbon footprint (ignoring on the one had the obscene number of flights I make and on the other the fact I have never owned a car), but with the temperatures, and more importantly the humidity at these levels at 9am I am glad for AirCon.

Aspirational, but wrong

Well, I finally arrived in Warsaw, a little bit late. Once again the Polish railways strike, and they had been doing so well. The train was to all intents and purposes on time when it arrived in Gdansk, pulling into the station just 10 minutes after it’s advertised departure time

Sadly, something (I think in Britain it would be referred to as “a-delay-on-a-preceding-train-in-the-Warsaw-area”) held the train up and we eventually pulled into Warsaw Centralny station just over 55 minutes late. I was the lucky one. I was the last to join my compartment at Gdansk, and the first to leave. As the train had started at 6am in the very North West of the country, and was continuing onto Krakow, I didn’t bear to think how late it would be by the time the final passengers got off.

To add to my fun, and in a repeat of Gdansk, albeit this time I didn’t get caught out, as I walked out of the station there was a massive clap of thunder and the heavens opened.