Homeward Bound. What a very pleasant place Brugges turned out to be. A touch smelly, perhaps, but you can’t have eveything; if Mr WanderingWard was 700 years old, he’d probably niff a bit too (some might say that I do now and, after wearing the same jacket for 35 consecutive days, I would have to agree).
Time and motion wait for no man, however, and England beckoned. Well, Farnham did anyway, and we had to be back for househunting by Friday, what with a short week coming up for half term (thanks for reminding me Pete) with only 4 house viewing days. It was with great disappointment that we finally conceded that today was the last day of wandering. We’ve really got into the swing of it and spent even this morning toying with the idea of heading back to Germany for a long weekend instead of coming home. We’ve enjoyed the whole experience enormously – more than any other holiday – such variety and so many beautiful and/or fascinating places, not to mention the eager anticipation of what the next place is going to be like (and we’ve only been let down a couple of times by the odd crap hotel or dodgy area, which is quite a good batting average for so many places in quick succession). The kids have also been very good. Long, long days for them. Usually up at around 8:00 and bed seldom before 10:00. Twice we’ve been 9+ hours in the car on one day, and several more 5+.
But, in the end, the head had to rule the heart so it was Gut Bij (?!) Brugges, bonjour Calais. We learned excatly no Flemish in our brief stay there; not even Hello or Goodbye. Everyone, but everyone, speaks English there and they only have to look at you once and the “Hello” is out in the right language. Can we really look that English ? God forbid they should think we were Americans. Anyway, off we went. The big surprise du jour had to be the motorway – Belgium’s other one – smooth, quiet, only 50 meters of contraflow; obviously their resurfacing programme has started and probably finished with the route that goes in the direction of the Minister for Transport’s house. After no more than 60km we were in France and the same again to Calais. We’d been there before and had no intention of returning, it being one of the least pleasant places in this quadrant of the Galaxy, so a beach was sought for an hour’s R&R before the boat sailed. And we found one…and a bloody McDonalds. Ah well, just 2 in 35 days…not bad eh ?
By 7pm after a smooth crossing (so much more fun than the Chunnel trains) and a major traffic jam on the A3 Guildford bypass, we were in the hotel in Farnham, kids enjoying a swim, us enjoying the conversation of the couple in the next door room – interconnecting door without soundproofing – they’re really going to enjoy the snoring later (did I mention that, allegedly, I snore ?).
So, that’s pretty much it for wandering and blogging. I can honestly say that doing this blog has been fun and the wandering would have seemd quite different without it. The 10 minutes or so each evening was quite a good way to relax and consolidate the days events. So, just leaves me to say a huge thank you to a few folk:
Firstly, Malcolm, Pete and Alex at TriSystems for agreeing to me being away for such a long break.
Then, Alex again for setting up the Blog and foisting it on me.
Lastly, to all of you readers who have between you hit the site over 3000 times in the past 5 weeks.
I shall sign off with a few boring statistics, if I may:
Total distance covered in the car: 4,057 miles
Average MPG: 27.5
Countries visited: France (3 times), Switzerland (twice), Italy, Austria, Belgium and Germany (albeit very briefly)
Major places visited: Bayeux, Paris, Geneva, Mont Blanc, Rome, Pompeii, Venice, Salzburg, Vienna, Brugges (OK, and Disneyland).
Favourite places: Pompeii (and Positano, where we stayed), Alpbach (Austrian Tyrol)
Least favourite place: Lake Constance
Favourite Country: Austria (despite the rather odd toilets)
Favourite Museums: The Louvre, the Modern Art Museum in Rome.
Hotels stayed in: 15 (not counting UK)
Digital pictures taken (after deleting the really awful ones): 2,588
Video footage taken: 2 hours (miserable eh ? It’s very hard to video and sightsee)
Postcards sent: 70+
Quickest Postcards: from Gerardmer, France, 2 days
Slowest Postcards: from Rome, not yet arrived after 3+ weeks.
That’s all folks. Dunbloggin.
(there’s no more).
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Here’s where we’ve been so far. Around 3,800 miles to get to Brugges by what you might call the scenic route.
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What a nice place. Despite the smell, which is pretty much everywhere on account of a drainage system that the Romans would have considered a tad dodgy, this is a most agreeable place. Rather like Venice in some ways – obviously rather canal-focussed but more in the sense that it’s rather like a living museum. And there are more Americans here than anywhere else we’ve been, including America.
First thing, it was a boat trip. Luckily, several hundred retired Americans in front of us in the queue, collective gross weight 73 tonnes, poured themselves into the previous boat, leaving it dangerously low in the water but the driver was brave and looking forward to a hefty tip, so off they lurched. We got the next one to ourselves with an English couple and a small bunch of French geriatrics. The driver/guide was a hoot with a wonderful sense of humour and, he claimed, fluency in French and English, so did the whole 30 minutes alternating the two languages with no change in tone, just words. His impression of an “R” sound was a wonder to behold with a full fluttering of the tongue against the teeth which went on for at least 5 times the necessary length. “Theeees cathedrrrrrrrrrral is rrrrrrreally old”. “Veeeeee ‘ave beeeeeen dominated by the French, the Spanish, the…...evereeeeeone has dominated us”, “veeee are rrrrrrrroman catholics because of theeeeeeee domination by theeeeeee Spanish, so eeeeet is not ourrrrrrrrrrr fault”, “theeee women go there to talk and they talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk….heeeeee heeeeee” and “veeeee like theeeee errrrrrrrrrrring feeeesh heeeeere” (yes, herring). Hysterical. Huge tip.
Next, to avoid any notion of exercise, it was off for a horse & carriage ride, except we walked the wrong way and, as the sun was out by then, were quite knackered by the time we got one. One marked difference between here and Salzburg is the horse “exhaust” collection method. Now, the streets of Brugges are paved with cobbles and, despte the awful niff everywhere, are pretty much horse poo free on account of the rather clever device shown in the photo below which collects the poo as it is, er, delivered. Clever stuff; no sad fellowes pedaling trikes here.
Then it was a quick visit to the Diamond Museum, which cost nearly as much to get into as to buy outright, and then we ran out of time. As this is theoretically our last day, we have also run out of time wandering Europe and this is not impressing us much at all, so we are sat here in the bar of the Hotel Stink trying to decide what to do next – home or not. Not that we’ve got a home, of course. The Not option is winning at the moment.
Watch this space.
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Pikkies below…...hurry now….first come, first served
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Why ? Search me. Every story, as you will no doubt remember from the very earliest lessons at school, needs a beginning, a middle and an end. Well, you’ve had the beginning and a rather large amount of middle and it’s about time now for the end, which was chosen to be Belgium. Why ? We have little clues to offer other than that it’s close to Calais and it’s not France.
As I know that at least two almost-Belgians are reading this nonsense (hello Peter and Alex), I have to select my words very carefully indeed. I already knew, for instance, that Belgium is a very nice place replete with some very nice folks, as I learnt when worked in Brussels for some while, and I also knew that not all their heroes were invented by Agatha Christie but, like most of you, I can put neither name nor face nor profession nor achievement to them. It was perhaps this lack of knowledge of a country so rich in variety that led us here on the final stages of our Grand tour d’Europe.
The journey started in Gerardmer, Alsace, at around 10:30 this morning, having said our final farewels to the excellent team at Le Manoir au Lac, purchased the obligatory pots of jam (we will need an import licence for the amount of “home produce” we’re lugging back home), re-arranged the car’s contents and shoehorned the kids into place. Our plan was to head north to Liege, where our book made mention of a noteworthy Modern Art gallery and War Museum, spending one night there before moving on to Brugges to mix it with the American tourists.
Liege is a long haul from Alsace, so a short stop was made at a rather nice place called Arlon, a few kilometers from Luxembourg, which hosts a very good, if rather small, museum of Roman and Gaulish (?) artifacts from the 1st century AD. The motorway was closed to Luxembourg which prevented us from chalking up (cheating) another country on the list (as we did with Germany, unsuccessfully visiting Neuschwanstein), the diversion taking us straight into the Belgain region of Luxembourg (which, as you know, is not the independant state of Luxembourg which lies to the east of it).
While on the subject of motorways, I can enlighten you to a new fact learned only today about Belgium. They have utterly appalling motorways. OK, they are long, very straight and very fast. But they are mostly surfaced with something rather like a ploughed concrete field. They are, without a doubt, the noisiest, bumpiest, most pot-holed and most fatiguing roads to drive on anywhere in Europe. Even the dismal dirt-tracks that Italian psychopaths hurl their turbocharged Fiat Ducato vans around on are surfaced better than these.
Anyway, after 1 hour of gazing in the museum, we were reinvigorated and set off for Liege, the theory being that we could head for the Best Western close by and snare a couple of rooms at short notice. Firstly, we hit Liege at 16:30, a.k.a. Rush Hour, and it was hell. Secondly, although we have had almost no trouble finding any hotels so far, even in cities ten times as big as this one, this hotel proved completely unfindable, so after an hour of touring what has to be one of the ugliest, traffic-infested pits in northern Europe, Mr WanderingWard had a weapons-grade tantrum (possibly a 7 or 8) and declared in somewhat colourful language, not unilke French, that Liege was cancelled. The car was pointed in the general direction of Brussels and off we went…to a motorway services to feed the kids who’d been in the car now, unfed, for some 7 hours. Following the ingestion of their version of food, Brugges was reached within 2 hours. 9 hours en voiture. The kids did a marvelous job (as did the DVD player).
The hotel, a 4-star Best Western (chosen on the “it’s our last couple of nights so we can splash out a bit” principle, is a dump of the highest order, stinking of blocked drains from basement to bedrooms – so much so that we had to change the kid’s room for one that smelt less like a sewer); Worst Western would be a more appropriate name. The girls had a swim in the pool (which is slightly larger than a bath and only marginally cooler) after which we went to the bar for a drink and a game of cards, wherein a ghastly American couple whose vocal prowess makes even this writer’s foghorn of a voicebox pale into mouse-like insignificance, were bellowing down a mobile phone at seemingly infinite numbers of witless family members back home, variously updating them of events and telling them how to operate the washing machine and the electric garage door.
Sightseeing tomorrow. Can’t wait.
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