Where's Bertie? He's in a free Stellplatz in a park (Volkspark Marienberg), on the north side of Nuremberg. There are toilets here but no other services. (Exact location: 49.47483, 11.09411)
Weather: Sunshine and showers, some violent and thundery. Hot when the sun's out.
Things that disrupted my slumber last night:
1) The temperature - we went to bed as soon as it dropped below 30 degrees inside Bertie, but it didn't get lower than 25 all night;
2) The rain - it wasn't just the noise on the roof that woke me in the early hours, but the fact that I was getting wet (in view of the temperature, we'd gone to bed with the rooflight above the bed wide open);
3) The trains - fewer than on Friday night, but still some;
4) The Bulgarian drug dealer* and his chums who decided to have a loud conversation 5m away from our heads, starting at 11.30pm and lasting an hour.
I mainly blame the temperature; if it hadn't been so hot I reckon the other things wouldn't have disturbed me nearly as much.
When the alarm went off at 6.40am (I wanted to run before it got too hot), I felt far from rested. Accordingly, I spent the first four miles focused entirely on reasons why I was going to cut short my intended long run. I did cut short too, but only after 10.7 miles and only on account of a small niggle in my back.
Meanwhile, Mick did exactly as he set out to do - two loops of yesterday's parkrun route**. I waved as I passed him, in the opposite direction, on his second lap.
The moment I sat down on my return to Bertie, my tiredness returned and I declared that I would be happy to do absolutely nothing for the rest of the day. Doing nothing wasn't entirely practical, as after two poor nights' sleep at Wöhrder See, we needed to move. Hence we came here, a whole 3.5km drive away. Almost immediately, I wished (with hindsight) that we had come here yesterday afternoon.
My 'doing nothing' plan took another knock this afternoon, when I was drawn to walk around the park. Germans do like to picnic in the park on weekends, and they do it grand style - many with tables and chairs (sometimes quite substantial wooden or metal ones), full-sized barbecues, bags upon bags of food and drink and, in a couple of cases this afternoon, with a gazebo. We couldn't resist a bit of people watching in that context.
I'm not sure you can make out in this snap that all the groups other than the one with a gazebo are huddled under trees, so here's a closer shot:
Mid-afternoon so many people had arrived for their al-fresco dining that the car park was full and cars started using the 'motorhomes only' area. Two who pulled in by us had just emptied their boots (yes, we gawked at the kit and caboodle they had with them) when the heavens opened in a biblical fashion. Stuff was hastily re-stowed and one of the cars left, but the other waited out the rain and then toted their tables, chairs, coolbox, teapot and shisha pipe into the park.
It's quarter to eight as I type and the car park is still over half full. It seems that most Germans like their al-fresco dining so much that they're not put off by a showery afternoon. You just need a big enough tree under which to sit!
(* There's a very good chance he wasn't actually a drug dealer. When we got back from our foray into the city yesterday afternoon, there was a Bulgarian BMW, with blacked out windows, sitting in a motorhome-only space in the back corner of the car park. As the evening went on, a couple of other cars came and went. I saw boxes and wodges of cash change hands, although the boxes were too big and the wodges of cash too small for me to really think it was a drugs deal. I'm not even convinced it was anything disreputable going on, as surely one would chose a more discreet spot? And not draw attention to yourself more than necessary by chatting so loudly (for goodness sake, you're standing right next to each other, you don't need to shout!) in the middle of the night. There was one other van that was in between us and them. I bet they were even more delighted with the behaviour.
** At 7.30am, the park surrounding the Wöhrder See was in a shocking state with litter strewn everywhere. By nine, the bin-emptiers/litter-pickers had made their way around half of the park and I'm sure that by ten it would all have been pristine again.)
Weather: Sunshine and showers, some violent and thundery. Hot when the sun's out.
Things that disrupted my slumber last night:
1) The temperature - we went to bed as soon as it dropped below 30 degrees inside Bertie, but it didn't get lower than 25 all night;
2) The rain - it wasn't just the noise on the roof that woke me in the early hours, but the fact that I was getting wet (in view of the temperature, we'd gone to bed with the rooflight above the bed wide open);
3) The trains - fewer than on Friday night, but still some;
4) The Bulgarian drug dealer* and his chums who decided to have a loud conversation 5m away from our heads, starting at 11.30pm and lasting an hour.
I mainly blame the temperature; if it hadn't been so hot I reckon the other things wouldn't have disturbed me nearly as much.
When the alarm went off at 6.40am (I wanted to run before it got too hot), I felt far from rested. Accordingly, I spent the first four miles focused entirely on reasons why I was going to cut short my intended long run. I did cut short too, but only after 10.7 miles and only on account of a small niggle in my back.
Meanwhile, Mick did exactly as he set out to do - two loops of yesterday's parkrun route**. I waved as I passed him, in the opposite direction, on his second lap.
The moment I sat down on my return to Bertie, my tiredness returned and I declared that I would be happy to do absolutely nothing for the rest of the day. Doing nothing wasn't entirely practical, as after two poor nights' sleep at Wöhrder See, we needed to move. Hence we came here, a whole 3.5km drive away. Almost immediately, I wished (with hindsight) that we had come here yesterday afternoon.
My 'doing nothing' plan took another knock this afternoon, when I was drawn to walk around the park. Germans do like to picnic in the park on weekends, and they do it grand style - many with tables and chairs (sometimes quite substantial wooden or metal ones), full-sized barbecues, bags upon bags of food and drink and, in a couple of cases this afternoon, with a gazebo. We couldn't resist a bit of people watching in that context.
Mid-afternoon so many people had arrived for their al-fresco dining that the car park was full and cars started using the 'motorhomes only' area. Two who pulled in by us had just emptied their boots (yes, we gawked at the kit and caboodle they had with them) when the heavens opened in a biblical fashion. Stuff was hastily re-stowed and one of the cars left, but the other waited out the rain and then toted their tables, chairs, coolbox, teapot and shisha pipe into the park.
It's quarter to eight as I type and the car park is still over half full. It seems that most Germans like their al-fresco dining so much that they're not put off by a showery afternoon. You just need a big enough tree under which to sit!
(* There's a very good chance he wasn't actually a drug dealer. When we got back from our foray into the city yesterday afternoon, there was a Bulgarian BMW, with blacked out windows, sitting in a motorhome-only space in the back corner of the car park. As the evening went on, a couple of other cars came and went. I saw boxes and wodges of cash change hands, although the boxes were too big and the wodges of cash too small for me to really think it was a drugs deal. I'm not even convinced it was anything disreputable going on, as surely one would chose a more discreet spot? And not draw attention to yourself more than necessary by chatting so loudly (for goodness sake, you're standing right next to each other, you don't need to shout!) in the middle of the night. There was one other van that was in between us and them. I bet they were even more delighted with the behaviour.
** At 7.30am, the park surrounding the Wöhrder See was in a shocking state with litter strewn everywhere. By nine, the bin-emptiers/litter-pickers had made their way around half of the park and I'm sure that by ten it would all have been pristine again.)
That communal picnicking looks like my idea of Hell. Loud conversations at unsociable hours are well known to me. At least for you I presume they were speaking a foreign language - if you can understand or worse still half understand you can't help being drawn in. From my LEJOG journal - sorry about the indentation problem - I tried to remove formatting from the copy but the day is too short to find out how to sort it:
ReplyDeleteDay 50
Wednesday 4th June 2008
Traquair to Peebles
There were a few tents in my area and one in particular about thirty yards
away. At about 11:00pm two youths, who I never saw, arrived back at this
ent in a car. Immediately they were shouting at each other obviously in the
middle of a massive fallout. One was doing most of the shouting directing
revolting language at the other and I would say that he was definitely
psychopathic. It seems that they were on an annual coarse fishing trip
they had been the year before), and the shouter was saying that he was
fed up and wanted to go home, and that the other never listened to him,
and that everybody hated him including the American they had met that
day, and that the shouter was the only friend he had got. It is difficult to
remember the hurtful words that were used, but the denigration of one
friend by another was positively evil and revoltingly malicious. At one stage
I think they actually came to blows. All this went on for about an hour until the shouter started to engineer some kind of sentimental reconciliation, and eventually things settled down. Unfortunately the diatribe had been so evil that it left me in a very disturbed state of mind, and I drifted in and out of sleep having some kind of mini nightmares influenced by the unpleasantness that I had listened to.
Some of the conversations earlier in the evening were carried out in heavily accented English, but thankfully those in the middle of the night were in 'foreign' (presumably Bulgarian).
DeleteI suppose I should count my blessings that Bertie is a little more sound-proof than a tent. And easier to move if a night-time disturbance does become too much.
I'm surprised you slept at all in that temperature - perhaps you should just imagine yourselves as inmates of Blackheath House and work out a story line...
ReplyDelete