Germany to Australia

Yesterday, Sandy Robson started on her multi-leg, multi-year, kayaking trip from Germany to Australia. Retracing as much as possible the route that Oskar Speck started on 14 May 1932.

I think it is quite an interesting coincidence to have two kayaking expeditions being 'launched' in these past two weeks that have high relevance to the 2nd World War; see also my previous post on the "Engelandvaarders".

Oskar Speck's enormous achievement never made any headlines in his time. He completed his 50.000 km (!) trip while his country was starting the war with the rest of the world and Oskar spent the rest of the war in Australian internment as an enemy foreigner.

(^(\w+\b.*?){2}).*
Above is not hiding a rude word, although that could well be the case while I tried to make an RSS-feed out of Sandy's website expedition update page. To my knowledge, Sandy does not (yet) offer an 'automated' blog-feed on her Expedition website. Using the internet services Open Dapper and Yahoo Pipes I set out to make something out of it and the above piece of Regex code made it work. Not for the fainthearted! I could have pulled all my hair out (if I had any left) to produce myself this magic bit of code that I needed for it to work, to no avail. Luckily I found it on the Internet and thus make Sandy's progress available on my Expedition blog roll. Click on the post title (day) to directly jump to Sandy's Expedition website from the blog roll.

It's a long way there, it's a long way to where I'm going...
(Little River Band)