Do not adjust your sets. We haven`t actually moved yet. Here`s the plan. Kiki (other half) and I both work for the investment bank UBS. We`re giving that up, buying a caravan, spending six months travelling around Europe (then I`m going climbing in China for a month) and then getting married in Crete. After that we`re moving to Seattle, where I have a job working for Microsoft. Phew.
We resigned on Monday. It seems that in order to give up your wordly posessions and take up the life of an idle itinerant, you do seem to have to do an awful lot of mundane organising work. We have to rent out the flat, buy caravan, get towbar put on the car, sell two motorbikes and then work out exactly where we`re intending going...
So obviously one of the key things one should sort of whilst getting away from the humdrum monotony of modern society, kicking back your heels and settling down to a simple, humble existence is... erm... work out where you can get an internet connection. Using GPRS will be crackpot expensive and as yet my brother Tony is refusing to defraud T-Mobile out of anything at all, so I think we`re going to resort to something that it seems is called WarDriving. This, as I`m sure you know (!), is the act of driving around with a laptop switched on looking for open networks. There are lots of websites about it, and most of them seem to be much more interested in collecting data about where these networks are than really using them much (they typically wire GPSs into the laptop, and log the coordinates of where the open network was). My plan was much more a "laptop beeps, screetch to halt and download email" one.
It seems the most popular WarDriving software for a Windows PC is called NetStumbler - I`m going to install this and perhaps have a try with it at the weekend.
So I phoned Elephant to find out whether our car insurance would cover us for this trip. It would appear that, while most of the countries we want to visit are actually covered by the insurance (with the rather odd exception of Andorra, and the more understandable one of Russia), Elephant will only cover me for thirty days out of the UK. "Paul" assured me that they were really quite flexible about that, until I told him that I was after something more like two hundred days, and he bowed out gracefully and said I was somewhat out of luck. I realise it`s going to be tricky for Elephant to actually prove that we have been out of the country for a particular length of time, but given that rather a lot of our belongings will be travelling with us I think it`s not really worth the risk. Time to find someone else, and I`m not entirely sure where to look.
It seems there`s a company called Stuart Collins (http://www.stuartcollins.com/index.shtml) - well actually I think it`s one bloke - who write insurance for ex-pats driving UK cars around the continent. I got a quote from him and it`s about 15% more than Elephant, which is a lot less than I thought it might be. My plan is now to switch to them (him) as soon as we leave the country, currently planned for sometime near the end of April. It`s looking less and less likely that we`ll get insurance anywhere that will allow us to drive into Russia, so we might have to get the train from Finland or just skip it.
We`ve agreed to buy a caravan. It was on eBay and we saw it last weekend - when you buy things you don`t understand very much, you tend to buy people as much as you buy items, and Nick and Lila (the current owners) seems nice, straightforward, honest types. After seeing quite a few at dealers, we reckoned that buying from private individuals seemed to give you more of the ancilliary stuff (awnings, alarms, things to transport water around in etc)... the main perk you get from a dealer is a warranty, and given that we`ll be out of the country rather shortly, I don`t see how useful that would be.
We`ve gone a bit over budget, but I think we`ve got something we would be happy to spend a few months living in, which is the main thing...
We booked a ferry crossing yesterday. After a bit of thinking about routes, we have come to the conclusion that we don`t know what our route is going to be. Having never done this sort of holiday before, it`s very hard to tell whether we`ll like zooming 1000km across country and then staying somewhere for a week, or moving on a small distance every day. Perhaps a mixture. Perhaps we won`t like anything at all.
Anyway - we decided that we do at least have to get into continental Europe at some point, so I went ahead and booked a one-way ferry from Dover to Calais on May 1st. Was only £75 including the caravan - I`ve paid more than 180 for a return journey with just the car, so I thought that was pretty good. We`re travelling out on a bank holiday, which might help as I`d imagine it`s not the most popular time to head off.
We`ll have two weeks in the UK beforehand, during which we`ll hopefully begin to get an idea of what style of travelling we like. As a result of not planning an itinerary properly, we`ve no idea really what parts of Europe we`re going to head to - we`re both still very keen to try and get the nordic coutnries in, but it remains to be seen whether we can really manage the distance or not.
All I can tell you now is that we`ll be in France on the 1st of May, and we`ll be in Greece by the 28th of June (because that`s when I have to fly to China).
Caravan picked up! Coldest evening for a while, and Nick and Lila (the previous owners) were remarkeably tolerant of the fact that we all had to make a number plate, and they had to help us hitch it all up.
We drove to Morrison Towers where it`s going to live for the next three weeks, popped down our legs, gave up trying to work the alarm without the instructions or a torch (both at home) and eventually got home at about half midnight. We might roll up on Saturday and poke around it a bit more, but Grant mentioned that he was laying gravel on his drive on Saturday, so I`m not sure it`s a great day for anyone who clearly owes him a favour to turn up at his house.
So I had a go at trail biking with the other unemployed Raes - Dad (retired) and Keith (studying). Was all rather good fun, though a bit more tiring than the other sorts of motorbiking I tried. I couldn`t believe how light these bikes were - just 70 or 80kg - mine weights at least 200kg and it`s not even a big bike. If you`ve only ridden largeish road bikes, it`s very strange to realise the front wheel is slithering out from underneath you, but that you can remedy the whole situation just by poking out a foot and steadying everything back up again. Much more like riding a bicycle than riding a motorbike, I thought.
We did about two hours worth of it, which was plenty for me. Once you`ve got stuck once, the back wheel turns into a sort of wheel-o-mud and the only way you can clean it off again is to get out of the muddy stuff and drive through some water, or some heather or rocks. That`s all well and good, but when the muddy stuff is the next 100m uphill, all you can do (as far as I can see) is get off and push the damned thing at the same time as giving it a few revs. 80kg it might only have been, but somehow it was made worse by the fact that my father tended to have just zoomed up to the top of whatever slithery muck it was, and would be sitting there waiting for me to finish pushing the bike up before he whizzed off up the next mud-river.
Great fun though, and I think it would be a valuable education for anyone who rides a road bike. Unlike the car, I think most of us road-only bikers would have to admit that we haven`t much of an idea of where the edge of traction really is, and what happens once you go past it. Here you get to experiment a bit with that, without the risk of damaging the bike or yourself very much.
And speaking of that, I managed to have two offs, which I think meant I was trying. The first one happened as I followed dad across a damp patch about a foot wide - he whooshed across it in his usual style, and as I went into it I very gently touched the brakes. Which seems isn`t the done thing. The front wheel went into what turned out not to be a damp patch at all, but the remnants of one bored highlander`s attempt to find Australasia. The front wheel vanished completely, the bike stopped, I leapt energetically over the handlebars into a bog and the bike fell over. My second off came just at the end as dad and Keith drove effortlessly down a muddy track to head back to the road, and I headed behind them looking I`m sure like I`d been doing this sort of thing all my life. Until the front wheel hit went into a rut, the bike went left and I continued straight on at a not inconsiderable pace. I bounced a couple of times on my arm (ow), once on my shin (ow ow) and then came to rest when my head (wearing a helmet, thank christ) hit a rather large rock. Apart from the (borrowed) bike steering not exactly straight, we both seemed fine. According to the telemetry data from my Garmin 305 Forerunner thing (will post a link if I manage to create something online) I was doing about 20mph, and my heart rate hit 180. Not sure how useful that knowledge is, but there you are.
Well, so far I`ve had three real days of unemployment - I`m not counting the ones where I was away trail biking in Scotland, as that was much more like a holiday. I`m only counting the ones where I was in London, Kiki was working and I was being a House Husband without any babies to look after.
I had quite a few things I was hoping to do whilst unemployed, and I`ve done terribly badly at them. I`ve completely failed to go to a matinee performance at the cinema - hopefully I`ll manage this later in the week. I`ve failed to drink ANY beer before 6pm, which is frankly embarassing, and even worse I`ve not watch any daytime TV whatsoever, let alone Trishia. The best I can do is claim to have listened to the same episode of the Archers twice, which is pretty hopeless.
I`ve embarassed us further by letting down our gipsy side as well. Not only have we not bought a dog on a string or any burnt mattresses, to my complete chagrin the caravan now has a number plate that`s exactly the same as the one on the car.
Today I sorted out the MOT and put the SV650 on eBay, then looked further into getting my mail redirected (turns out you need more ID than you do to buy a gun in Wal-Mart) and cashed a couple of cheques. Once again, no beer during the day and no TV. I hang my head.
I`m off to dinner this evening at the Reform Club, courtesy of Steve Hemingway, who mentioned that he was a member after a couple of beers one evening and lived to regret it when I harrangued him until he took us. Maybe I can be a sort of New Pikey?
Next Move (the letting agents) have rented out out flat. To three reasonably young blokes, which alarmed us slightly but we actually met them today when they came around to take some measurements and they seemed perfectly nice. Mind you, most young blokes probably seem perfectly nice in these sorts of situations. They were looking for a furnished flat and, of course, while ours is furnished now it won`t be furnished when they move in. We felt rather guilty pointing out all the furniture we were taking with us, but at the end of the day I suppose it`s rather their fault for renting an unfurnished flat when they don`t have any furniture. They`re going to do an IKEA run... I suspect they`ll end up needing more than they think they do, but I`m trying not to feel guilty about it. We`re leaving them the lightshades, some curtains, a bed and a wardrobe. Oh, and the bath/toilet mats. We`ll need to buy more in the US, but as I pointed out to Kiki there`s a reasonable chance they will not bother buying any at all and just pee on the carpet, so leaving them might be considered an investment.
I got a call from Microsoft today telling me that we most certainly shouldn`t be moving house until my visa application was approved. It seems that somewhere down the line the movers and MS got crossed wires, and the movers are all set to pack up the house on Monday - but MS won`t pay for it. They have a rule that prohibits them paying for anyone`s relocation until their visa is approved, which makes sense really. After a few nervous hours MS have agreed that our move should go ahead on Monday, but that if my visa application doesn`t go through we will have to reimburse them. I can`t imagine it`s cheap, but what can I do? We have tenants moving in on Wednesday and there`s precious little chance of us organising anything else.
I can`t imagine my visa won`t be approved (we find out in 15 days, according to the lawyers) but then I`m not wonderfully keen on staking quite so much on it.
Out to Castle Morrison to pack some stuff into the caravan. We took pretty much a whole car-load but it actually all packed away in the caravan remarkeably easily and we should have room enough for another car-load. Which is handy, because we certainly have another one. It`s rather tricky working out what you need for two and a half months living in a caravan, a month climbing and being at three weddings (one of which is yours). Sellotape? Matches? A notepad? Some envelopes? And how many pairs of socks?
Moving house for us has always been a case of hiring a van, stealing some cardboard boxes and getting on with it. Moving house seems to be something of a different business when a corporate is paying for it. Well, hopefully paying for it. Two gentlemen (in suits!) turned up last week to assess how complex our house move was going to be - they explained that pretty much all we have to do is stick labels on the things that aren`t being packed. We don`t need to put _anything_ into boxes.
And today the movers turned up. It`s 12 noon, and already they`ve got the great majority of the house into boxes, dismantled our sofa, taken our sideboard off the wall (after wrapping and packing all the crockery) and they`re in the middle of taking down the bookshelves (which were of course still full of books). Remarkeably efficient. I do think we`ve packed most of what we actually need with us, but the only thing I`m nervous about is those little piles of things we quite clearly meant to take with us, but hadn`t put in the nominated "things we`re taking with us" area of the house. I was ambling along this morning when I realised that my wallet was sitting on the sideboard, about to be put into a box. I alerted Kiki, who is now unable to find her house keys...
Right. We will be in (nights of):
13th-15th April: New Forest, Hampshire
16th-17th: North Devon
18th: Plymouth
19th-20th: Snowdonia
21st-24th (approx): Lake District (Ambleside)
25th (approx)-27th: Edinburgh
28th-29th: Northumberland (Hexham)
30th: Somewhere South a Bit
1st May: France Somewhere
The Lake district is a weekend; Nev Woods will likely turn up for some outdoorsey stuff - we can accomodate a couple of people ourselves but once we`re full you`ll need a tent.
A bicycle made for two
Three days worth of Camping Holiday in Britain and it`s rained reasonably consistently. Must admit it doesn`t entirely seem like we`re getting away from it all - as we chose to start our travels on the Easter weekend, everywhere is mobbed. On the upside, at least we`re not being held up by bloody caravans all the time now.
I know I`m generally metric, but the car puts these figures in miles, and I have to confess to still secretly measuring fuel consumption in mpg. Come to think of it, I`m not even sure what the metric equivalent is.
Distance travelled so far: 160 miles
Average fuel consumption: 18 mpg
Fuel consumption is rather what we expected. In fact, umm, it`s significantly better than my Mazda RX7 was. I think we`re somewhat over the maximum towing weight of the caravan but it`s actually towing fine, probably because the car is fine towing anything up to the size of the average bungalow. Despite horrendous wind yesterday when we started off, towing has generally been okay... I`m not normally nervous driving anything, but it`s taking some getting used to the size of the caravan, mostly when you`ve ended up on a country road with giant ditches on either side and a truck coming the other way. I`m going to have a good bit of practice at this, so I imagine I`ll be an expert just as we get to the countries with the worst drivers.
We had a dinner of Moet & Chandon and Spanikopita (Greek feta cheese pie, as I`m sure you`re aware) last night, to celebrate the start of our jolly. We might have had something a bit more feast-like, if I wasn`t still vegetarian for Orthodox Lent. I`m allowed to eat fish on Sunday, then next Sunday we`re suppose to spit-roast a sheep. I`ve checked the caravan and there doesn`t seem to be any spit-roasting gear included, so we may have to improvise. I`m told a whole sheep isn`t easily purchased in the Lake District, so we may have to stop in at a pet shop on the way and see what they`ve got.
We hired a tandem today. I thought we were going to get about 100m on the thing before having to take it back but actually it was remarkeably easy. We didn`t fall off once, though we had a couple of ungraceful stops. It`s quite a good way to travel as you can balance out the effort during the trip if one of you is an attractive, slender athlete and the other one is a bit dumpy. We followed the prescribed route around 20km, with a rather long pub stop on the way. My attempts to get Kiki to take a photo from the back of it failed, so you`ll have to make do with one of me standing next to it. It`s actually remarkeably good if you`re trying to follow a prescribed route, because the person on the back can read the map. I`m going to try and upload the data from this Garmin Forerunner thing at some point, so you can have the joy of watching exactly what happens to my heart rate when I am sitting eating chips.
We`re off to North Devon tomorrow (Watchett). Autoroute tells me it`ll take two hours, so it`ll probably take three.
Let the words "popular seaside town" stand as a warning. I bet they say that about Southend. In the context of seaside towns, "popular" means that the town has a Butlins, or would dearly like to. For those unaware of what Butlins is, it`s perhaps the nearest thing the Brits have to Disneyland, though depressingly somehow much worse. Whilst Disneyland has months upon end of glorious sunshine and a selection of tasteful themed rides for kids and adults alike in a tastful landscaped garden surrounding, a Butlins venue (for sadly, reader, they are many) is situated on some British excuse for a beach and as the rain passes overhead they alternate between Guess My Brother`s Surname competitions (during the day, for the kiddies) and Beer-Forfeit Fancy Dress Karakoe (in the evening, for the parents). Watchet doesn`t have a Butlins, but its next door neighbour Minehead does, and I bet the Watchites are furiously jealous. All they have is a seafront promenade with an ice cream stall and a couple of gruesome pubs. The sort of pubs that feature white tables, battered faux-leather chairs, TV on Emmerdale with the sound off, more fruit machines than a Las Vegas Wal-Mart and are so brightly lit you think you might have stepped into an interrogation room.
We did have one pint in Watchet. In order to get into the spirit of things, we entered their version of a raffle which involved writing your name in one of a hundred or so numbered boxes on a large piece of paper. As they started the draw, we eyed up the prizes and had a sinking feeling that the small pile of Things We Probably Ought Not To Have Brought was going to have a large faded orange teddy bear added to it. Fortunately not! The large teddy bear was won by someone who looked to me like a twelve-year-old, but as she was smoking she was clearly at least fourteen. She was just about to walk off with the bear when the gentleman drawing the box-numbers out of a hat pointed out that there was some sort of "be sick on vodka jellies" kit that was still to be claimed as a prize, and convinced her to take that instead. We didn`t win anything at all, fortunately.
The caravan site at Watchet was actually rather nice - apart from some (ptooey) St*tic Caravans it had about ten pitches for tourers, all on the top of a very nice bay and pointed directly out to sea. We elected to take the very end pitch (mostly because I didn`t want to have to back the caravan in in full view of two sets of twitching lace curtains), at the end nearest to the entrance. The problem with this was that as we backed in, we stopped all the traffic trying to get out of the site. In the eventuality, this was only one car, and he waited very patiently as we backed up onto some chocks in order to level it, and unhitched. It all went quite smoothly actually, so he didn`t have to wait long. As he drove past, he said "obviously not novices!" out of the window, which made my little heart swell with pride. We`re practically pros! We`re in the club!
The next morning we drove (unhitched, and leaving the caravan) as fast as we could out of Watchet, past Minehead (and past the rather spectacular Dunster Castle, which casts a regal presence gazing out to sea over the Minehead chapter of Butlins) and on down the coast towards Devon. We thought we were staying in Devon, actually, until we realised from the signposts that it was in Somerset. Anyway, we were attracted to North Devon mostly by the "25% gradient" and "unsuitable for caravans" markings on the map, and the road did indeed turn out to be both steep and pretty much unsuitable for caravans. It led us up and down to a town called Lynmouth - a fantastically attractive little village, though a little touristey. Its main theme appeared to be the fact that thirty two of its inhabitants had been killed in a devastating river flood during the 1950s, which they were milking as much as possible. Along with the "Flood Museum" and the "Awesome Power of Water Exhibition" (I`m not joking, unfortunately), I half expected to see the "put your swimming trunks on and ride along the murderous path of the flood on an authentic floating recreation of a pensioner". The flood museum, like a lot of these such places, was unfortunately very detailed on minutiae but a bit scant on what actually happened. As far as I could work out, the two rivers that converged inside the village flooded at pretty much the same time, washed away a large number of the buildings and severely damaged many others. Unfortunately, though, the museum itself had far more pictures of Price Philip (who visited them shortly after the disaster, and again fifty years later) than it had diagrams of where the water went, so I might be barking up the wrong tree. Our parking was running out, so I didn`t have time to investigate further.
Observant readers will know that I have been fasting for Orthodox Easter, to ensure my place in Heaven. Or at least give me enough bargaining power at the Pearly Gates to offset my membership of the National Secular Society. As keen students of Orthodox Easter will know, this involves not eating meat for the forty days of lent and then being essentially vegan for the last week. In the Greek Orthodox Church, "meat" means anything with a backbone - so I can eat shellfish, squid and such. I`ve been eating scampi as well, which I maintain is exoskeletal but I will admit does appear to have the beginnings of a backbone, if not one which would actually provide it with the ability to stand up in the particularly near future. If Saint Peter wants to argue about scampi and backbones at the Pearly Gates, then frankly the queue is evidently short enough to just let me in anyway. I can`t imagine Heaven is teeming these days. Anyway, I`m now into the last week of fasting, so I`m vegan. I managed to bollocks this up within the first hour of day one by absent-mindedly getting out of bed, wandering to the other end of the caravan and eating a Jaffa Cake, which appears to contain Milk Chocolate, and egg. I realised this while still masticating, but sadly couldn`t bring myself to spit it out. Since then I`ve been pretty good... the only time I may have muffed up slightly was when I ate a "vegi-burger" in a pub, which might rather have contained egg. Apparently they often do. It`s a lot harder being vegan than it is being vegi - in a lot of ways I`ve quite enjoyed being vegi and I think I`ll actually carry on doing it for certain meals. Indian food, for example, is often very nicely prepared except for the shitto meat they buy. We`ve all been at that stage halfway through our Chicken Bhuna to find the chewing action stopped short by... something... something quite hard, though a little maliable and definitely not a part of the chicken we were intending eating. Well, vegi indian food contains all the same herbs, spices and sauce but without the "hmm, is that a foot or a collar" moments. So I think I`ll carry on being vegi for indian takeaways. Indians themselves eat a lot of vegetables, so the ones you get aren`t the "bought three weeks ago" effort you get in pubs, but actually quite fresh and reasonably presentable. Anyway, on Sunday I get to eat meat again, which I have to say I`m quite looking forward to. We`ll be in the Lakes, hopefully with our awning erected, and hopefully with weather fine enough we can whip out our as-yet unused barbecue.
One of life`s great pleasures must be sitting in the car listening to a Greek woman pronouncing Welsh place names. Once we`d established that "LL" was pronounced much like "Χλ" and "w" was "ooh", her pronounciation ended up being as good as mine, which is no doubt appaling. I don`t know what the other letter sounds are. What`s "FF"? And is Welsh a phonetic language, like Greek? Who knows. Without the Internet in any meaningful way, I`ve no way of finding this stuff out. I`m not actually missing the Internet as much as I thought I would, apart from those times when you end up idly wondering whether "sport mode" on the car is better for towing, or whether there was always a border between Ulster and the rest of Ireland.
This was by far the longest section of our journey - 500km, compared to around 150km for each of the other days. I`d found the other days much more tiring than I`d expected but this one worked out fine, mostly because the great majority of the journey was motorway. On the motorway you have about 50cm on each side of the whole entourage, there aren`t any overhanging trees and there`s precious little change of you having to reverse up the road to let another caravan and associated tailback through (which happened this morning coming out of the tiny roads around Plymouth). We accidentally timed it wonderfully to spend the latter part of the journey coming up the A5 through the Welsh valleys just as the sun was setting, which gave us a pretty spectacular view of the scenery. We arrived relaxed and buoyant at our campsite, and within about five minute had managed to bury both the car and the caravan in what looked to the untrained eye like a slightly damp patch of grass but was actually a cleverly concealed mud pit. Eventually we unhitched the caravan and managed to use the motor mover and some elbow grease to get it back onto the gravel track (making me think that this motor mover thing isn`t perhaps the complete extravagance I formerly believed it to be), only to discover that the car couldn`t actually move on its own either. As my father may be reading and shaking his head, I hasten to add that I hadn`t spun the wheels until it dug itself into a rut, but had in fact given up as soon as the wheels spun for just a second or two. I`ve been playing with Landrovers and hiking plenty much in muddy fields and I`ve never before seen one that looked quite so innocuous but was quite so gloopy. Eventually (after revolving the caravan and re-hitching it to the car) we managed to find a slightly less soggy pitch and squelch the caravan in, again using the motor mover. I`ve driven the car up beside the caravan... god knows if we`ll get it out again tomorrow. If it rains I`m not sure we`ll ever see it again.
Miles travelled: 700
Average mpg: 18.4
Bottles of wine remaining: 14 or so
Portmeirion is an interesting place. It`s a town that was built almost completely from scratch by a gentleman call Clough William-Ellis and intended to capture the atmosphere of a mediterranean resort. Depending on your point of view, CWE was either a glorious architectural visionary or someone who had more money than sense. Perhaps both. Anyway, he knocked up this village (as far as I can see without much of an idea of where it was going to generate revenue) over a period of fifty years between 1925 and 1975, when he died. The place is run by a charitable foundation, and most of the buildings in it are owned by the hotel (situated at the bottom) and rented out as holiday cottages.
It`s certainly a curio. If you ask me the whole place could do with a lick of paint, but the gardens surrounding are splendid, and apparently house a legendary collection of rhododendrons. I`ve not seen any other collection of rhododendrons, but they looked nice to me. The cafeteria was a bit dilapidated-looking, with a menu featuring "vegetarian option" as one of the dishes. Yum! It turns out that "vegetarian option" was a vegetable lasagne, which I ordered shortly before realising it was covered in cream, which I`m not supposed to be eating for the final week of orthodox easter. I, umm, ate it anyway, possibly in the process submitting to eternal damnation.
The funniest thing in Portmeirion were the tat shops. All tourist venues are required by law to have a shop selling "authentic insert_name_here fudge", or miniature national flags on little sticks. Portmeirion had several of them, with the best one selling all sorts of random kitchenware. I`d be intrigued to know who exactly visits Portmeirion and comes away with a new bin for the kitchen.
After wandering around Portmeirion until we thought we`d justified our £6.50 entrance fee, we wandered off to the Llanberis pass, from where two of the popular approaches to Snowdon (Wales` highest mountain) depart. We were far too late in the day to try and climb Snowdon itself, but we wandered down the Miners` Track for an hour or so until it started getting steeper, at which point we sat down and had a biscuit. Oh, and, umm, I had one with milk chocolate in it by mistake. Sorry Jesus, but being vegan is a lot harder than being vegetarian. I think it would have been much easier in London, which is full of pretentious tossers mucking around with diet fads, but when you`re standing at the food counter of a bar in Betws-y-Coed trying to explain that you don`t eat meat or any animal products you can see them thinking "you`re from London, aren`t you".
So I made a mistake here. I have stayed at the rather nice Great Langdale campsite quite a few times, which lies under the shadow of Great Gable, and Scafell Pike (England`s highest mountain). After looking on their web site and calling to check whether we needed to book or not, we turned up there to discover that they don`t actually take caravans. Tents and camper vans only, apparently. So back up the rather windy road we had to go, aiming for the nearest caravan site that my navigation doofer knew of. After it tried to take us down a road with a 2.5m width restriction we eventually managed to roll up at the site rather later than we`d hoped. As Marcroft and Nev were joining us, we gave them directions to the new site and Marcroft duly turned up shortly after we had. Which was handy, as he was just in time to help us put the awning up. Nev had left London rather late, and didn`t expect to arrive until the wee small hours. As we were about to go to bed (at 1am - something of a record for us at the moment), Marcroft sneaked outside for a surreptitious pee before turning in. After a couple of minutes he bolted back into the caravan saying that just as he was about to relieve himself a man with a torch turned up, pointed it at him and called "miss!". We were a little confused as to why anyone might address someone urinating standing up as "miss", but Paul was so upset by the whole incident he ended up using our Portapotti, which he`d not seemed very keen on earlier.
We all met at the caravan at 0930 the next morning for breakfast. Nev and Lucy had arrived at approximately 1am, and pitched their tent. Nev had just been walking down past our caravan when he spotted a man standing in the bushes. He shined his torch over and called out "Chris", but the man promptly zipped up his flies and ran off.
After a somewhat leisurely breakfast, Nev and I went off to climb Middle Fell Buttress. I use the words "I" and "climb" somewhat loosely in this context, as I naturally wasn`t going to lead anything, and I certainly hadn`t picked the route. Or brought a helmet, or any rope. Basically Nev was going to climb Middle Fell Buttress, but he needed someone to come up after him and remove all the gear, which is what I`m best at in climbing. My entire gear rack consists of a belay plate and a nut key.
It was a splendid climb - four sequential pitches of quite easy rock without too much exposure, apart from the obvious 150m down. Reasonably solid belay stanchions - the only real problem was that there was quite a lot of traffic, and quite a few beginners. We skipped past a couple of groups, but still ended up queueing at a couple of the belays. Still, the weather held up nicely apart from a few gusts of wind. The last pitch we adapter slightly and it ended up being a very nice climb - huge variety of hand-holds, which always makes you feel like you`re making tactical route decisions and not just following the same route everyone else uses.
Miles travelled: 1094
Average mpg: 18.9
Bottles of wine remaining: 12
Now that Marcroft, Neville and Lucy were here, we decided to have a pop at a proper hike. Coniston Old Man (not the Old Man of Coniston, it would appear) seemed like a splendid choice. Well, Nev said it would do, and we all tend to believe him on these sorts of things. We drove down to Coniston in two cars, in case we ended up splitting into two groups, which we didn`t end up doing anyway. We found what appeared to be the car park, paid the princely sum of £5.50 per car as we reckoned we`d be more than four hours, and off we trotted. As we walked up the really rather steep paved hill from the car park, we kept having to stand to the side of the road as quite a large number of cars were still continuing up the hill. As we got towards the top of the now relentlessly steep road, we spotted an enormous free car park and a huge track leading directly up the side of Coniston Old Man. Humpf. Undeterred (though a little sweaty, as it was shaping up to be a rather warm day and that road had really been rather steep) we set off up the Coniston Old Man Motorway. I suspect the track was originally used for slate mining, as it was wide enough for a car to drive up and much larger than the ones on, say, Snowdon or Ben Nevis, so not something the National Trust would likely knock up.
Whilst on the subject of slate mining... there is quite a lot of slate mining detritis on Coniston Old Man. In a way the juxtaposition of rugged mountain and decrepit heavy machinery looks rather charming - my photographer brother Keith would have a field day, no doubt. But in a way it`s really rather a shame that we can`t clear up our rubbish properly. Apart from the remains of buildings and huge piles of slate, there are huge steel cables running all down the mountain from what would appear to have once been some sort of hoisting mechanism. As far as I can see all that`s been done to tidy this stuff up is to pull down the midway supports for this hoisting mechanism, which if you ask me verges on making it look worse rather than better. The mining junk stretches almost to the summit and encompasses a great deal of the next valley, so it`s really quite expansive. I realise when your mine stops paying out your first thought is probably to what the hell you`re going to do to pay the bills, and not what to do about the stinking mess you made of an attractive landmark, but it`s a bit of a pity. Not sure whose fault it is. Probably mine, consuming all these fossil fuels driving around the country taking photographs.
Speaking of detritis, I`m not sure if you`re ever had the joy of emptying a Thetford Cassette Toilet, but as you open the spout and pour, there`s a button you can press on the body of the device which ejects a fine misty blueish-tinged spray of toilet content onto your left leg. Upon consulting the manual, this button seems to be to allow air into the top of the cassette to help you to pour faster. If you ever find yourself in future emptying a Thetford Cassette Toilet, don`t press this button too eagerly, as the level of content must be below the button`s level before the button is pressed.
Where was I? Ah yes, Coniston Old Man. Upon reaching the summit (about 750m climb from our car park, and 550m from the free car park) we elected to head down the ridge and around the back of a lake directly into the town of Coniston, making our walk circular and allowing us to pretend that we deliberately parked where we did. The magnificent weather held all day, as you`ll hopefully see from the photos. Perhaps this contributed to the eagerness with which Nev and Marcroft jumped into the aforementioned lake, then emerged yelping perhaps seven or eight seconds later. Nice sunny day it may have been, but we discovered why none of the other assembled hiking groups appeared to be swimming.
We ended up back at the car after about five and a half hours - we could probably have done the walk quicker but Nev had to stop every couple of minutes to climb something, swim, jump in a puddle, fetch a ball or sniff other Nevs` bottoms. A superb day out in the end - we managed to navigate a slightly novel route without a hitch, everyone was tired but not exhausted and we had sunny weather with a light wind all day. Smashing.
About a year ago, Kiki and I attended level one (of four) of the RYA`s Dinghy Sailing Course, at Stoke Newington Reservoir. We had a super time, but then somehow failed to find enough weekends to do level two and it all rather fell by the wayside. Imagine my joy when a query to 82ASK (text message 82275 a question and they`ll answer it for you, for a quid - more useful than you`d think when you are rather internet connectionless) revealed that we could hire a dinghy in Coniston, just a couple of minutes from our camp site. Kiki politely declined this chance of a lifetime, but Marcroft and I were thrilled to discover that actually every single dinghy was available for hire, and there was a smashing breeze to give us a turn of speed.
As Kiki sat down with a coffee and (sadly) the camera at the lakeside cafe, Marcroft and I leapt enthusiastically into our dinghy. I didn`t remember quite as much about dinghy sailing as I thought I might, and after briefly crashing into the ferry about three feet after pushing off, I realised that one important part of sailing a boat is holding onto the tiller. A few seconds later, though, we were off and making reasonably good speed across the lake. And getting faster, in fact. I let out some sail and steered a little more into the wind, reducing our speed to what felt like about thirty knots as I wondered how in the name of christ we were going to get back to the jetty we`d just started at. We got to the other side of the lake, executed a tack that would have been improved by my holding the rope with the sail attached to it all the way through the turn, and not having the tiller under my leg once we`d turned around. An even faster ride back across the lake resulted in a tack so close to capsize that I am stil largely unaware of what happened. What I hadn`t realised was that Marcroft, somehow, had been under the impression that my cries of expletives and plaitive mumbles about not being as easy as I remembered it were all bravado, and actually I was in complete control of the entire unfolding disaster. As we approached Mach 1 back across the lake, the enormous waves ripping over the bow of the boat as I lay on my front trying to untangle the sail-rope-thing from the steering bit at the back, Marcroft chortled heartily and heaved even harder on the jib thing, which I`m thinking now was perhaps making us go even faster. As I wondered whether swimming back to the jetty was actually impossible or just ludicrously dangerous, fortune finally favoured us. Our forth tack resulted in us facing directly into the wind, sitting on opposing sides of the boat, the tiller somewhere up my trouser leg and the rope thing wrapped around my midrift, the whole setup zooming at a great speed towards a rocky beach on the far shore. We ran aground at a mere seventy miles per hour or so and to my delight appeared to be completely stuck. The force eleven gale was flapping the sails so loudly that we could barely talk and the wind even on the side of the boat was enough to make us feel it was about to be pushed over. We felt the best plan would be to put the sails away completely (they just didn`t seem to be our thing) and try to paddle the boat back to shore with the two canoe paddles we`d helpfully been left in the boat. As we tried to get the sails down, a nice man from the boat hire place in a speedboat turned up and, after a not inconsiderable amount of difficulty, managed to get down the sails, tow us off the beach and take us back to the jetty. The owner of the ferry we crashed into appeared to find the whole incident really rather amusing, and toasted our bravado at taking out a dingy in such hilarious weather, when nobody else would dare. I decided against asking for a refund for the remainder of our two hour boat hire fee (we`d used nearly an hour, though perhaps only twenty five minutes of what might pass for sailing). The chap who towed us back suggested that next time we might like to rent a motor launch, as it seemed more our sort of thing.
Once back on dry land, we took the awning down again - I reckon it`s going to be a good thing to have in warmer countries, as it`s surprising how handy having some of your own outside space is. We failed to get the barbecue going yesterday, and I failed to buy the necessary connector today. Hopefully we`ll get one in Edinburgh, and then we can start cooking outside a bit.
With a jaunty 9am start, I gave my sister Joanna her first driving lesson - something I agreed to at a some what late hour in the pub last night. I probably wouldn`t have done it if the rest of my family hadn`t looked quite so horrified by the idea. Jo doesn`t have a provisional driving licence (though she`s 18) so we did it in the sports club car park across the road from my folks. Given that the car is automatic and possibly not the hardest thing to drive (I`m struggling for a while trying to think of something harder), it all went jolly well. Apart from one brief moment where she either had better spatial awareness than I`d given her credit for or was about to drive into a tree. Tricky call.
Continuing my Trying New Things ideas, I had a go at some fishing with my brother Keith. He`d arranged to go with a friend of his (Ronny) and I rather rudely tagged along. Still, they were very good natured about it. Keith spent a goodly while teaching me to cast and by the time we got to the end of the afternoon (which was quite soon, as we`d turned up at four and the place shut at five) I think I was pretty much casting like a pro. I was very pleased to have caught more than Keith and Ronny, but discovered later that the idea was to bring fish out of the loch and not fling the shrubbery behind you into the water.
As soon as we got home from this hunting expedition, I finally made the racketball date my mother has been asking me for for about three years. Previously I`ve always found an excuse to get out of it before, as I had a speaking suspicion that my mother would be past the point of letting me win in case I got cross. This time, though, the excuses had run out. We tried to play doubles - racketball is very similar to squash but with a more springy ball, and the way racketball doubles work means that the person on the team best placed to hit the ball hits it - you don`t take turns, except for the serving. Teaming me up with Joanna meant that she was pretty much always in the right place to hit the ball, and I found that my niche in this game involved seeing where the ball was going and ambling out of the way so that Joanna could hit it. Mum spotted this fairly quickly and I landed up in a singles game with her instead. She pretended to miss a few shots, gave me as many lets as I needed on service, started forgotting to count up her own points and then realised that even the combination of all of these efforts was going to result in me losing badly and getting cross, and stopped counting completely. Towards the end of the game I was actually managing to hit the great majority of shots with the stringy part of the racket, but I`m not sure ball sports are entirely my thing.
I can`t be bothered writing multiple entries for multiple places any more, so you`ll just have to make do with Things I Wrote Since The Last Diary Entry. Perhaps people would prefer that, who knows.
As some (either) of you may know, we were at Stuart and Nicola`s wedding in Hexham. More specifically in Langley Castle, which isn`t really in Hexham at all but it`s close enough. We booked a caravan site near Haydon Bridge and headed down from Edinburgh - as we didn`t leave until 2pm or so, we didn`t arrive until after ten. The fact that it was dark was indubitably a major contributor to the fact that we went off in the wrong direction just before reaching the caravan site, into someone`s drive. During the somewhat laborious process of getting out of this person`s drive backwards (something we discovered the next day that we didn`t have to do, as there was a turning area) I managed to gently nudge a telegraph pole with the caravan. Pictures of the damage are on this site, should you be the sort who relish in the misofortune of people swanning around without jobs. There`s nothing actually broken, just a small bit of bodywork remoulding and some brown paint that wasn`t there before. From the look of it some sort of previous damage had occured on the same corner of the caravan, and been filled in a little.
I went for a run before the wedding - pretty much my first one since we started travelling. I`d been making brash boasts before we left about perhaps running every day, but that really hasn`t happened. Anyway, I ran off and decided to continue down the narrow country track that our campsite lay on, which wound nicely through the lowlands just next to the river. After about 0.5km, it turned left up a hill and didn`t stop climbing until the clock nudged twenty minutes and my heart rate hit the highest I`ve ever seen it. I ran back down again in that sort of half-running, half-falling way that people have when they appear at an oasis after being in the desert for three days.
The wedding was a rather irreligious one, to the point of excluding any religious words from any of the readings, vows or any music played (no Robbie Williams` "Angel" here) so I was quite keen to see how it went. The venue was really very nice - it`s a large building in nice private gardens, but I have my doubts as to whether it was ever really a castle or whether it was some sort of 1920s folly like Castle Drogo. I didn`t have that many doubts really, as I could probably have asked someone at reception and they`d have told me. At the time I was more interested in drinking beer and Kiki was more interested in dancing. Something we both managed to keep up all night, and strangely although Kiki was the one up on her feet all night, it was me that fell over.
The non-religious ceremony was good, and the parts that could have been awful ("and now Nicola and Stuart will read the vows they wrote themselves") were actually quite touching. Strangely, though, there`s still a part of distinctly atheist me that enjoys church weddings more. I`ve always believed that we should take out of religion what we can before we ditch it - this always included buildings and festivals, but I never thought about including actual church ceremonies. Perhaps as we become less and less religious, we`ll also think of ways to pep up the wedding ceremony. At the end of the day you really just need the bride and groom to tick a couple of boxes and everyone can fuck off, but somehow now that everyone`s dressed up to the nines and have all filed in here, you need something else. What better than some religious nonsense that nobody listens to anyway?
After losing the sweepstake about the combined length of the speeches, we settled down to some nice boozing and the whole evening went very nicely. I don`t think I`d realised how much I`d miss the company of other people whilst travelling - we generally keep ourselves to ourselves on the campsites and the only people we actually socialise with are people we already knew, who we come across en route. This will of course be happening less and less as we go through Europe, so perhaps we`ll eventually have to start chit-chatting to the caravan fraternity about diesel engines and stabilisers.
And as a practice, here`s some stuff about stabilisers. For the caravan dunces here, a stabiliser is a device that clips onto the towing end of the caravan and stops the caravan and car moving laterally independently so easily. There are a few different sorts, but our one is a whole new tow-hitch on the caravan which grips the towball with carbon fibre plates instead of just metal. These provide a damping action - the overall idea is to stop the caravan swinging around willy-nilly in high winds or when trucks pass you. Anyway, ours has been working very nicely but making a rather loud creaking noise whenever we turn around corners. This is pretty much hidden on the motorway, but rather visible when you are driving down windy roads through the middle of small towns or trying to pitch up on a campsite where everyone else is asleep. I replaced the friction pads like the good caravanner I am, but it didn`t seem to help much. A quick search on the internet (at our pre-France internet pitstop in Kent with Grant and Tiffany again) revealed that I just needed to sand the towball down a bit in order to stop the noise. I borrowed Grant`s electric sander and we buffed away for a few precious minutes together, but that doesn`t seem to be quite enough. It`s much better, but it`s not gone away. Fortunately I stole one of Grant`s sander pads, so I can have a further manual grind tomorrow. Keep your eyes glued for an update.
And so into France. I`ve done the UK->France trip rather often on the way to the Nürburgring so nothing much was different apart from the 55mph average motorway speed. We decided to drive all the way down to Paris on the first day and after negotiating two comparatively hairy road systems into and out of Paris we ended up at our campsite near Rambouillet at 21:59, which was fortunate as they closed the gates at 22:00. The pitches were all rather dainty little ones surrounded by hedges, and we had our own electricity supply, water tap and waste water disposal. It said it had a bar, but the sign on the door of it (it looked like a pretty shit bar anyway) claimed that it was "exceptionally closed".
And so off to the Palace of Versailles, where of course the treaty that ended World War One was signed. We both expected it to be a, well, palatial affair well outside town but in actual fact it`s slap bang in the centre of Versailles. Inside it`s the usual fare for a palace with some splendid roof paintings, mostly done by the same chap. I forget his name - he was Louis XIV`s personal artist, and apparently back then an artist would as much a project manager than anything else, and would allow students of his to do the great majority of the actual painting while he sat around defining an overall vision for the piece. And no doubt drinking wine and humping court ladies, or men, or whatever he fancied. Anyway, his name`s on the bottom of a lot of the ceilings (does that work?) and jolly nice they are too. Actually I couldn`t see a lot of the rest of what was in there because of the truly breathtaking throngs of tourists taking photographs towards the ceiling (see pictures attached).
We were finished with the palace in about an hour, and outside are some amazing gardens. Despite being right in the middle of town, I`m not joking when I say that the landscaped part of Versailles` gardens extends pretty much as far as the eye can see. There`s a steady slope down to two man-made ornamental lakes - I tried to involve Kiki in a dialogue about how hard it must be to make a symmetrical ornamental lake but she seemed to think it was a silly sort of a conversation. Presumably you`d have to have entirely flat ground to start with, which must have been a real job of work in the sixteenth century. If anyone wishes to discuss this, please give me a ring.
I know I said I`d post our European itinierary on the first of May, but this hasn`t been sorted out yet. Right now we`re thinking we`ll stay here for another couple of days and then head to Switzerland, but we`re not quite sure. What we do know is that we have to be back in this direction - Reims to be precise - for Mark and Marjorie`s wedding in a fortnight.
Miles travelled: 2045
Average mpg: 18.5
Bottles of wine remaining: 8
Countries visited: 2
For those unaware, "bouldering" is the art of finding a piece of rock - not necessarily a particularly big one - and clambering up it in an ungraceful fashion. Sometimes there are prescribed routes one must take, and sometimes you just have to get to the top. The reason it gets a special name and isn`t just called "climbing" is mainly because you don`t ever use any ropes, as the rocks aren`t high enough to cause you much damage from falling off. A particular route up a particular boulder is generally known as a bouldering "problem", and climbers give them tossy hippy names because they`re just crazy, and way out there.
South of Paris is an area famed around the world for its bouldering - Fontainebleau. I seem never to be able to pronounce its name properly as it starts off with a slightly squiffy version of "fountain" and ends up with something that you expect to be the colour bleu but is actually bleau. I tend to pronounce one half of it properly and the very act of doing that makes me mispronounce the other half. So generally it`s Fountainbleau or Fontainebleu. Anyway, the reason it`s famous with boulderers (look it up in the dictionary, I challenge you) is because the town is surrounded by a sandy forest full of lots of oddly placed rocks averaging around two or three metres high splattered around much as if they`d fallen there specifically for boulderisation (don`t look it up). I don`t know how they got there, because the lady at the tourist office wanted EUR25 for the guidebook. For the same reason, we didn`t really get any bouldering done. Our rock-climber sandals-in-the-house type friends Dan and Nicky told us that it was very easy indeed to find where the bouldering was to be had - they had colour coded paths through the forests demarking various levels of difficulty, and only a child could fail to find them.
We tried, we really did. We eventually found a little signpost which showed the colour codings, and then set off into the forest to find either yellow (embarassingly easy) or white (children`s) boulder problems. After about two trees we lost the yellow path completely, and then eventually had to make do with following the blue one. We had no idea what difficultly level it was supposed to denote, but there were a lot more blue marks on trees than yellow ones. Eventually we came across a boulder with a blue star on it. Does that mean "climb me"? We peered at each other for a while and neither of us seemed particularly eager to give it a go, so on we wandered. Someone`s helpfully covered all of the paths through the wood with about two inches of fine sand, so moving a hundred metres takes you in the region of an hour. Eventually we followed some blue daubs up to another boulder. On it was painted in blue what appeared to be a bathroom tap - perhaps this meant "climb this one, starting left a bit" or "climb the one around the corner". We elected not to climb it at all and continued. The next one had a large blue letter "Z" on it. Does this mean "move to the right a bit, climb diagonally leftwards and then come off to the right again"? As the following one had a letter "Y" on it, we deduced that it was instead some sort of sequence that we were working backwards in. Perhaps the bathroom tap was a new special French letter (of the alphabet), introduced to stop people Frenchifying English words instead of using the French ones. As we`d got up rather late, it was now somewhere around six in the evening and neither of us were any closer to swapping our loafers for climbing shoes, so we elected to call it a day after a couple of staged photos. Where did we go wrong? Well, we didn`t have a guidebook. And I think at the end of the day neither of us are quite keen enough on bouldering to just leap at something and give it a go, and we were both a bit full of lunch. Oh, and there was nobody else there apart from a couple of old ladies walking a dog. I think if we`d spotted other feckless unemployed youths jumping around doing their bouldering stuff, we might have plucked up the courage to have a go at one too.
And so onto Eurodisney. I`ve been to both the other Disney parks, despite them not really Being My Thing, so it seemed a shame not to complete the set. After forking out EUR8 for the special Disney parking, we then had to pay EUR108 to get two people into the theme park and Disney Studios (which are next door to one another, but unconvincingly separate attractions). Having already blown two days` worth of our budget it seemed a shame not to fork out a further EUR15 for two British Rail sandwiches that had been lightly toasted a couple of days before, at the Disney New York Sandwich Somethingorother. I`m sure writing New York on something makes it more valuable, in a similar way to housing it in brushed aluminium and having a couple of LEDs on the front.
The studios and the main theme park are largely indistiguishable from one another - there are a few more plants in the theme park and the studios have a very slightly film-ish bent to them, but there`s only so much you can theme a rollercoaster. Oh, and speaking of which, I went on my very first one. The Aerosmith-sponsored "Rock and Roller Coaster". I`ve always maintained that I quite enjoy a bit of zooming-around excitement but only really if someone`s given me a steering wheel, some bits of string or a stick and told me that I`m in some way in charge of where the thing is going to go, even if in real life I`m not much. I always thought being chucked around on a roller coaster was a curious way to want to enjoy yourself. Well, it is and it isn`t. The being-chucked-around part wasn`t all that much fun, but I did quite enjoy being upside down and I couldn`t help but marvel at the engineering work that was in the thing. For the petrolhead in me, there`s also quite an enormous amount of oomph needed to fire the little carriages up some really quite considerably steep slopes at quite a pace, which is rather jolly. Afterwards, Kiki didn`t want to get into a conversation about whether it was powered by compressed air or not, and seemed much more interested in how worried she was that her handbag was going to be rock-and-rollered into cyberspace on the steep bits. On the upside, I don`t think I actually heard any of Aerosmith`s music, which was being poked into my head through speakers in the seats.
Also in the studios was an Opel-sponsored cars-skidding-around show. It wasn`t called that - it was called something so breathtakingly crap I couldn`t actually spoof it. "Moteur Action Stunt Show Spectacular!" I think. I`ve been to a few cars-skidding-around shows, but this one was definitely the best one. They had a splendid big film set of a village behind it, and a huge big screen on which you got to see the main presenter (yes, presenter) introducing the cast (yes, cast) and the other two presenters (yes, two more) introducing and training the various members of the audience who volunteered to take part (no, not driving). The fact that it seemed to have to be presented in a mixture of French and English meant that the presenters all had to talk twice as fast as a normal human being in order to keep up, which made things even more thrilling. Having arrived half an hour early as instructed, we then had another half hour or so of geeing-up the audience before any cars actually turned up on stage. The premise was that they were pretending to be shooting stunts for a film, and there were various car chases with a goodie in a red car and some baddies in six black cars and two black motorbikes. Actually, once it got going it was all quite well done. The whole thing was very well coordinated and the car-chase aspect of it was quite fun. The audence participation was pretty rubbish but no doubt necessary (they basically all just had to run away screaming in one "scene"), and they gave away some interesting tricks as to how things were being done as the show went along. What they didn`t give away was how the six Opel Corsas chasing the good guy (in something that looked a bit like a small 1980s concept car) were all rear-wheel drive and sounded like motorbikes... I tried to take a picture of the underside of one after the show but failed. They all had blacked-out windows, and I imagine when the chap said "these are all prototype cars" during his "don`t try this at home" speech, he wasn`t kidding. I doubt they`d ever seen an Opel Corsa. The motorbikes which featured in the show also appeared to have some sort of cutout switch to ensure that wheelies didn`t overcook, as you could hear the engines stop and start as they wheelied across the stage. All that said, though, it was mighty impressive driving. Obviously I told Kiki afterwards that this sort of thing really wasn`t all that hard, and it was just politeness that stopped me getting out of the Waitrose car park that way.
The main theme park is all much the same thing - it`s well done, rather cheesy but juuuust not cheesy enough to feel hatred towards it. It was certainly busy - the big rides had queues of up to an hour, and queuing space for far more. Disney are masters at the art of queueing - every ride has a twisting, turning lead up to it so you can`t actually see how many people are in front of you, and you get to look at a different photo, or animation, or robot for that particular ten minutes of your queueing experience. They place you nice soothing music, and you can rather see they`ve done this before.
Once you`ve finished your little train-tour of how special effects are made, featuring Jeremy Irons (only on a TV, I hasten to add), perhaps you`d like to get lost in the Alice of Wonderland Maze. I wondered for a while what Lewis Carroll would have made of all this, but that was soon superceded by wondering what Mark Twain might have thought of it, and particularly what he might have thought about having the Authentic Paddle Steamer Ride named after him.
An enormous amount of the whole park is about stuffing your face with food. Apart from the aforementioned sandwich and an ice cream, we didn`t really eat, but I`m not joking when I say that about half of the attractions in there are restaurants of varying sorts. If you do ever eat in there, I`d recommend the Blue Lagoon Restaurant. It looks rather romantic, and the Pirates of the Caribbean Authentic Floating Log Ride Thing goes straight through the middle of it. I`ve no idea what the food`s like, but I`d imagine the whole place has pretty similar "better than adequate" nosh.
I failed to collect £10 from Marcroft in return for a picture of either myself or Kiki being given a piggyback by a popular Disney character. I did look out for any opportunities, but they never came up - there weren`t any characters wandering around shaking hands with everyone, and there didn`t appear to be plastic effigies of them anywhere either.
I am due an apology to an ant. A number of ants had made our car home as it was parked outside our flat in Stoke Newington, and before I could stop her Kiki coaxed two of them out of the door in the Eurodisney car park. Language barrier aside, I think they`ll have a really tough time coping with weather and if they`re reading I do wish them the best. Perhaps it`ll turn out to be a blessing in disguise.
Back in 2000 or so, I visited a restaurant in Paris with Emmett and Marcroft, at Emmett`s recommendation. We had a splendid meal and a great evening, and it`s been in my mind as one of my favourite dinners. As we were at Versailles, I think Kiki was mighty impressed with my dropping "I know a little place in Paris we could pop into for dinner tomorrow", though perhaps let down slightly when I had to phone Emmett in Bahrain to find out what it was called. On the way back from Eurodisney, we did indeed stop off at what I now know is called Brasserie Flo (7 Cour des Petites-Ecuries, Entrance from 63, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis) and had a jolly nice dinner. The atmosphere of the place is very convivial and it`s a little off the beaten track - you really feel like you`re eating dinner somewhere that the French go. I`m not sure the meal came up to quite the standards of the one I recalled with Marcroft and Emmett, but I`d also not drunk several pints of beer beforehand owing to having the car with us and, well, Disneyland not being really that sort of a place.
Miles travelled: 2505
Books read: C:2, K:2
Bottles of wine remaining: 7
Countries visited: 2
I`ve been to Zürich before but really only passing through on hiking trips - I`ve never stayed for a sustained period of time. What a fantastic place. Very attractive, clean, superb public transport, and within fifteen minutes drive of the city centre you can be swimming in the nice clean lake or partaking in what`s indubitably some of the best mountaineering in the world. OK, maybe a bit further for the mountains, but you can cetainly be hiking within fifteen minutes. And it`ll be somewhere with nice paths, and unobtrusive but accurate signposts telling you where you can go next and how long it`ll take.
The campsite we`re staying in is probably the second-worst we`ve been in, after the Betws-y-Coed mudhole. Everyone`s wedged in much as if it was a dealer`s forecourt rather than somewhere you`re supposed to live for a while. You have to pay CHF2 (just under a quid) for the showers, and they close the front door between midday and 3pm, and don`t give you anywhere to park temporarily. When we called them up and they said "just turn up!" they didn`t mention that one. Oh, and the electric points are all at one end of the pitching areas, so we had to push the caravan right across the gravel when we found our cable wasn`t long enough. Anyway... this site is great, because it`s smack in the middle of town. No doubt that`s why everyone else is here too.
We left France early in the morning (well, 8:30, which seems early now). After arriving in Zürich we went to visit Kiki`s friend Kalina and peer at her new baby, over in Uetikon on the east side of the lake. Now I`m not against babies, but they don`t hold my attention for too long when they can`t talk. So much more interesting to me than the baby was the two African Grey parrots that Kalina`s husband Dan had in a very nice aviary. One looked more like a rat than a parrot, due to having pulled most of its feathers out as a declaration of discontent at being removed from the breeder`s cage and put into Dan`s. It`s really quite a poignant protest - to make yourself vulnerable and immobile (she can`t fly) in a situation you distrust is somehow almost worse than suicide. I do fancy keeping birds again myself, but probably not parrots. I reckon one of Dan`s could have taken my leg off.
Back across the lake by ferry at Dan and Kalina`s suggestion, and a fine one it was too, and out to dinner with Kiki`s Croatian friend Jasmina and a selection of her chums, who mostly worked for UBS or were Croatian. I always feel somewhat humbled by people who can speak more than one language flueuntly, and the effortless way in which this lot switch from English to Swiss-German and Croatian was quite depressing. I was tempted to make up a new language and pretend to chatter it to Kiki, just so I didn`t look like a small-town boy. After dinner we headed to a club called something like Shipyard (in Swiss-German, obviously) where apparently the trendy young people of Zürich hang out. And us, for an evening. Dancing not being my sort of thing, I managed to do my characteristic sway for a little while before someone told me I didn`t have to, and I could instead stand outside drinking beer.
Off for a spot of rugged outdoorsness the next day with Jenny Allan, who generously took us for the standard Tourist Hike, involving a super cable-car ride up to a ridge (I want to call it Ffestiniog, but I think that`s in Wales), then an hour and a half walk along to a nice mountain-top restaurant with splendid view of the city. Ate some food (over budget again), looked at the views and then back the same way again. Out for dinner in town with Jasmina again later on (over budget) and then I drove back to the caravan site leaving Kiki and Jasmina to talk about boys, which they did until somewhere around 01:30. Not entirely sure how Jasmina`s monday work performance was.
Sorry, this isn`t very interesting, I`m not sure how I can spice it up. Perhaps you`d like to hear my medical woes? I`ve had what appears to be a fairly minor eye infection over the last couple of weeks but now it`s got a bit worse. Now that my eye is, umm, largely crusted over, I elected to go to the doctor. There`s a nice walk-in medical centre next to the main station, and after you`ve taken your ticket there`s about an hour`s wait before you get to see a doctor. Anyway, I did all this, the doctor pronounced (in perfect English, as usual) that I did indeed have an eye infection and gave me a prescription for three different antibiotics (cream, drops and pills). I knew I`d have to pay for this but I honestly had no real idea of how much it would be - I`d have been unsurprised by anything up to £200. The appointment with the doctor cost me about £15 (very reasonable, I though) and the prescription around £35 (for three items, so not too bad). I may be able to claim this back from our Boots travel insurance, but I haven`t looked into it yet. The doctor kindly altered my prescription slightly so that I can start drinking again before Mark and Marjorie`s wedding on Saturday in Champagne...
Unless anyone tells me otherwise, I`m recommending not bothering with Lichtenstein. The main town, Vaduz, looks much like Switzerland but a bit more industrial and with a bit less impressive scenery. In my personal opinion.
Highlight of this day-trip was driving into Austria by mistake. Like Switzerland, driving on motorways in Austria reqires a permit, or vignette, a little sticker that goes in the windscreen which you can buy at motorway border crossings. As we crossed the border in a town but ended up on a motorway we realised we were in fact fugitives from Austrian law. After we managed to get off the Austrian motorway and cross the Swiss border in another town, to avoid unpleasant questions about our lack of a Vignette, we realised that my passport was in safe keeping at the campsite back in Zürich. We gave the border control chap my driving licence instead, smiled a lot and looked foreign - he pointed at the "naughty people" spaces they had reserved and told us to park oofer zair for a minute. After about five minutes he turned up, gave us our documents back and waved us in. I imagine that the five minutes involved him phoning Interpol; running our digitally scanned number plate through a worldwide database of stolen vehicles; electronically cross-referencing our ID details with the UK`s own systems and then comparing the retinal scans they`d secretly taken against a worldwide gene database to see if we had natural tendencies to crime. Or perhaps he went back into the booth and consulted with his colleague. "Ist this ein passport?" / "Nein" / "Hmm... ist student cart?" / "Nein" / "Zis picture look like zat guy out zere in de beemer?" / "Yah sure, I say so. He has a wery distinctive noze" / "OK, danke".
At some point we saw a truck on fire on the motorway - I`ve a feeling it might be in Austria, but as I`m going to claim not to have been on an Austrian motorway, let`s say it was in Switzerland. Traffic was stilll running with one lane cut off, and the heat from the blaze as we went past was quite extraordinary. It didn`t look like an overly flammable cargo, so I`d imagine driver was safe and well. I`m afraid the photo doesn`t really cut the mustard, but Kiki wouldn`t let me take any more as we got closer.
Bear with me, I have to hype this one up a bit as it`s the most exciting thing that`s happened so far.
Tuesday saw yet another very pleasant night on the beers in Zürich, this time with Kiki`s mates Tanja and George. Tanja is former-UBS and they`re also unemployed, having spent over a year pootling around the place, including six months living on a boat sailing around Australia. Which they made sound rather fun, but I`m not exactly sure where we`d fit it in.
Anyway, early start to Wednesday because they`d stayed with us in the caravan and George had to pick up his camper van from where he`d left it in town before the parking charges started at eight thirty. This also meant that Kiki and I started early heading to Interlaken, which was actually only around 150km away. Thanks to Nev Woods and UBS London (for doing some superb research on what to climb up near Interlaken, and for paying him as he did it) we had some fine ideas. I`m sure Nev wouldn`t mind if I quote his text messages verbatim, just in case anyone else was looking for stuff to do:
"Walk up to Keine Scheidig, or catch the train and walk back to Grendelwald"
"Mannlichen is very nice but may be too high this early in the season. Interlaken is lovely and low or get the Grindelwald yellow bus to Bussalp"
"From Kscheidegg there`s the Eiger trail, walk to Lauberhorn, or into Alpiglen at the base of the north face"
"Was it you that borrowed my Grivel G12s?"
Despite all this fine research, it`s now looking a bit less likely that we`ll do this. About two thirds of the way to Interlaken you pass through the village of Lungren. I probably couldn`t tell you much about Lungren as it`s just outside one the tunnels the Swiss enjoy making so much - once your eyes have adjusted to the light, you`ve already passed through the town.
As it happens, though, I can tell you plenty about Lungren, as that`s where I`m sitting now. There`s a steep hill coming out of the south side of it, and almost as soon as the car had grumpily kicked down a gear and started hauling our home up it, there was a rather loud "pfffsshht" noise and a not inconsiderable amount of steam and liquid started pouring out from under the left hand side of the bonnet. It`s a busy single-carriageway road and not a very wide one, so as it looked like steam and not smoke I elected to look at the temperature gauge instead of out of the window, and stop in the next place we possibly could. As we struggled up a steep winding hill many miles from home in a foreign country pulling an enormous caravan with clouds of smoke billowing around the car, the BMW chirped up with its typical German humour. "Ding!" it said, in that soft way it does, as if the elevator you`re travelling in has now reached the executive washroom. "Ding! Check coolant level", it said on its little LCD screen. Then, as the clouds of smoke began to obscure my view of the steep mountain pass ahead, it did it again, just in case I`d missed it. Perhaps I was asleep.
Fortunately there was a small level-ish gravelled area in a hundred metres or so, at which point we turned the engine off and peered at the steam for a while. I began to feel a little uneasy. Kiki`s heard me rambling for hours in the pub about cars of all shapes and sizes, and as far as I could see she had decided her role in this escapade was to sit there muttering "bollocks" and sighing every so often, whilst mine was going to be to fix the car. Not wanting to be shown up as a tire-kicker, I announced that I was going to fix the car. I`d taken the precaution of once finding out where the bonnet release catch was, and so I pulled it energetically. The bonnet opened nicely on some little hydraulic pistons (ah, BMW) and there was lots of shiny engine stuff for me to get started fixing. I expected a few more silvery bits, but it seems 7-series BMW owners prefer to be confronted by lots of bits of black plastic instead, no doubt to make it all a bit quieter. Quite a lot of the black plastic had been sprayed a fetching shade of green by copious quantities of coolant, so using my Car Fixing Skills I followed the trail of the greenest parts to the radiator, where a rather large hose appeared not to be connected to a rather large hole nearby. "Ahah!" I said out loud, to impress Kiki. "I think the Radiator Hose Connector has become disconnected". I thought for a while as to whether there was a more impressive automotive word which meant disconnected, but I couldn`t come up with it. "Bollocks", said Kiki. The hose had one of those hose tightening clamps around it but it still appeared to be holding onto a little ring of plastic inside the hose - there was yet another small broken-looking ring of plastic lying on top of the headlamp cover. The part on the radiator also looked sheared, so it seemed that somehow the connector had really just shattered as we started climbing up the hill, leaving the hose and probably the radiator spraying coolant everywhere.
It was at this point that my automotive knowledge somewhat let me down. How much pressure is there normally in a radiator hose? Since the Lancia blew up I always watch the temperature gauge like a hawk and I knew we`d not been overheating - was it coincidence that it had sprung off as soon as we started climbing a hill? Or just coming out of a town with slow traffic? Was this a symptom of some much greater car malaise? Blocked radiator?
Kiki had started to read a book and I could see my "useful man to have around" points diminishing at an alarming rate. Everything had cooled off a little bit now, and I undid the hose clip on the waggly end of hose. And here, dear reader, I did the only piece of Motor Diagnostic Work that I was quite impressed with. To stop the broken end of the radiator connector disappearing down the hose into the engine, I held the hose pointing down at the ground as I squeezed it gently to see if I could get the bit of plastic out. The bit of plastic shattered into three bits, which fell out onto the ground (phew). The lone ring of plastic that had flown onto the top of the headlamp cover broke just as easily when I prodded it. Was it because the plastic was hot? Are they always this brittle? All these are actual questions, incidentally, please send me text messages if you know the answer. Anyway, there did seem to be juuust enough plastic left on the radiator`s connector to reattach the hose to it using the circlip, so I did. I managed to get Kiki out of the car - superficially in order to inspect my superb motor handiwork, but mainly so that when the car burst into flames it wouldn`t have been wholly my fault. "Let`s call the AA", she said.
The AA wanted £500 to cover me for six months, so I explained that that wasn`t an option. "Bollocks", said Kiki.
We decided to refill the coolant and try and see if the car would drive at all with my bodged repair. After putting all of the coolant I had with me (500ml) in, carefully using the 50/50 water mix stated in the car manual, we started just pouring in water. The outside temperature was somewhere around 20 degrees C, so I reckoned the chances of freezing at night weren`t all that high, and if we overheated we could just wait for a bit. After using up all of our drinking water I checked the manual to discover that the coolant system holds a flabbergasting twelve litres of the stuff. Kiki wandered down the hill to the town to get some more water, and when she got back announced that she`d spotted a campsite on the other side of the lake. I ran down to the site, knocked on doors, tapped on the window, rang the phone number but found nobody and waddled back up to the car. Basically the options were:
Plan 1: Carry on over the pass (about 6km, and we`d no way of telling when it stopped going up and went down) to Interlaken (about another 20km on motorway on the flat), which is a large town and will almost definitely have a BMW dealer
Upside: Whatever happens, it`ll be closer to a BMW dealer
Downside: We could get stuck somewhere on pass that`s not as easy to stop as where we were already; car could overheat and, well, die
Plan 2: Pitch the caravan where we stopped in the lay-by and try to drive the car to Interlaken
Upside: The car will be stressed less if there`s no caravan, so we might get further
Downside: Caravan might get nicked/broken into
Plan 3: Head back down to Lungren, plop the caravan in that campsite in the hope that they`ll not throw us out, and then work out what to do
Upside: Very good chance of making it there, as the car won`t have warmed up before we stop
Downside: The car may need to be towed somewhere with a garage
Plan 4: Call ADAC (German recovery company which operates across Europe)
Upside: Car will get fixed, somehow
Downside: May cost £££ as we`re not members; caravan will cause problems (will they take us to a site? Doubt it)
Plan 5: Pitch caravan where it is; call ADAC
Upside: Car will get fixed
Downside: One of us will probably have to stay with caravan for... days?
If you choose option 1, turn to page 14. If you choose option 2, turn to page 6. If you decide to stay and fight the dragon, roll one dice and turn to page 4. If you skipped through these options, I can`t really blame you. I did when I was rereading it, so they might even be wrong.
We went for Plan 3. Fortunately, just before we left, the chap at the caravan site phoned me (I assume they must have got caller ID, as nobody answered when I phoned) and told me we`d be welcome to stay there. We crawled down the hill with the car dinging and telling us about how much coolant we didn`t have, crept slowly into the campsite and pitched up. I walked back into town and fortunately found a general car repair place with a Swiss gentleman who spoke excellent English and told me he`d turn up at our campsite the following morning to peer at the car.
Well, it`s now the following morning and he`s just been. He thinks (as I do) that it may well need a new radiator, which is probably going to be expensive and time-consuming. I`m going to drop it off there (I can get to the garage before the car gets warm) at 11:30 for a better diagnosis. Whilst we are technically itinerants, we`re due to be back in Reims (about 550km away) for Mark and Marjorie`s wedding on Saturday, and we`ve also pledged Vassili and Anna and lift there from Paris. Right now it`s Thursday and we`re stranded in Switzerland with an undriveable car which probably needs a part that`s going to come by post. Hmm.
Distance travelled: 4872km (it`s no good, I`m switching this to Metric)
Books read: C:2, K:4
Bottles of wine remaining: 5
Countries visited: 5 (UK, France, Switzerland, Austria, Lichtenstein)
As it became apparent that we were unlikely to get to Reims by car, we bought a train ticket instead. It involved getting the last train from Lungern to Luzern, then another from Luzern to Basel and then the sleeper from Basel to Paris. As we`d pledged to pick up Vassili, Anna and Ioana in Paris, we opted instead to hire a car at the Gare du Nord as they had no other means of getting to Reims on time for the wedding. Our return journey was on the TGV to Berne, a night there and then back to Lungern via Interlaken - I`m sitting writing this on the train to Interlaken.
As our first train didn`t leave until after 9pm on the Friday, we decided it would be rude not to take the cable car up the mountain directly next to our campsite. It`s a rise of about 900m to Turren, at about 1600m, and then a chairlift ride up another 400m to the summit of Schoenbüel. The lady at the booking office assured us that the large restaurant at the top of Schoenbüel was indeed open, despite us being distinctly out of the skiing and hiking seasons. When we got to the bottom they started the cable car especially for us and we shared the ride up with some mechanics, who in turn started the chairlift for us and plopped us onto it. As we approached the top of Schoenbüel we`d seen a grand total of zero other tourists, and as we alighted from the chairlift the only people there appeared to be a very nice elderly German couple sitting looking at the view. We found a restaurant employee who answered "no" to our "sprichen zie Eenglish" question, and "non" to our "Francais?" followup. The jolly German tourist weighed in to help us - he knew no English other than "I eem seeventee seeven!", but this certainly beat us not knowing the German for "food". He and Kiki managed to establish that the restaurant was willing to serve us either "chicken nuggets" or "fish nuggets". We got the feeling that we ought to be thankful for even that, so we opted to have a plate of each. We admired the truly splendid view for about ten minutes before the lady in the restaurant put on some sort of nineties pop compilation CD, which sadly you could also hear if you were sitting outside.
We`d not paid for the chairlift ride back to Turren, so we headed down to look for the "road" that the woman at the bottom insisted would lead us nicely back to the cable car. As there was still a reasonable snow covering in a lot of places, we ended up on a rather more novel route to the cable car, which I like to think of as Kiki`s Swiss mountaineering baptism. I suspect she likes to think of it more as Chris failing to find the proper way back.
In the evening, our two Swiss trains arrived with Swiss precision and the French sleeper from Basel to Paris was predictably difficult to sleep in. If anyone has any ideas about how to actually sleep on a train, plane or ferry I`d be delighted to hear them. Earplugs don`t help me much and either drinking beer or taking sleeping tablets just serve to up the ante, because if you don`t manage to sleep you`ll be even worse off the next day. My idea of going for a run shortly before we left seemed to help a bit, but I still got the feeling that if anyone whispered my name during the journey I`d have heard it.
The wedding went well - Reims is in the heart of the Champagne region, and whilst driving around you go past the gates of many of the famous champagne houses. The reception was held inside the Ruinard grounds, and so naturally the only thing you could drink all night was Ruinard champagne. This sounds good on paper and it certainly was rather splendid, but once you`ve had a few pints of expensive champagne it has a slightly syrupy feel to it and at 4am I couldn`t help finding myself imagining that the drink in front of me had magically transformed into Stella. After a fairly long and quite involved service of an hour or so in a quite magnificent church, followed by a transfer to the champagne house for some drinks. This was a somewhat welcome interlude for us, because we hadn`t got changed yet. Our original plan was to arrive in Reims on the Friday and, no doubt after a couple of drinks with other wedding guests, get into our finery on Saturday morning and then head to Paris to meet Vassili and Anna off the Eurostar and whisk them back down to Reims for the service. As our car was sitting in Switzerland with its legs in the air, the plan now required considerably more time for us all to get to our hotel in Reims, get changed and _then_ head to the service. Eurostar weren`t very keen to bring their timetable back an hour, so what happened instead was that we completely ran out of time to get changed and instead arrived at the reception just as it started, wearing our civvies. We hid fairly successfully at the back; at the end of the service the guests wait outside the church to greet the bride and groom and as they approached the groom looked at me with a horrified expression. "Where`s the kilt?" he said nervously, as I looked at my trainers and muttered some humble excuses. I discovered subsequently that he wasn`t so much offended by my lack of vestigial deference to his nuptuals, but concerned as he`d promised the French contingent at the wedding the spectacle of a man in a skirt with no pants.
Once at the champagne house we didn`t start eating until around nine, and the food carried on coming until the two (French and English) wedding cakes were dished out at what must have been about 2am. There are no speeches at French weddings, so the bride`s father was doubly impressive by not only making a very good one but making it whilst seamlessly switching between French and English. Roger, one of the two best men, has to be congratulated for making his whole speech in le very finest English schoolboy French, which je understoode particularlement well as ca est what je can parlez aussi.
Whilst others danced, I spent most of the time at the reception avoiding a progressively more drunk French gentleman who was insisting that I sung him Flower of Scotland, and showed his wife what I had underneath my kilt. He kept telling me that he was okay with me showing his wife my undercarriage, but I had difficulty getting him to understand that his acquiesence wasn`t really the obstacle. Whilst attempting to get out of the singing part of the deal, I mistakely used the phrase "maybe later", and he came and found me every half hour to remind me. At about 3am I was cajoled into singing the first two lines and then decided that if I wasn`t drunk enough now to solo the whole thing, it was unlikely to happen. As I made my customary one trip to the dance floor to sway incompetently for two minutes, the gentleman seized his opportunity, whooshed onto his knees and took a rather good flash photo of my hirsuit posterior and the rearward portion of my testicles. Delighted that I had turned out to be wearing everything he hoped, he ran around the dance floor to show the snapshot to his delighted wife, and then continued to proudly show it to the great majority of the guests on the dance floor, who peered at it with quite an interesting variety of reactions. It`s the first time I`ve ever had a critical public appraisal of my testicles, and personally I don`t think it went too badly.
Compared to Switzerland, I couldn`t help not being bowled over by France. A lot of the place is somewhat disorganised, the streets are just a bit dirty and a disappointing proportion of people working in the service industry are either rude, incompetent or both. Perhaps our view was coloured somewhat by the fact that we spent a couple of hours hanging around the Gare du Nord railway station, which I`d imagine most French people wouldn`t count as their most appealing tourist attraction, and perhaps it was because we`d been staying in a particularly attractive part of Switzerland.
Ah yes, and the continuation of the car saga. The chap phoned me on Friday to say that the car would be ready to pick up on Saturday, and that there was actually a problem with something as well as the radiator. He told me what the part was in German, but that didn`t help very much. I got the impression that he meant the radiator issue had been caused by this other thing, whatever it is. We`ll hopefully pick the car up and get the no doubt sizeable bill this afternoon - perhaps I`ll have more of an idea then of what else was wrong with it, or perhaps I`ll never know.
Distance travelled: 4872km car, 1115km train
Books read: C:2, K:5
Bottles of wine remaining: 5
Countries visited: 5 (UK, France, Switzerland, Austria, Lichtenstein)
If you`re reading this because you secretly enjoy hearing about other people`s misfortune, especially those on holiday, then the final bill was CHF1,417.10. It works out to be something like £630. If you`re also interested in what it was that was wrong in a car-person sense, pray read on.
I do have a photograph of the bill but GetJealous appears to scale photographs to just about the point that you can barely see them, so I`ve no doubt it would be unreadable. It says:
Material
Kühler [radiator] CHF550
Lüfterkupplung CHF310
Thermostat CHF85
Kühlmittel [coolant] CHF36
Arbeit [labour, I think]
There`s a breakdown here, but basically the total is CHF336
Then there`s some tax and stuff to top it up. The chap tried to explain to me that something else had broken which he thought caused the radiator damage - no doubt this is the Lüfterkupplung. I know nothing about that word other than that I`m intending using it as the name of my band. Any ideas?
It impressed me that the labour cost barely £150, especially that he actually came to visit us on the caravan site and then came out on his bicycle to rescue us when we broke down in the road. I`m also jolly pleased that the breaking-down-in-the-road incident wasn`t the car overheating and breaking something major. Oh - and I`m now even more sure that the car didn`t overheat when the hose first popped off, because I looked it up in the manual and it`s one of the car`s Priority One Dings. So, non-moving temperature gauge aside, it would have told me we were overheating if we were.
After driving around a little in our newly repaired motorcar, we upped sticks and moved to "Manor Farm", the campsite near Interlaken that we were aiming at sometime around a week ago. In some ways it`s been a handy reminder to avoid places that say "popular with Brits" in the guidebook, as the buggers are all over this place. I think around half of the cars parked here have British registrations, which is something we`ve not been used to over the last few weeks and somehow makes us feel a bit less impressive about how far we`ve gone. On the upside, though, they had a convertor to change our power cable to a Swiss one and they told us where we could get our UK gas cylinder filled up. Gas cylinders on the continent not only employ different connectors but also pump gas out at a different pressure - it always amuses me that pretty much the only power connector that`s homogenous throughout the world is the car cigarette lighter, which clearly was never an electric socket to start with.
We were very pleased with the size of the pitches here, until we realised we`d used two by mistake. After correcting this we discovered that there are little drains you can poke your waste water tube into to save you carting the stuff across the site, which is rather neat. Or perhaps we`ve been caravanning for too long.
There are two main tourist areas around here, so being tourists we went to them. To the South-East, Grindelwald is a ski town not dissimilar to Chamonix and faces directly onto Wetterhorn, Schreckhorn and the Eiger - three of the most impressive mountains in the Berners Oberland. The Eiger is doubtless the most famous, its North Wall ("Eigerwand") having been centered upon by Nazi Germany in the 1930s as a suitable objective to prove its might. After a few teams tried and failed, Heinrich Harrer finally managed it and then wrote about it in his book, "The White Spider". He also wrote a more famous book called "Seven Years in Tibet", which is about something else. I haven`t read either of these books but I do own a copy of TWS and I thought I had it with me, but I don`t. Partly because of this lot but mostly because it has places to get pissed in, Grindelwald is pretty popular with Brits.
The second local tourist trap is the Lauterbrunnen valley, headed by the Jungfrau - one of the more spectacular Swiss 4000m peaks. The valley itself is steep-sided and contains legions of spectacular waterfalls which drain the surrounding peaks of snow and carry off the water from the glaciers Kiki and I are permanently melting by zooming around here munching fossil fuels. About two thirds of the way down the valley are the Trummelbach Falls.
The Trummelbach Falls have to be one of the most impressive ways to see the raw power of falling water. They have eaten through the rock to such a degree that they`re now tens of metres underground and for eleven Swiss Francs you can see them by walking through a network of tunnels that some enterprising people have dug. Presumably because of variations in rock density, they take a rather curious path including at least a couple of sections where they seem to corkscrew back on themselves. Once underground the noise and spray is quite incredible and viewing the falls is really a surprisingly visceral experience. The most spectacular parts are in the rock maybe a hundred metres or so above the valley floor, so the enterprising Swiss people have made a rather pointless underground elevator to get you up there, instead of the perfectly good steps that you use on the way down anyway. The elevator has completely glass sides to it, presumably to impress you with the engineering work involved in making an underground elevator because there certainly isn`t any view. It must be amusing for the chap who operates the lift, seeing all of the tourists peering around the place during the journey waiting expectantly to see a giant waterfall out of one of the sides of the elevator, when in actual fact they`re just going to see a rock-hewn elevator shaft. I can only assume they got some Swiss equivalent of lottery funding. "We`d like to apply for a million Swissies to dig some holes under the Trummelbach Falls. What`s that you say? Five million minimum? No, that`s fine, I`m sure we`ll think of something".
Whilst getting the camera soaking wet, I was amazed to see the difference between my flash and non-flash waterfall photographs. It would appear that the flash reflects spectacularly upon the mist coming up from the falls rather than the waterfall itself - there`s an example of the difference in the photos below.
Whilst in Grindelwald we decided to come back and try to climb Kleine Scheidegg, a 2000m peak which sits above the town and below the face of the Eiger. Well, I say "we decided", but it was more an act of persuasion on my part, and I`m not sure what I`m going to do when it turns out there`s not a Mulberry factory outlet on the top. Fortunately for Kiki it poured with rain right on cue as we woke up the next morning, so it`s been postponed to the following day and I`m now sitting in the caravan writing this instead.
Oh, and talking of sitting in the caravan, last night we had a game of Command and Conquer in the awning. Because Kiki insisted on working from home until about an hour before we were thrown out of the flat, we failed to ship our broadband equipment to the US and, after some trouble working out which plugs would fit where, we eventually got the networking stuff to work here. The game CDs were in both laptops, so we sat in the awning in the pouring rain to the familiar sounds of "missile launch detected", and such. We have to play against the computer rather than each other, in the interests of marital harmony, but it was quite a fun throwback to life in London. I can`t see us doing it very often - we`re living quite an outdoorsey life at the moment and I`ve no doubt there`ll be plenty of time in future for peering at computers, both at work and at home. Having moved the television onto and off its stand every time we pitched up for the last month we`ve eventually extradited it to the boot of the car, because we`ve not yet switched it on and it`s looking increasingly unlikely that we ever will. I can`t say I miss it, though I would rather like to have Radio Four back...
Distance travelled: 4960km car, 1115km train
Books read: C:2, K:6
Bottles of wine remaining: 4
Countries visited: 5 (UK, France, Switzerland, Austria, Lichtenstein)
We were supposed to be climbing Kleine Scheidegg today but as it was pouring with rain we didn`t. As I`m now lacking a Book Club to ramble onto about the books I`ve read, I`m going to write it here. I`ve not written a book review before so bear with me.
I rather enjoyed this book - it basically follows two members of a Hungarian national basketball team around the country for a few years in postwar communist Hungary. I don`t know whether Fischer is Hungarian or not (his paragraph-bio claims he`s a Brit) but either way he`s certainly done his research and the book is as much about life, death and politics in Hungary as it is about basketball. Actually there`s not a lot of basketball in it, so perhaps that`s not hard. One thing that makes me hope he`s a Brit is his use of words I don`t understand. If anyone would care to let me know what the following mean, I`d much appreciate it:
catafalque
epistemological
plenitude
ozymandiased
obsequies
vituperating
fulminated
ontogeny
phylogeny
badinage
eructations
sesquipedalian
imprecations
presentment
aposiopesis
manumittance
You need to actually know what they mean, rather than have a guess or think you`ve heard them before. Answers on a postcard.
The book has a quite charming tone to it, and Fischer does well at following two characters at once. In some ways the plot is a bit directionless but he gets away with it by sticking in a healthy chunk of Hungarian history to keep you happy. I found the second half a lot easier to get through than the first - I think his prose can be a little sticky to read and the language improves as time goes on.
Readers who were also members of Book Club will know that we score books one (good) to five (bad) in the three categories used by the Hardens` restaurant guides - food, service and ambience.
Food: 3
Service: 2
Ambience: 2
We were supposed to be climbing Kleine Scheidegg today but, well, we didn`t get up in time. It`s a hard life.
The Rough Guide to Europe says that the Jungfraujoch "Top of Europe" cable car ride isn`t worth the ludicrous amount of money they want you to pay in order to go on it (about £70 return) and that instead those desperate for a high-level cable car ride should go up the Schilthorn (£35 return). There are advertisements for the "Top of Europe" one pretty much everywhere in this area of Switzerland and the postcard photos from the top of the thing are so numerous you can`t help wondering whether perhaps you have been there after all. The Schilthorn is marginally less heavily advertised, but the adverts are much worse because they home in on the fact that On Her Majesty`s Secret Service was filmed at the revolving restaurant they have on the top. They`ve even written "007" on the cable cars, in a horribly un-Swiss tacky moment.
And while on the subject of Swiss Tack, I do think that the cable cars are it. Whilst the word "understated" would pretty much sum up the rest of Switzerland, the cable cars add a bit of Butlins to the world`s most sensible country. I`m in two minds about the things - they undoubtedly give a lot of people the chance to take in views that they wouldn`t otherwise, but they do completely spoil the countryside. I know how irritating it is to spend two days climbing a remote mountain peak and eventually hacking your way over the summit cornice in wind so hard you practically have to lie on your stomach, to discover that the focal point of the view on the other side is a group of seventeen Japanese tourists eating Mister Frostees at the Airborne Cuckoo Clock Authentic Swiss Restaurant And Funicular Railway on the peak opposite. I think many of these railways and cable cars (the Jungfraujoch and the Schilthorn being prime examples) were built with the technological achievement in mind rather than any environmental considerations - I wonder whether in fifty years, when the technological achievements seems a lot fewer, they might start taking them down.
Because I took the cable car right to the Schilthorn`s revolving restaurant, I feel somewhat unqualified to say that it shouldn`t be there, but I can`t help feeling it shouldn`t. The blurb at the bottom proudly states that the cable car and restaurant were built because mountaineers had proclaimed the Schilthorn to bear some of the very finest views in all of the alps - I bet the mountaineers have clammed up now about what contains the second-finest views. As I sat admiring the view in what I hoped was a mountaineery sort of a way, my concentration was interrupted by an Englishman and an American at another table having the most preposterously high-volume hair-brained discussion about Christinanity and what it meant to them, the high point of the conversation being the phrase "well, you can`t just die and then there`s nothing after - what`s the point?". And perhaps this is the worst thing about the cable cars and funiculars - as well as providing those less mobile with the possibility of ascending to the top of the alps, they also provide those with thirty five quid and a spare afternoon the chance to get pissed, talk about the weather or pick their noses at the top of the alps. Surely that can`t be right.
I`m a huge Kurt Vonnegut fan, so when he announced that he was quitting writing books on account of being too old it was a pity but not a great surprise. Anyway, all of a sudden out popped this book - it`s not a novel, and more just the general ramblings (and some artwork) of an old man fed up with the way society seemed to be going. The doodles are classic Vonnegut, though perhaps not as good as the ones in Breakfast of Champions, and the prose is instantly recognisable - probably because a lot of the novels comprised general grumblings about life instead of the more conventional "plot" approach. I think it would be fair to say that his main gripes are American imperialism and human beings "making whoopee" with the few remaining fossil fuels - the former I can understand entirely and the latter... well, guilty I suppose. And I did feel rather guilty, perhaps for the first time, as he outlined exactly what we were doing and why. I also felt rather guilty when I read that people should never use semicolons, as they only ever did so to prove that they went to university. I`m doing my best.
I can`t help feeling this will be his last book - not least because he`s getting rather old now, but because he really does seem rather fed up. Perhaps that`s what being old does to you. I`m not sure who will succeed him as honourary president of the American Humanist Society, but surely nobody can beat his acceptance speech when he took over from the dearly departed Isaac Asimov with the words "well, old Isaac`s up in heaven now".
Hardens Restaurant Guide Scores (1 good, 5 bad):
Food: 2
Service: 1
Ambience: 4
All this for free. And you still complain.
First things first. To demonstrate that we truly are modern, switched-on sorts of people, we immediately seized upon the advice of "Michael", who wrote on our message board: "If you make it to Interlaken, don`t forget to visit the Hooters bar there - it`s THE spot to be seen in that fashionable Swiss town". I`m assuming Michael is Mixalis Masouras. If not, we took the advice of a complete stranger. Perhaps that makes us even more modern and switched-on.
I`ve never had the pleasure of going to a Hooters bar before, and especially not with my future wife. They have an interesting selection of signs with appropriate sorority humour (the toilets are labelled "used beer disposal") and the waitresses wear shorts that would best be described as underpants. Also rather a lot, though not all, of the other customers were men. The food was actually jolly nice, and not too badly priced either.
After polishing off our Hooters Burgers and bidding good day to our waitress, we wandered outside into the rain and peered into the windows of the Rolex dealer right next door, who is probably anxiously seeking a new commercial property. All over Switzerland people are very keen to sell you preposterously expensive mechanical watches, and to explain to you just the fiendish amount of work that goes into making something that is dashed nearly as accurate as the quartz clock in your microwave. Some of these are really quite pricey. It wouldn`t take you long looking in shop windows in the average Swiss town to find a watch made by a company you`ve never heard of on offer for more than thirty thousand pounds. Why do people want mechanical watches? It`s a comparatively little-known fact that Rolex make quartz watches - they restrict the proportion of them to less than 5% of their total output, and they claim that demand doesn`t really exceed that. They`re no cheaper than the mechanical ones. Obviously there`s a huge amount more art involved in making a decent mechanical watch than there is in making a quartz one, but it`s almost refreshing to see people buying watches more because of the challenge involved in making them rather than their timekeeping qualities.
On Sunday we eventually climbed Kleine Scheidegg. It`s a 1000m climb covering only around 7.5km of ground, so it`s fairly a relentless uphill plod. As you reach the top there are splendid views of the North face of the Eiger, and across to Wetterhorn and up to the Jungfraujoch. I can`t verify the splendid views, because there was a fair amount of cloud around the place when we did it. I didn`t like this hike very much - not because of the poor views, which are never a great motivator for me, but for a number of other reasons. First off, for about two thirds of the way you follow a very similar route to a nearby tarmac road - there`s something somewhat depressing about sweating away plodding up a slope only to find that the view from the top of this particular section is of a man driving past you in his rusty Nissan Sunny. Secondly, like many of the tourist peaks in Switzerland, it has a bloody great funicular train driving up it twice an hour. The hiking path pretty much follows the train line, and as you come into view of the Eiger Nordwand you see at least four chairlifts going in various directions for the ski runs. Once you finally reach the top, after some four hours of quite invigorating hike, you find a large railway station which serves as a junction between the Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen valleys for the Jungfraujoch railway, amongst others. And four restaurants, a few hotels and the obligatory shop selling you Toblerone and Rolexes. We took the train back down again, but I`m now a bit fed up of this. The next mountain we climb up is going to be served so poorly by public transport that everyone at the top will be wearing hiking boots.
On the way back down, Kiki took a rather good photo of Manlichen, the next-door mountain that she wanted to continue up to but I couldn`t much be bothered. No doubt the shop on top had some extra-special new Rolexes in stock, or perhaps the cable car was the longest brown-coloured eighty-two person cablecar in southern Switzerland, but we sadly missed it. If anyone wants a higher-resolution version of this photo (or any others), drop me a line as the GetJealous pictures are rather small. You`re likely to have to wait until we have broadband again to get it but I`ll stockpile emails.
The next morning we headed over to Zermatt without the caravan for a spot of tourism. We have a Rough Guide book which seems geared somewhat towards backpackers, so when it said "the only way to reach Zermatt is on the spectacular narrow-gauge MGB trainline", I didn`t realise that Zermatt was in fact a car-free town. We ended up getting the train from wherever the road ran out. It was the second train of the day, because earlier we`d loaded the car onto a rather neat train not unlike an open-topped Eurotunnel to circumvent the Grimsel Pass. It`s a bit odd sitting in the car zooming along in pitch darkness.
Zermatt is very attractive, though entirely geared towards the tourist industry. Instead of cars it has legions of small electric vans, most of which appear to belong to hotels. To contribute to the general air of motor-vehicle free peace and quiet, the only other things that are allowed to drive around are bloody great diesel-engined trucks. So instead of a general hum of traffic you have silence for periods of a few minutes, interspersed with what seem to be the loudest trucks known to man.
I was keen to go to Zermatt not just to peer at the Matterhorn, but because I`ve been reading "Scrambles Amongst The Alps In The Years 1860-1869", by Edward Whymper. He was an artist sent on a commission to the alps who turned professional climber, and actually went on to explore a great deal of Greenland and claim many first ascents in the Andes. If you`re looking for a book about the alps and have already read Killing Dragons (Fergus Fleming) then I can`t recommend Scrambles enough. Whymper takes a great interest not only in the climbs themselves but in local diseases, how glaciers are formed, the digging of railway tunnels and anything else that crosses his mind. It`s a fascinating glance back into an era when a single person could invent a new sort of tent, and then the next week come up with a controversial proposal about how glacial moraines are the result of rockfall onto the glacier, and not the excavated glacial detritus at all.
The book is full of Whymper`s own drawings, and I`d been looking through it to see if I could recreate any of these as photographs. I`d earmarked a couple that looked possible during our Zermatt trip, but in actual fact the weather procluded either of his two Matterhorn views (one from the Riffelberg hotel, which still exists, and the other from the Thedule Pass - now serviced by ski lifts of various sorts). The one photograph I thought I might manage was one entitled "The English Church at Zermatt". My sat-nav device from the car had a "point of interest" that was optimistically titled "Anglische Kirche" or somesuch, and I was sure I was onto a winner. Kiki heaved a familiar sigh as I whipped our my TomTom (umm... that`s the sat-nav device) and chased it around town enthusiastically. We found the church and I took a couple of photographs - the whole area appears to have been built up substantially but I think I got a reasonable shot, despite leaving out some of the foreground. Both Whymper`s and mine are below. If anyone else has a copy of this book and is interested in trying to seek out any others then please let me know - I think the side-by-side shots would make a great coffee-table book. No that I have a coffee table right now.
The Matterhorn was a great preoccupation for Whymper, who eventually climbed it in July 1865. Well, I say "climbed". There was always a lot of idle speculation as to whether George Mallory, who died whilst attempting to climb Everest in 1924 but whose body has yet to be found, actually summited and died on the way back down. Although the logical evidence points somewhat against it as what most view as the crux of the Everest climb was still some way above him when he was last sighted, the idea is at least supported by the statistical fact that 80% of Everest deaths occur during the descent. When Edmund Hillary was asked how he`d feel if photos on Mallory`s camera revealed that he had indeed summited, Hillary said that he`d regard it as a magnificent achievement, but to say that you`d climbed a mountain you really had to come back down again too.
Edward Whymper and his whole team were certainly at the summit of the Matterhorn on July 14th 1865, but unfortunately four of them got to the bottom a lot quicker than the others. One of the more inexperienced members of his party slipped and fell, dragging off French guide Michael Croz and another two British climbers. Whymper and Peter Taugwalder braced themselves to take the strain on the rope, but it snapped as it drew taut and the four fell to their deaths. The rope, it transpired, was a flimsy one they hadn`t been intending climbing on and there was much speculation at the time as to whether Taugwalder had deliberately put this rope between himself and the inexperienced Brits, or perhaps even cut it intentionally. Both of these theories are now regarded as pretty unlikely, and the whole incident has just served to intensify the Matterhorn legend. You can climb the Matterhorn more easily these days, but rather than being a fantastically tricky climb (though it`s by no means easy) it`s rather a lottery as the primary danger is from rockfall, which is heavy and constant.
All of those who died are buried in the main church at Zermatt - I must say it was really quite a sombre moment for me standing by the graves. I couldn`t help recalling the last lines of Whymper`s chilling chapter "The Descent of the Matterhorn":
"Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are not without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destro the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end."
We found a campsite with WiFi. I`m trying not to sound too excited about this, but it`s quite nice to have eBay back after all these weeks.
It also looks to be the best campsite we`ve been at so far - the chap even came out to help us pitch up, with his special jack for lifting up the caravans. I said I didn`t mind doing all that stuff myself, but he told me that most of their customers were somewhat older than we were and appreciated the assistance.
Having spent the entire evening playing around on the internet, we`re determined not to do the same thing all day tomorrow. Still, at least now we can work out what to do locally without bumbling around finding brochures or asking people.
Distance travelled: 5664km car, 1115km train
Books read: C:2, K:6
Bottles of wine remaining: 3
Countries visited: 5 (UK, France, Switzerland, Austria, Lichtenstein)
This book is a veritable treasure. I expected it to be rather more something the author was expecting to sell based on the title, but how wrong I was. Uncle Fester has clearly invested a great deal of time and effort into researching all aspects of production, covering everything from which brand of drain cleaner provides the highest sulphuric acid content to suggestions about what sort of disguise to wear when trying to buy large quantities of nitromethane from motor racing suppliers.
Providing chemistry lessons where necessary, Mr Fester takes us on a journey from good old nitroglycerin to the many ammonium nitrate-boosted variants, with interesting add-on sections on fuel-air explosives and how to manufacture blasting caps. There`s even some interesting speculation on the content of the device that Timothy McVeigh set off in Oklahoma, and some subtle criticism of how he could perhaps have set it up better, from one lover of explosions to another.
Mr Fester is clearly a real enthusiast, and his excitement comes across gloriously in this book. In the three-page preface he deals perfunctorily with the nasty question of who might use his book and for what, and in a lot of ways I can understand his approach that the problem is with people, not with explosives. However... while you can buy plenty of books that will explain how to make different sorts of explosives in laboratory conditions (or get instructions from the US Patent Office), there can be few other publications which give you quite such practical instructions for the layperson intending blowing stuff up. His "hardware store nitro" recipe looks remarkeably straightforward, and as he explained to me that serialising production of plastic explosive was a much safer way of producing large batches than cooking a load of the stuff up in one go, I couldn`t help but feel a little irksome. If someone had decided to blow me up, wouldn`t this book be handy? I`d much rather they spent a few months trying to creating fuming nitric acid for themselves with hopefully disasterous consequences than found out in two pages. Now that I know how to make nitromannitol and it`s not turned me into a murdering lunatic, why should I be worried that anyone else reading this book also posesses the same instructions? Has some of the War Against Terror nonsense actually sunk into me?
Aside from whether it causes the death of many innocent civillians or not, the book is spectacularly poorly edited - not only are whole paragraphs repeated in various segments, but the "diagram below" is quite often on another page entirely, and there are hyphenated chunks which clearly once split lines but don`t any longer. One page charmingly switches into a whole new font for a couple of paragraphs, and then back again.
In the end, I`ve decided that I didn`t like this book at all. I didn`t like it because it made me want to cook up just one small batch of nitroglycerin. Not because I want to blow anything up, but because Uncle Fester tells me that "it has been my experience that anyone who is not brain damaged can easily master the process". I`ve even spent some time trying to think of things I`d like to blow up, but I haven`t got any.
If any reader has a target they`re keen to devastatingly explode into smithereens and can come equipped with a glass bowl and rubber stirrer (avoiding glass-on-glass friction and rubber-on-plastic static electricity, as any aspiring explosives manufacturer will know), please get in touch.
Hardens Restaurant Guide Scores (1 good, 5 bad):
Food: 1
Service: 2
Ambience: 3
After doing some careful research to find a mountain that didn`t have a cable car or a funicular railway going up it, we eventually picked one that had a cable car going only _halfway_ up it. This mountain was Hoher Frassen, right behind our campsite. Being quite lazy sorts of people, we took that cable car, ate in the inevitable restaurant at the top and then walked up to the second restaurant (Frassenhutte), decided the top was too far, gave up and walked all the way back to the campsite. The scenery was very nice, the weather was excellent and it was great not to follow a railway all the way up. Rather disappointingly there was some sort of cable car setup at the Frassenhutte, but it appeared to be for goods rather than people. I suspect that what happens is that the cable cars are eventually declared unfit for human service and become "goods-only" ones - we saw quite a lot of these in Switzerland and I rather doubt they were built specifically to carry goods.
Right, enough of that. I`ve decided not to spend too much time on things that aren`t particularly exciting for the reader, so let`s move onto something technological and whizzy. I have a Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS device - it`s really meant for running, cycling or other such going-around-in-circles pursuits but if you wear it whilst hiking it sits there remembering where you`ve been. There`s a web page (www.motionbased.com) where you can upload these tracks, and it allows you to then export them in Google Earth format. If you don`t have Google Earth, please download and install it from http://earth.google.com/. It won`t do anything bad to your computer, I promise. Once you have it, download the file http://chrisrae.com/euroblog/nuziders.kml - this is the hike we did today. If you double-click on it (once you`ve got Google Earth, dad, that`s what the "which program do you want to use" thing means) it`ll whoosh up and show you a nice satellite picture of the map. The red line poking out to the left about two thirds of the way up is where we got the cable car - we then walked up to the hut and all the way back down to our caravan.
Now, here`s the really neat thing. Below and to the right of the up/down/left/right scrolling arrows underneath the main display is a "tilt" control. Hold down the mouse button on the lower "tilt down" icon. There you go. Either you think that`s kind of neat, or in your heart of hearts you were never really going to enjoy this computery part. Dad, the reason Google Earth is now saying you don`t have an internet connection is because you unplugged that funny grey box to plug in a light to find your spectacles to read this.
If you thought that was at least vaguely interesting, try http://chrisrae.com/euroblog/kleinescheidegg.kml , which is the walk we d