… and no we're not referring to the current Tardis occupant, rather it's the nagging feeling that we're missing something. It's rhythm, or rather the rhythm of a season unfolding before our eyes, week to week. The anticipation of the next story, reaction to the last and, at least during the RTD era, the shaping of what the season is building up to, is all but gone.
I suppose it couldn't help be otherwise, and so this is what a "gap year" is truly all about… the lack of anticipation. If there had been a full season in wing now, we would (as of this writing) be two to four episodes in already. Planet of the Dead felt like a season opener (an overlong season opener) in tone and content, but it's hard to work yourself up for The Waters of Mars 6+ months out.
Still if fandom survived 16+ years with only one televised story to chew on, six months is a breeze.
The Season-o-Specials for 2009 begins with the fun, interesting, but all-too-forgettable 
The THT Brain Trust (OK mainly me) were struck by the news that the second special will not be airing until Christmas, and not during some other, earlier, holiday during 2009. We had naively thought that one of the benefits of this gap year would be to realign, slightly, the season schedule to steer away from spring/summer scheme used since 2005 to a more traditional winter/spring sked, taking inherent advantage of the colder weather when people are more house-bound. It made perect sense for the fourth and last of the Tennant specials to run at Christmas, which is after all when he bowed in 2005, and then have the regeneration lead directly, and quickly, into Matt Smith's first season. Because we're being purely reactive here, more information should clarify this in the days and weeks to come.
It wasn't supposed to happen this way. It had been planned to move to this new shiny spot on March 1st, but after our previous host (sincere thanx to Phenominet for many years of selfless serving of the front end of this site from near-infancy to the leviathan stage) unexpectedly went belly up, we've moved the front end of the site here a little early. Please forgive the rough edges as we're still working out the kinks. Some page index navigation is occasionally wonky and we're still coming to grips with this overdue overhual of the site. Don't be surprised if the layout changes completely once or twice more as we're still doing plenty of experimentation. But behind the front door, all of the Tour content continues where it has been. The new site will be updated with more regularity, and we look forward to more interaction with all of the Tour faithful.
The Tour getting smaller? Yes, and that's a good thing. One of the challenges for managing an image database this big is duplicate-looking images. Try as we might, dupes get into the Tour and are hard to root out. But now we've found a great new tool for finding these images and the result is an overall image reduction of over 300 images. Now that we've cleaned up our act so to speak, we're poised for a new phase of growth. And for that the Tour will need you help. An announcement pertaining to that will follow.