Tuesday - Thursday 7-9 June - Izegem

Where was Bertie? He spent three days/two nights sitting in the workshop at Campirama having major surgery.
Weather: Tuesday - showery; Wednesday - an "I'm not going out in that!" level of wetness until early afternoon, then increasingly bright. Thursday: dry with sunny intervals and warm (22 degrees).

Surely the least exciting trip to the continent we have ever made, spending almost the entirety of it sitting in amongst the caravans and motorhomes* in a showroom.

Daytime view

As we had no access to Bertie during the days, we had to take with us each morning everything we would need for the day**, which on this occasion included food/drink provisions, various electronics (laptop for Mick to do some work, Kindles, and the tablet on which we do the crossword), my knitting, and changes of clothes/shoes so that we could each go out for a run. Due to the electronics, we weren't going to leave our bags unattended, meaning one of us had to go out in the morning, the other in the afternoon. (Complicating factor: in European style, the dealer closes for two hours at lunchtime and, whilst they allow us to stay in the showroom during that time, we don't have the freedom to come and go until they reopen.)

On Tuesday, I ran in the morning. Or I tried to. Just over 5km in, I started getting a mild niggle in my right Achilles, so erred on the side of caution and fast-marched the return leg. Mick's outing in the afternoon was more successful.

Come the night, this was our view out of Bertie's windscreen:

Not for the first time, we were to spend the night sleeping in the dealer's workshop***. On the one hand this is mightily convenient (and cheap!) for us. On the other hand, once we've been locked in, there's no possibility of leaving, except via an emergency exit, which, clearly, is only for an emergency - and would lead us into a locked compound, rather than out into the world. No "I'll just nip to the shop for that" moments.

On Wednesday morning the rain teemed down to the extent that I felt in no way inclined to go outside, but come the afternoon, I took myself off for a walk, opting for a magical mystery tour of Izegem. I'd spotted a running waymarker embedded into the pavement outside the dealership, so decided to follow it and see where it took me, banking on the idea that it would be a 5km circuit.

I was just over 2.5km in, and was still heading away from my start point, when I came to:

Until this point I'd been following yellow markers. Now I had a blue option too - which is the one I took. A while later I abandonned the waymarks and made my own way back. As a one-off, it had been an interesting tour of the local architectural styles and worth doing, but overall my view was that I'd rather do an out-and-back along the canal than weave around residential streets in the suburbs. (Later I did some Googling and discovered there's a suite of running circuits of varying lengths that, all together, add up to a marathon.)

Tag-teaming Mick as I got back, he opted to explore what appears to be Izegem's High Street - somewhere he'd not been before, but I visited a few years ago. It's nothing noteworthy.

Wednesday night was again spent sweating inside the workshop.

Thursday was warm and fine, and I tested the Achilles with a run. Absolutely no hint of a problem, other than my ability to do simple mental arithmetic - which is how my 16km became 18.5km.

The craft on the Roeslare-Leie canal are a bit bigger than on our local waterway at home...

After lunch (using the term loosely; I'd failed to buy adequate provisions so it was a picnic of unhealthy snacks), off went Mick, returning just as a member of staff came to tell us that Bertie was a few minutes away from being returned to us. Excellent timing - Mick got to have a proper wash in Bertie rather than a quick swish with a wet wipe in the toilets.

It must have been 1630 by the time Bertie hit the road, with his new rear seam gleaming and his door catches both back to full functionality. We were on a mission, for which we needed to make haste to France...


^{(*There aren't many motorhomes for sale. When we arrived they had just four inside and six outside, with masses of empty space in their huge yard, and far more caravans inside than we've ever seen before. I later spotted that one of those inside was second hand too. The current vehicle shortage is clearly causing hard times for the dealers.
** This involved a daypack and two large carrier bags, with their contents spilling over the tops - a collection of belongings that made us look like bag-ladies. As a result, half way through the first day one of the staff asked us nicely if we would move ourselves from the front of the showroom to a more discreet spot at the back, as we were making the place look untidy (I'm inferring the last bit; she was too polite to actually say that).
***Back in March, when we knew Bertie would be going in for surgery, we looked at booking an Airbnb for the time he was in the workshop. I revisited this notion a couple of weeks before we travelled, and could have got a self-contained apartment within a 2-mile walk of Campirama for a price that I considered reasonable to save us from having to sit in a showroom for 3 days. Two things stopped me from booking it: 1) The engineer had been so certain that he could get the work done in 2 days, even though it's a 3-day job (I never really believed this, and was proved right); and 2) the check-in time for most places I looked at was 5 or 6pm, and the check-out time 10am - meaning we could spend a couple of hundred euros and still find ourselves hanging around the showroom for most of the time anyway. I also looked, whilst we were there, at catching the train to somewhere in Belgium we'd not been before - somewhere more interesting than the residential suburb of Izegem - and maybe staying overnight, but we'd not packed appropriate luggage for that scenario. As it went, 27 hours sitting in a deckchair in a showroom and 28-odd hours of being locked in a workshop wasn't as bad as it might sound - the key is to be prepared during the days with plenty of entertainment options.)}