1. 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 MoreMelt down
I’ve been fighting my bad back and the old knee is giving me some gyp too but we’ve been making good progress until we reached our first tent site of the tour. It was a fab site, the showers and toilets were better than most hotels, a bit like you’d expect in a very posh gym on the day it opened and the Germans next to us got told to shut up by some annoyed Dutch around 10:30 saving us the trouble of getting out of our sleeping bags, but overall it was a good place to stay, despite the fact it poured with rain all night and we got a disturbed night’s sleep. We set off...
Read MoreWheeling our age…
As you get older the list of ailments grows, those younger than us will be thinking it won’t happen to them and those older will be thinking Oh yes it will, but anyway we’ve come of age and joined the multiple ailments brigade. And there’s only one way to deal with it and that’s as soon as they glue the latest bit to fall off you back on you get going before another part has a chance to fail. So we set off on our latest, much less adventurous tour – Friends and Family 24, or FAF for short. My knee is still not right and oddly enough it’s been fine until we...
Read MoreBack on our own again…
By the time we woke up the Du Randts were already on the train back to Holland, in fact they may have already been in Holland – We were back in our old routine and lying in! We had a short ride up to Cologne when we finally got going and found a lovely campsite by the river a few kms south of the city. We had a great pitch right on the waters edge and met another touring cycle couple over a bottle of wine who were cycling to Vienna for a great evening. We had planned to go into Cologne the next day but woke to signs on the shower block saying please contact reception because of the...
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