Where’s Bertie? He’s at a campsite(!!), called Fortduinen, near a place called Vught. With our ACSI card, it costs €11 for a night here, including electricity and showers. Without the card it would have been €28.50. (Exact location: 51.65578, 5.24480.)
It’s funny how an occurrence that is disappointing at the time (like taking a detour to a marina in the hope of staying the night there and doing some laundry, only to find on arrival that there are no vacancies) can turn out to be a positive thing*.
After another unintended lie-in this morning (even the extensive mowing and strimming going on outside of Bertie only vaguely disturbed us), and a walk around the town of Zaltbommel, where I got particularly distracted by the traffic on the River Maas…
The Maas is busy with barges. We had just watched one barge pushing an unpowered (whatever the boating word is for the equivalent of a trailer, but that you push in front of you), both full of coal, when this one came past, with the same inverse trailer arrangement but also with two more unpowered vessels being dragged alongside – so four times the capacity of a barge, for one powered vessel.
…we had a choice before us. We could go to the town of ‘s-Hertogenbosh (whose name does, indeed, start with an apostrophe), where we would park out-of-town at a supermarket I had identified, and walk to a laundrette that the internet had told me was in the town; we would then continue on to a free Aire, probably in Belgium. Or we could go to a campsite. On finding that there was a campsite only a couple of kilometres off-route, available to us at the bargain price of €11, including electricity and showers, it was the obvious choice, even if it did end a record run of 87 nights since our last campsite.
It turned out to be such a good choice that we had barely got Bertie settled on his pitch before we decided that we would be staying a second night. The fact that it has been so hot and sunny today has made the campsite even more worthwhile – there are no restrictions on getting ‘stuff’ out here, as there would be in a car park, so we’ve been able to sit out in our deckchairs all afternoon, whilst the laundry has dried on the washing line, saving the cost of a tumble drier.
Other than doing some laundry, using showers connected to a mains water supply for the first time since we left home on 4 June, and walking to the nearest supermarket, nothing has been done today. Tomorrow we will take a look at the lake which is apparently behind the campsite, although if the weather is as warm and sunny as today, I’m thinking that will be the extent of our activity.
I’ll finish with a leap back in time to the final paragraph of last night’s post. The band of youths with their music grew and shrank as the evening went on, but the loud music was relatively short lived. Just before 10pm, they all left. This morning the area of the car park where they had been parked was strewn with litter, even though there were bins within twenty paces (insert a heavy sigh here).
(*The marina yesterday would have cost €15, we would have needed to pay for a tumble drier as we wouldn't have been able to get the rotary airer out and we quite possibly couldn't have got our deckchairs out either. Because there was no room for us there, we ended up somewhere cheaper, where we could dry the washing outside and where we could sit out.)
It’s funny how an occurrence that is disappointing at the time (like taking a detour to a marina in the hope of staying the night there and doing some laundry, only to find on arrival that there are no vacancies) can turn out to be a positive thing*.
After another unintended lie-in this morning (even the extensive mowing and strimming going on outside of Bertie only vaguely disturbed us), and a walk around the town of Zaltbommel, where I got particularly distracted by the traffic on the River Maas…
The Maas is busy with barges. We had just watched one barge pushing an unpowered (whatever the boating word is for the equivalent of a trailer, but that you push in front of you), both full of coal, when this one came past, with the same inverse trailer arrangement but also with two more unpowered vessels being dragged alongside – so four times the capacity of a barge, for one powered vessel.
…we had a choice before us. We could go to the town of ‘s-Hertogenbosh (whose name does, indeed, start with an apostrophe), where we would park out-of-town at a supermarket I had identified, and walk to a laundrette that the internet had told me was in the town; we would then continue on to a free Aire, probably in Belgium. Or we could go to a campsite. On finding that there was a campsite only a couple of kilometres off-route, available to us at the bargain price of €11, including electricity and showers, it was the obvious choice, even if it did end a record run of 87 nights since our last campsite.
It turned out to be such a good choice that we had barely got Bertie settled on his pitch before we decided that we would be staying a second night. The fact that it has been so hot and sunny today has made the campsite even more worthwhile – there are no restrictions on getting ‘stuff’ out here, as there would be in a car park, so we’ve been able to sit out in our deckchairs all afternoon, whilst the laundry has dried on the washing line, saving the cost of a tumble drier.
Other than doing some laundry, using showers connected to a mains water supply for the first time since we left home on 4 June, and walking to the nearest supermarket, nothing has been done today. Tomorrow we will take a look at the lake which is apparently behind the campsite, although if the weather is as warm and sunny as today, I’m thinking that will be the extent of our activity.
I’ll finish with a leap back in time to the final paragraph of last night’s post. The band of youths with their music grew and shrank as the evening went on, but the loud music was relatively short lived. Just before 10pm, they all left. This morning the area of the car park where they had been parked was strewn with litter, even though there were bins within twenty paces (insert a heavy sigh here).
(*The marina yesterday would have cost €15, we would have needed to pay for a tumble drier as we wouldn't have been able to get the rotary airer out and we quite possibly couldn't have got our deckchairs out either. Because there was no room for us there, we ended up somewhere cheaper, where we could dry the washing outside and where we could sit out.)
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