We came back last Sunday from a week away to Disneyland Paris. I thought I’ll share some quick thoughts and stats on the trip part.

We drove roughly 1050 miles, one way. That’s 2100 miles in total. We were in the car for much of 34 hours. We didn’t push it too much and took regular breaks (every 3 - 4 hours). The first leg was hard; 10 hours on the sat nav doesn’t seem too much… but it was!

The hotels we stayed at on the journey to Disneyland:

• Hilton (Hampton) - Frankfurt am Main Airport - Germany (10 hours drive, without breaks)
• Newport Bay (our main hotel for the week) - Disneyland (~ 4 - 5 hour drive from Frankfurt)

The hotels we stayed at on the return journey:

• Radisson Blu (one night before our big journey back) - Disneyland Paris - we opted to stay the day in Disneyland and wouldn’t tempt the journey back until the next day. Gave us an extra full day at the parks. (5 - 10 minute drive from Newport - if you include the turn left traffic light… 20 minutes).
• Hilton - Dresden - Germany. Hotel was OK, dirty city (everything is black). (~ 9 hours drive from Disneyland) - this was a last minute decision as I wasn’t up to drive all day and night back home.

The best driving was in Germany, people just know how to drive there. France was second place, although I don’t get the way they drive there (relaxed and lazy it seems). Poland… worst place in the world to date. I don’t like driving here. It’s the wild west and they disregard any safety (with or without kids). Enough said before I get angry and depressed.

Europe is incredibly beautiful!

Except most of Poland, the fresh air smelled like freshly fertilised fields for most parts of west Germany and east of France.

As expected, we filled the car full of stuff from Disneyland - which would have made flying difficult on this occasion. Driving and staying at the hotels was cheaper than flying 5 fold.

I missed the quality of Polish food whilst away. Best food we had was on the way back during one of our stops… in Poland.

On the first day when leaving to Disneyland, it was 36 degrees Celsius… pretty hot. Even hotter when we stopped for a break. Concrete gets hot!

We refuelled the car twice each way. Happy with that.

Speaking German was funny for me. Good to practice again I guess. I understand everything though. If only I could speak Polish at the same capacity (I’ll never learn - I gave up for this year to learn).

Overall it was a great little trip, although very tiring.

I miss it already. Many childhood memories surfacing! I had to hide my teary eyes as we left Disneyland… even just writing this makes me all teary.

We’ll certainly go back.

It’s been a long time coming, but after nearly 9 years of “life just throws random stuff at you” we’re finally going on a proper holiday.

Yes, true, we obviously had a few days here and there, but we never really been away far from where we were.

To put it into perspective, this is the first real proper holiday since my wife and I got engaged in 2010.

This will be our honeymoon and first trip with our daughter beyond the confines of the local area. When I say holiday, I mean a proper holiday. We obviously moved to Poland when our daughter was young… but that was certainly no holiday!

So, next week, for a week, we’re gonna be in Disneyland Paris.

It’s gonna be a journey in the car of about 1,400km (870 miles). We’re stopping off in Germany for the night and then the next day through to Disney. I’m the only driver in the family, so it’s gonna be great to travel… I love journeys, so this is right up my alley. Also gives me time to think!

We’re setting off Monday morning. Hopefully there will be some nice travel pictures when we’re back.

See you all on the other side.

It’s time to wrap up the development for Gluon. It’s especially important for me as I’m also going to share my new way forward in the coming weeks. But before I go ahead and share that, I want to complete the app (or at least write this post).

There are a few things I want to tackle before launch, namely:

• Posting and reply screens to be re-written and make them way more awesome, that will also include image uploads and… “insert secret feature here”.
• Posting to include MicroPub love - I promised this for launch, so I’m gonna do it.

There are many more little things that need to happen and be fixed, but they’re too boring for you to know about.

I’m also going to make progress on the Android version after the iOS release. It’s at 90% with feature parity so I’ll need a bit more time to work around some limitations that I’m hitting.

Saying that, there isn’t too much interest on yet another third-party Android app for Micro.blog (from what I gather). From what I see, and feel, everyone wants a first-party solution. I’m hoping this happens soon and also hope that Gluon showed that it can be done.

Use the email below to get an invite to Gluon for Android.

I don’t have a release date yet for iOS but will announce it as soon as I know more myself.

Feedback time

As I work on the specific tasks at hand, I’m looking at collecting the last round of feedback. So if you use it, please do let me know if something doesn’t work as expected or if you have any suggestions. You can reach me here: gluon@vincentritter.com.

I do try and reply to everyone that emails me. If I missed someone… sorry!

Anyway, thanks so much for using the app and your feedback to date.