3. Along the Elbe
Germany has some big rivers which are very popular with cyclists. We’ve cycled the Rhine and parts of the Mosel but the Elbe is much less popular and more remote so we decided to try that next. It’s another huge river with commercial traffic even though we didn’t see any, but it has cycle paths adjacent to it. It’s flat, picturesque and quiet. The river meanders like a river should, winding back and forth untamed by humans and has beaches and mud flats. For most of it you are entirely on your own, with no other cyclists and just the noise of your tyres on the path and...
Read More2. The Devils Day
Leaving our second home in Naarden we took a short cycle back to the hotel where we’d recently spent our anniversary at Amersfoort, successfully missing the thunderstorms until we could actually see the hotel across the road and getting drenched in the 300m before we could get to it. The rain now is tropical not just showers, great deluges for 15 minutes then gone. Who needs Thailand, but on the bright side we were offered a free glass of bubbly on arrival – should have been cocoa – and postponed that until we had got changed and dry and sat by the fire to enjoy it....
Read More1. A Catalogue of Catastrophes
It’s not often Ten Tonne Taffy gets a mentioned in dispatches these days, but lately she’s had a rough time, doing nothing but being our home. Firstly, I got up one night to go to the loo, one of the joys of getting older, and smelt that plasticky electric burning smell. I switched off the power and went back to bed after checking nothing was on fire and the next day took the fuse board cover off and found that the immersion wire had burned completely through and melted some other wires and fuses. A close call! A close call… It turns out that the screw for that wire...
Read MoreAnniversary Waltz – a mini tour.
We visit a lot of hotels so get to use all sorts of different showers, from buckets to multi jet rainfall showers. One thing most have in common is the lengths they go to to make it hard to read the shower controls by making the temperature and shower flow knobs chrome and the instructions for want of a better description ‘off chrome’ which make reading it, without your glasses in a steamy room almost impossible so with unbridled joy and with a deepening sense of ‘oh you’re really getting old now, getting excited about this sort of thing’ we found our first...
Read MoreAnother late off the press finale… Bail out skipper
Our coastal 2 day break at Seaton Carew was a nice stop with an extremely noisy hotel, but the beach was great and we even took in a Robbie William tribute on the seafront at the town Tribute festival, he wasn’t very good. We had planned to stay on for Oasis, Coldplay and Abba, but with Robbie being poor we decided that staying up on the seafront in another hoolie with the rain wasn’t quite as appealing as getting tucked up in bed! We arrived in Hartlepool the next morning to see the historical harbour, but again the mist was so dense you could hardly see the water, but we did...
Read MoreThe North East Coast.
Hornsea is a town that time forgot. There are no chains! Heaven! It a gem of a seaside town and where our friend Mike grew up. It’s full of nice restaurants and coffee shops and of course hundreds of chippys, where we had the children’s menu Battered Veggie sausages and chips. Why don’t they do a adult portion? Who knows …. Refreshments in Beverley We had a great time with Mike and 3 days off in his lovely new house despite the seagulls pebble dashing Mikes car each day in a very strange Welcome to Hornsea move. We left Mike reluctantly and tried to stop for food on...
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