We are parked up tonight at a Wohnmobilstellplatz "Siebengebirgsblick" (phew) at Bad Honnef. This wasn't our first choice when we set off this morning. To be honest we didn't even know such words existed this morning! We were intending to stay at a campsite right on the Rhine a couple of miles away on the other side of the river. When we arrived the sun was shining and there was a lot of activity; food stalls, beer tents, green fields full of Motorhomes and lots of happy smiling people - just what we wanted. We found our way to the reception/registration desk which was an annexe of the beer tent and asked how much and where do we park? "Do you have a reservation?" was the response. Reservation? We're nomads, we don't make reservations. We're free spirits, currently exploring Western Europe. We only have a small Motorhome. None of these responses was correct so after a ten point turn we left all the happy smiling people to their food stalls and beer tent and drove down to the ferry to take us over the Rhine to a couple of sites we had as back up. These turned out to be fields containing lots of dead caravans. But we stumbled upon this place which is ok, clean and tidy,8 euros a night and a twenty minute walk back down to the river and a bar where we could watch the ferry tooing and froing and massive barges slicing up and down whilst we enjoyed a couple of steins of Germany's finest.
Today is a public holiday in most of Europe and they take these things seriously here, no queues for Ikea or the garden centre - they're all closed, as are all the shops and supermarkets. Excellent, just the way things should be on a public holiday. There are lots of river walks and cycle ways here and plenty of families taking advantage of them on a warm day which must be better for your health and your wallet than trudging round a retail park.
Bad Honnef I hear you ask? Well, I came here on a school trip when I was fifteen. That's all. Anyway it's good to be in Germany, after a day we like it but I'll save our impressions of Germany for a few more days.
Yesterday, to be honest, was not the most auspicious start to our trip. We had parked up the night before in a pub car park ten minutes from the Eurotunnel terminal and set the alarm clock for 6.30am to give us plenty of time to catch the 8.20 train. Unfortunately I set the alarm wrong so it woke us at 7.30!! Fortunately Eurotunnel give you a two hour window either side of your departure time so when we finally arrived they allocated us a departure time of 10.20 which would arrive in France at midday local time. On arrival at Calais we put the co-ordinates of our Belgium Aire into the SatNavs which gave us a journey time of three hours.
This would have been fine if we hadn't first been held up for an hour and a half by roadworks on the E40. Even that wouldn't have been too bad had the Brussels ring road not been one big car park! I've never seen so much traffic just stalled in all my life. All the slip roads had cars and lorries queuing to get on and off main roads and it was absolute chaos. We crawled around Brussels to get on the last leg of our journey only to be slowed down again by a minor accident.....Aaaaargh! It finally took us over six hours to get to our destination, a little under 200 miles. When we said to friends and family that we were in no hurry as we travelled across to Greece this wasn't really what we meant.
The Aire we stopped at was next to a very well equipped and expensive looking equestrian centre with cafe, bar, restaurant, gym, sports centre, dry ski slope and all manor of horsey buildings. We didn't take advantage of any of the facilities or explore the surrounding woodland within the national park location. We were too tired to be honest and after a beer and a snack tea we were about ready for our beds.
So our first impressions of Belgium were coloured by the fact that our journey took twice as long as anticipated and on my "personal scale of driving ability by nation" Belgians would score a 5. When you consider that I would give Moroccan drivers an 8 you get some idea of how rubbish these folk are at driving.
No pictures from yesterday, Belgium is not the most picturesque of places. No pictures from today either.
Pat
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