Sorry there was no blog or picture yeaterday. That was because I ended up spending much of it ordering, collecting and setting up a new laptop. I’ve mentioned that my old one was ready for the knackers yard, but getting its replacement turned into a bit of a saga as I ordered it direct from Dell, who gave me the run-around, leading me to cancelling my order. That actually worked to my advantage as I ended up getting exactly the same model that I’d spec’d from Currys, £350 cheaper and 10 days earlier!

My local Currys had several Dell XPS laptops in stock so I was able to pick it up just a couple of hours after ordering and paying for it. OK, it didn’t come with a charger, but I’ve ordered one off Amazon at a damned site less cost than Dell would ching me for one of their branded ones!

It’s nearly seven years since I last had to set up a new laptop and the process is a heck of a lot simpler now – especially as so much of my stuff it Cloud based, not sitting on the hard-drive of another machine. I could copy down stuff within a few hours with the machine up and running in no time. Oh, there’s a few software programs I still need to re-install, but they’re not urgent.

So, now I have a machine that I can rely on again which will allow me to catch up on picture editing and other work without having to consider the idiosyncracies of an ageing machine. Talking of which, whilst my new bit of kit was sorthing itself out, I managed to edit another batch of ‘grand tour’ pictures on a reserve laptop. Latvia is now complete and so is Lithuania. Here’s links to Latvia’s rail and travel galleries, whilst the links to Lithuania’s train and travel galleries are here and here. Meanwhile, I’ve done the first edit of my pictures from Poland, which are in the queue to be checked and captioned next.

The weather here in the Calder valley’s been pretty wet and miserable these past couple of days, which means I’ve not missed much being stuck indoors. I’ve still managed to get out and rack up some steps but nothing like what I was doing whilst I was in Europe. Hopefully I’ll have broken the back of the European pictures by the end of the week which should free me up for some other activities next week. The autumn leaves are turning some gorgeous colours right now and I’d love to get out with the camera whilst they’re still hanging around.

In the meantime, here’s today’s picture, which is from Poland and the old city of Warsaw which has been beautifully restored after the terrible devestation it (and its people) suffered in 1944.

I’ve a small favour to ask…
If you enjoy reading this or any of the other blogs I’ve written, please click on an advert or two. You don’t have to buy anything you don’t want to of course – although if you did find something that tickled your fancy that would be fab! – but the revenue from them helps me to cover some of the cost of maintaining this site (which isn’t cheap and comes out of my own pocket). Remember, 99% of the pictures used in my blogs can be purchased as prints from my other website – https://paulbigland.zenfolio.com/

Cheers,

Paul