Wo ist Bertie? He's in a Stellplatz on the edge of Hameln, where it costs €8 for 24hr. Water and electricity are available for a small extra fee. Exact location: 52.09588, 9.35827.
Wetter: A cool start, but warming to a pleasant, if humid, afternoon. Mainly overcast.
Hameln (or Hamelin in English): famous for the tale of the Pied Piper, and probably why most people come here. The reason for our visit is part of the 'visiting places from Mick's childhood' theme, as he remembers cycling here with his elder brother, from their home in Scharfoldendorf, when he was 10 or 11. Whilst he remembered the cycling bit and the destination, he had no recollection of the town itself, so we came to see if it rang any bells (conclusion: it didn't).
Initial impressions on arrival weren't good. I'd already been forewarned by comments on Park4Night that the Stellplatz isn't pleasantly sited, being in an industrial area, but I didn't expect it to be this bad.
View from Bertie's windscreen. The freight cars are abandoned.
The general dodgy feel of the area on the drive in wasn't helped by there being only four other vans here, thus lacking the feel of safety in numbers (generally leaving a motorhome in an Aire or Stellplatz feels safe as there are always other people around). We gave consideration as to whether to decamp to the Canoe Club on the other side of the river (the bridge visible in the photo above goes over the river, but you can't see the water from here, with freight cars and trees in the way), but given it's twice the price over there, and further from town, we decided to stay.
(Incidentally, slight digression: cash is still king in Germany. All of these Stellplatz we're paying for require us to insert coins into Pay & Display machines; there's no card payment option. It hasn't taken many nights to exhaust what seemed, at the start of the trip, to be an excessively large bag of coins.)
It was immediately after an early lunch that we headed into town, by which time I'd downloaded a tourist brochure and decided we should try to catch the glockenspiel for its 1305 'performance' (there are only three a day).
First view of the old town. It turned out to be a good represenation of the whole of the rest of the place.
A bit of wandering, the viewing of the Glockenspiel on the gable end of the Hochzeithaus (Wedding House)...
Wetter: A cool start, but warming to a pleasant, if humid, afternoon. Mainly overcast.
Hameln (or Hamelin in English): famous for the tale of the Pied Piper, and probably why most people come here. The reason for our visit is part of the 'visiting places from Mick's childhood' theme, as he remembers cycling here with his elder brother, from their home in Scharfoldendorf, when he was 10 or 11. Whilst he remembered the cycling bit and the destination, he had no recollection of the town itself, so we came to see if it rang any bells (conclusion: it didn't).
Initial impressions on arrival weren't good. I'd already been forewarned by comments on Park4Night that the Stellplatz isn't pleasantly sited, being in an industrial area, but I didn't expect it to be this bad.
The general dodgy feel of the area on the drive in wasn't helped by there being only four other vans here, thus lacking the feel of safety in numbers (generally leaving a motorhome in an Aire or Stellplatz feels safe as there are always other people around). We gave consideration as to whether to decamp to the Canoe Club on the other side of the river (the bridge visible in the photo above goes over the river, but you can't see the water from here, with freight cars and trees in the way), but given it's twice the price over there, and further from town, we decided to stay.
(Incidentally, slight digression: cash is still king in Germany. All of these Stellplatz we're paying for require us to insert coins into Pay & Display machines; there's no card payment option. It hasn't taken many nights to exhaust what seemed, at the start of the trip, to be an excessively large bag of coins.)
It was immediately after an early lunch that we headed into town, by which time I'd downloaded a tourist brochure and decided we should try to catch the glockenspiel for its 1305 'performance' (there are only three a day).
A bit of wandering, the viewing of the Glockenspiel on the gable end of the Hochzeithaus (Wedding House)...
...and we set out to do a self-guided tour of the old town, per the leaflet I'd downloaded. That turned out to be too difficult/uninteresting, so was soon abandoned, but did lead to us coming upon a building site that captivated us more than the surrounding complete buildings.
We wandered a bit more, I got overly excited at the range and value of sock yarn in a wool shop...
Wandering back to Bertie along the river, we took a detour across a bridge to check out a laundrette (cheap, but having since reviewed the laundy bag, it's pretty empty), which happened to give us a good view of the impressive weir.
Arriving back at the Stellplatz, we found it approaching full, and thus it's feeling less of a dodgy place to be. There's probably a daily turnover of visitors and we must have just arrived in the morning lull between departures and arrivals.
(For anyone desperately wondering how last night's leftover electricity credit got on, it ran out about half an hour before we left Bad Eilsen this morning. A few minutes later I was just about to put a coin into the slot for drinking water, when I thought I'd be better turning the tap on before inserting the coin. Water came out, so we not only absconded without paying tax*, but got free electricity and water, thanks to credit left over from others.
*It occurs to me that the only people who will have trouble paying the Tourist Tax on the weekend are those from non-Euro-as-currency countries, and given that until today we've only seen one non-German motorhome on our travels, the losses from people who can't reasonably pay the tax (like us) must be tiny. I'll wager the losses from people who choose not to pay the tax is far greater.)
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