Day 1 – Collecting People
Wow, its that time of year again. X’24 has come around so quickly. This year after many emails and much discussion I decided that I would take my own car for the journey. Originally I was going to get a train to Newcastle to meet Mibri and then Conrad would come and collect us from the Metro. After thinking about it, it did not make sense logistically to do this (and the fact that we were going to hire a car was incurring even more costs). We chatted via email and formulated a plan, which I then feed into google maps and decided a time and location to collect Mibri, then after a short drive to collect Maestro and Conrad.
After this it was on to Hull to get the overnight ferry to Rotterdam. Which would mean beers and pizza on the boat.
Day 2 – Lets go to Someren & Asten
I woke up around 6:30am, or was it 7:30am ? being that we were now in Europe 1 hour ahead. After a quick wash we headed out for breakfast, settling on the main restaurant and paying an extra £13 (which for me was a total waste of money as I only had 2 croissants and a banana – I don’t travel very well on the sea even if it is calm).
Owen had very cleverly booked us express parking which meant we were the 4th car to depart the ferry. Although I drove in the UK, Owen very kindly offered to drive in the Netherlands. I think he wanted something to do and travels better like this.
The drive to Someren was very straight forward, leaving the ferry around 9am and arriving at the X hall just after 11am.
Day 3 – Lets Party
Saturday was the main party day. Although the numbers were down on last year by over 100 for me this was a better number of people. Last year was record breaking and historic for all the best reasons, but I felt there were just to many people in attendance and it was a case of Hi, how are you?, before moving on to the next person.
This year people seemed to have a lot more time to stop and chat, I took time out from party coding to spend time with some people and have nice in-depth conversations with them.
The Hotel
I know the fee for X includes somewhere to sleep, but once again this year I opted for a hotel in nearby Asten with the rest of the PADUA crew. I thought I would show some images from the actual hotel so you could see what it was like.
Day 4 – Goodbye X’24
Sunday morning I woke up at 8am, had a shower and heading for breakfast with the other PADUA guys. We heading back to the X venue to say our final good bye before we all go out separate ways.
We decided we would visit the computer museum in Helmond again, then go for a drink with Franky at a local micro brewery. Outside the museum I twisted my ankle on the gap between the pavement and cycle-path. I hobbled on to the micro brewery and had a really nice blonde beer, followed by an amazing Aberdeen Angus beef burger with chunky chips and for desert ice-cream with chocolate flakes. We chatted for a while then walked back to the car where I have some ibuprofen and Conrad drove us to Rotterdam to catch the ferry.
All was going so well, we had remarked that the traffic had been good to us in both England and also in the Netherlands …. Until we got closer the Rotterdam, the satnav showed a broken down vehicle, we were then passed by 2 unmarked police cars and we counted 4 breakdown vehicles. So we got ourselves prepared for a little delay. However when we got past the location on the satnav, the traffic in our lane was gone so we continued freely to the ferry port and onto the boat. I took some tablets for my ankle, grabbed a snack and heading straight to bed.
Woke up Monday morning, feeling not to bad. We skipped the expensive breakfast on the boat and decided that we would stop at Ferry-bridge services to get some food. I was OK to drive, my ankle was twinging a little but it was not painful so I was able to give Conrad a break from driving.
Below are some of the party releases, If you want to see them all check out the page of CSDB.
For Videos from X’2024 see the Transmission 64 youtube channel.
