Thursay 29 September - Liedberg

Where's Bertie? He's in a car park (official Wohnmobilestellplatz, but without services?) in the village of Liedberg. Exact location: 51.16470, 6.53968.
Weather: wall-to-wall sunshine this morning (but starting at 5 degrees), with some cloud developing this afternoon (hitting mid-teens).

The Stellplatz at Brüggen was incredibly quiet overnight - a fact I contemplated last night when the pain of a migraine woke me and kept me that way. Eventually I got up and rummaged for some drugs, listened to an audiobook for a while, then the next thing I knew I was woken by hammering on the building site at 0720. There had been no heavy lorries driving past this morning; it seems that phase of the works is complete.

I still felt rather poorly after first breakfast, but knowing that a run usually makes me feel better (at least while I'm running, even if not afterwards), off we went into the forest beyond the lake we'd run around yesterday. Only an out-and-back, but a glorious route, with the sunlight streaming through the trees.

Not the best representation of the route. Further on was much nicer.

Once again, the rest of the morning ran away from us and it was lunchtime by the time we'd completed all of our chores. It wouldn't have taken much persuasion for us to stay put another night, but as we'd completely packed away by the time we had that thought, and as we were pretty sure we'd exhausted everything there was to see nearby, onwards we came, hoping that there proved to be something to see at our destination.

First indications on walking into the village were good...

...and rounding the corner it got even better (and wonkier)...

...then we came upon the tower (also wonky), which I now know dates from the 9th century and is the oldest building in this district:

More wandering took us to the Schloss, which is now inhabited by a number of businesses...

...and it was in front of that buidling that I spotted a sign saying 'Pfadfindergrab'. Google Translate: Boy Scout Grave. We had to go and investigate.

Having translated the inscription on the grave, when we got back to Bertie I Googled the incident in question and found the sad tale of a group of scouts who got caught in a 10-ton rock fall in an underground tunnel, related to the local mining activities.

The grave had drawn us into the woods, so we continued to walk through them rather than backtracking - our second lovely bit of woodland of the day:

Another street of wonky half-timbered houses...

...and a modern house with some excellent topiary in its front garden...

...brought us a complete loop back to Bertie.

So, an interesting (if small) place. On Saturdays there are guided tours (in German), the flyer for which observes that most visitors don't see/learn the most interesting stuff. It's a shame they don't publish a little guide for those of us not here on a Saturday, and who don't speak German (written literature can be translated more readily).

Wednesday 28 September - Brüggen

Where's Bertie? He's in the same Stellplatz as yesterday, but in the space opposite the one where he spent last night.
Weather: A surprisingly sunny morning, quite pleasant when in the sun and out the wind, followed by an increasingly cloudy afternoon with some heavy showers later on.

You'd think, after 11 years of motorhoming, that it would be second nature to put a little bit of thought into where we're parking. In general, I think we do: if it's hot and sunny, we seek shade, if it's raining we avoid being under trees, and if it's cold and sunny we try to orientate Bertie's massive cab windows into the sun. Yesterday we had an aberration, and managed to park under trees, facing north.

Thus after this morning's run to and around Born See...

...we did a quick manoeuvre to rectify the situation. Finding ourselves with an unexpectedly sunny morning, we wanted the solar gain through the front windows.

Somehow time evaporated and it was gone eleven by when we headed into town to renew our efforts to pay for our electric hook up. Success - the Tourist Information office gave us an official, stamped receipt in return for our envelope. A bit bizarre that they didn't also offer us any information about the town, but a quick scan through their displays didn't reveal anything so useful as a town map or guide.

Our meanderings revealed:

The Rathaus, which we believe to be the old Kloster

In front of the Rathaus is a 'Stolen Memories' exhibition, which is aiming to reunite personal effects stolen from concentration camp inmates with the families of those inmates

A pretty scene (that probably doesn't come across so well in this snap) of one of the town's watermills and another historic building

Having missed elevenses we were ready for lunch by the time we'd done that, so we picked up a takeaway from the local Wok. No photo! I was so hungry I forgot to take one.

After a bit of computer-based admin this afternoon, we nipped back into town to take a look at the ramparts, which turned out to be much less extensive than anticipated - even reading the two information signs and walking their entirety can't have taken more than ten minutes.

The viewpoint at the end was underwhelming...

...but I did subsequently find a vantage point from which the castle can be seen (it's obscured on most sides by trees).

The detour we then took across town to a cake shop we'd eyed up earlier was perhaps a little ill advised. Having dithered in there about which goodies to choose, and after a bit of chat with the server, who learnt her English from growing up in a town mainly inhabited by British military personnel, and thus spoke coloquially with a Home Counties accent, when we emerged back onto the street it was so dark that it seemed like dusk had come three hours early. Turns out the forecast of heavy rain between 4 & 5pm was spot on and despite our haste back Bertiewards, it caught us about half way. Thank goodness the cakes were of the sort that I could shove down my jacket without spoiling them!

A cherry lattice tart and a nut and chocolate thing. We went halvers. They were good.

News from the building site is that it's been another busy, and relatively noisy, day of activity. However, the first heavy truck to trundle past Bertie wasn't until just gone 6.30 this morning, and even after that we managed successfully to doze in between subsequent trucks - hence we're happy to spend a second night.

--------------

Just after I typed the above, there was a flurry of new arrivals at the Stellplatz. A motorhome, a demountable, and two white vans towing massive double-axled caravans. The latter were the first British number plates we've seen in Germany this year. Caravans in a Stellplatz though? Is that allowed? Well, sometimes yes - we've seen many a caravan at Stellplätze - and sometimes no, but there's not usually any signage to make the position clear. The position became clear here not long after they'd unhitched, and just as one of them was about to plug into the electric. Having not seen the guardian at all until now (as there are no daily charges at the moment, it makes sense that he's not currently in residence), he arrived on a bicycle with curious promptness (someone had phoned him?) and after much gesticulation and some raised voices, the caravans were re-hitched to their white vans and away they went. 

Tuesday 27 September - Not Roermond (NL) but Brüggen (D)

Where's Bertie? He's in a Stellplatz in the town of Brüggen (Germany) where it usually costs €5 per night, including water. Electricity is available for a small fee. Exact location: 51.24264, 6.18991
Weather: Rain almost all day. 11 degrees.

Our run (dry for the first ten minutes, then wet), was timed to get us back to Bertie on the dot of 9am for Mick to call his mum's doctor. With that completed and after the usual breakfast/faffing, it was time to move on*.

Roermond, just on the NL side of the NL/D border, was our destination, but first I wanted to visit Eindhoven's Stadswandelpark. I'd become aware of it as the Tourist Information website, whilst suggesting nothing to see in the City Centre (is there nothing to see there?), highlighted the Stadswandelpark sculpture park as a good place for an autumn walk.

I'm sure that on a sunny day at any time of year, it would make for a pleasantly diverting hour or so. The surroundings are certainly nice, and some of the many sculptures are worth seeing. Today, however, was not that day. Fortunately, I'd been able to identify a car park that was 600m away (versus my original plan of walking in from 2km away), but even so it was a rather damp outing that saw me in full Paramo, and wearing gloves, for the first time this season.

Some of the bird-themed artwork in an underpass on the way to the sculpture park. Mick's in the last snap for scale.  

One of the few photos I took. My phone isn't waterproof.

Looks like she doesn't approve of that seagull on her hand! This piece, from around 1930, was designed to celebrate the first radio communication with the Dutch East Indies. It predates the sculpture park, which was instigated in the mid-1950s.

Back at Bertie we shook the excess water off our waterproofs, hung them in Bertie's shower room, and headed on towards the German border.

Mick's mum's doctor phoned en-route, and conveniently a few seconds later I spotted the entrance to a car park, so in I pulled. A fine idea (mainly so that the SatNavs wouldn't keep barking instructions whilst Mick was talking), but there turned out to be no free spaces and nowhere to turn around. Ready to move again, there was nothing to be done but to reverse back out onto the main road.

Arriving at the Camperplaats at the marina in Roermond a while later, confusion reigned as to where we needed to present ourselves. Mick investigated (jacketless, in the rain), until eventually he discovered the reason he couldn't find an open office: it's closed on a Tuesday. He phoned instead, to learn that there was no room at the inn. Never had it occurred to me that we wouldn't find a vacant space in a large Camperplaats mid-week in late September. A pity as from what we saw Roermond is an interesting historical place and the camperplaats was well situated to explore it (even if the weather wasn't particularly amenable to the activity).

I quickly re-programmed the SatNav for a nearby car park, and a few minutes later we duly pulled into it, only to find that it was full and there was nowhere to turn around. Gah! Twice in an hour! Another reversing manoeuvre onto a main road.

With no Plan C (nor even an idea of which direction we needed to head), I pulled into the next residential side street, parked outside a rather grand mini-mansion and proceeded to prepare some cheese toasties. It was approaching 1430 and I was hungry. If the residents of the houses either side of the road were in, they perhaps wondered what we were about, but didn't come to ask us.

By the time lunch had been consumed, we had a new destination: Brüggen in Germany. We'd seen the warning of a large building site immediately adjacent to the Stellplatz, causing disturbance during the day, but otherwise it looked like a good bet. So it seems to be, as we arrived to find that from this morning and for the rest of the week heavy trucks will be driving through the Stellplatz at regular intervals, and as a result charges have been suspended*. Having been here for a couple of hours before work stopped, the trucks weren't bothering us, even though driving a few feet in front of Bertie's bumper, so I reckon this will do us for a couple of nights. From a quick foray into the town centre (only 500m distant) it seems another small but historic place. We'll investigate more tomorrow, having curtailed today's little look-see due to a heavy rainshower coming upon us. It was with soggy jeans that we got back to Bertie.

View from Bertie's windscreen upon arrival. Look - there's some blue sky. Didn't last long before the next rain came in.  

^{(*Our first night at Eindhoven's P&R was €4. Today when I presented our ticket in the machine it charged me €9 for two nights. No idea how that pricing structure works.
*As we're not paying for parking, we thought we'd pay for electricity instead. We've duly put our coin into one of the provided envelopes and completed our details, but can't find out where to put that envelope. There's a small round hole just above where the envelopes are kept, but it's too small for a €2 coin. Our foray into town was mainly to try to deliver it to the Tourist Office instead, but we found that to be closed. We'll continue our endeavours to pay tomorrow.)}

Monday 26 September - Eindhoven

Where's Bertie? He's still at the Park & Ride at Eindhoven.
Weather: Miserably wet and cold.

A short blog on a day when little happened.

My run this morning was fortuitously mainly during one of the only dry spells of the day. The route was disappointing - a cycle path alongside a canal, but being up above the water and with a line of trees in between me and it, it wasn't the 'tow path' style of track I was expecting.

During a rare dry spell

The plan for today had then been to go into Eindhoven to see if there's anything to see, but first we needed to wait in for a call from Mick's mum's doctor (yes, phones are mobile, but receiving such a call on a bus or whilst walking around a city in the rain wouldn't be ideal). Eventually, at 1700, Mick called the surgery to find the wrong number had been called repeatedly and a message left on some stranger's phone, so we now need to repeat the process tomorrow.

Had it been fine weather, it would have been an annoying waste of a day. As it is, it wouldn't have been nice to have been outside, and at least I managed to do a couple of useful things whilst frittering the day away.

Saturday & Sunday 24-25 September - Eindhoven

Where's Bertie? He's in a motorhome parking slot at P&R Meerhoven, on the west side of Eindhoven, where it costs €4 for 24 hours. There's a grey water drain here, but no other services. Exact location: 51.43496, 5.42441.
Weather: Sat: persistent light rain all morning, dry but overcast afternoon. Mid-teens. Sun: Sunny morning, sunny intervals in the afternoon, with some attempts at showers. 20 degrees.

Saturday
We started with an early breakfast and a drive* to Karpendonkse Plas on the east side of Eindhoven, where we sat in a car park occupied by just us and a dodgy looking chap in a Corsa. Watching the rain come down didn't instill us with enthusiasm to go out in it, but at quarter to nine we trotted off to say hello to the parkrun volunteers.

It was our first parkrun in the Netherlands, and a couple of things struck me as stereotypically Dutch: 1) On both laps of the lake we ran past a prostitute openly soliciting in daylight on a street corner; 2) after the run one of the other runners got changed before cycling home, so she stood in front of us, chatting away as she whipped off her top (no bra underneath) and changed into a dry one, then repeated with her shorts. All we were lacking was seeing a windmill, some clogs and some hash cake on sale for the full set of stereotypical Dutchness. Alas the cafe at the nearby Athletics club, where we all gathered afterwards, didn't have any type of cake, nor pastries. We were hungry by the time we dragged ourselves away at 11.30am!

My time, whilst not as fast as last week (I was meant to be taking it easy but managed to be neither fast nor slow), says I wasn't shuffling to the extent suggested by this snap. 

We had already decided that this rainy day wasn't one for doing anything else out of doors, and once we'd relocated to the Park and Ride we stuck to that, even though the weather perked up far more than forecast. Indeed, it stayed largely dry all afternoon.

I chivvied us for a quick walk around the block after tea, but that was the sum of the afternoon's activity.

Sunday
Yesterday afternoon I researched things we could do whilst around Eindhoven and on the agenda today was the Wings of Liberation Museum**, which sounded right up our street.

Via a quick trip to Lidl (turns out supermarkets are open in NL on a Sunday), we made the 16km drive up to the town of Best and the museum.

The main subject of the museum is Operation Market Garden, which took place over the course of 10 days in September 1944 before it failed for being 'a bridge too far'. It's an unusual thing, having a museum dedicated to such a small period of time, but with the assistance of the Audio Guide, some help from Google Translate (many of the information signs were monolingual), and Mick's prior knowledge of the Operation, it was an interesting three hours we spent there. Reasonable value for the €11 each entrance fee.

There were three smaller rooms, and one bigger. This is part of the bigger, which contained planes and vehicles.

Mick listens intently to the audio guide

"What are the chances?" I exclaimed as I read the information sign next to the engine. "Conrad is just making a model of one of these!". Pity my photo has bleached the colour out of the information sign photo, as it was indeed bright yellow.

Our visit ended with Mick flying a Dakota over Rotterdam and Den Haag, and into Valkenburg - a Dutch Naval base he'd visited when in the RAF.

The museum, being housed in unheated concrete buildings, was rather on the cool side, so it was something of a relief to emerge back out into a sunny and warm afternoon.

A quick, late lunch in Bertie then a little tootle 4km along the road for a fun hour at a petrol station:

The 'fun' bit of that statement may have been a lie.

Yep, I'd declared it to be laundry day. Far from the cheapest laundry facilities, but they gain bonus points for the convenience of being able to park adjacent. On reflection, 4pm is not a good time of day to do laundry. It needs to be done in the morning on a sunny day so that anything that comes out of the drier still a bit damp can be aired on the dashboard.

With that done, back to the Park & Ride we came - via a rather slow route as I'd forgotten that whilst looking at trip distances a couple of days ago I'd set Google Maps to avoid motorways (we're right next to a motorway here, as is the town we'd just come from). On the plus side, it gave us the opportunity to resolve the issue of Bertie's 'low fuel' light having come on. At 186.9/litre, we are slightly kicking ourselves for failing to fill up before we left Belgium, where it was 10c/litre cheaper.

^{(*Our impressions of driving in the Netherlands thus far: narrow lanes, far too many block paved or cobbled roads, and raised junctions or speed humps every few hundred metres.
**I also quite fancied the DAF museum, but with museums being closed on Mondays, to go to both the Wings of Liberation and DAF would have required us to stay until at least Tuesday.)}

Friday 23 September - Vessem (Netherlands)

Where's Bertie? He's at a Camperplaats 2km outside of the village of Vessem (NL) at a cost of €13.50 per night (includes 2x hot drinks at the cafe, wifi and service point). Electricity, showers and use of a private bathroom are all available for small extra fees. Exact location: 51.43989, 5.27918
Weather: Lightly overcast morning, becoming increasingly overcast with the threat of rain as the afternoon progressed. Up to 18 degrees.

After another walk across many national borders in Baarle this morning, we stopped at a cafe in the 'square' (which isn't really a square, in that the main road cuts right through it) and over drinks and some excellent apple cake*...

...I did a bit more reading about the history of Baarle, trying to find out how and why such a bizarre border situation could arise. We had assumed it was relatively recent arrangement (particularly having read that the borders weren't finalised until 1995), but it transpires that it goes back to 1198 when one duke gave some parcels of land to a mate. One of those dukes was part of the royal family of the Netherlands. The other was from the south of the country and when that area gained independence and became Belgium in 1830, that duke's successor became the monarch of Belgium.

Leaving Baarle, our next destination would have been Eindhoven, except that I realised yesterday that the motorhome parking there doesn't have a service point. We could have made the toilet last until Sunday, and bought a bottle of water to tide us over, but wanting the flexibility to spend a couple or three days in Eindhoven if the fancy takes us, we needed to visit a service point today. The problem is that whilst the Netherlands has plenty of Camperplaats, the vast majority seem to be private enterprises (like UK certified sites, but with far more pitches). I'm sure that most would allow you to just use the service point for a fee, but a few won't, and we didn't want to drive out of our way to meet with refusals. I spent far too long looking for an answer to this problem before the obvious occurred to me: we don't *need* to be in Eindhoven until 0830 tomorrow and a whole choice of different camperplaats(es?) lay along our route. I chose this one on the strength of its reviews, even though the next one along our route apparently has free laundry facilities. What we didn't know until we arrived is that the fee here includes a couple of hot drinks in the cafe:

Caught scoffing the cake that came with the drinks. I had a choice of teas, all served as loose-leaf. I went for Dutch breakfast and enjoyed it.

The drink-on-the-house thing worked out well for the café. As we sat there we realised it was knocking on for 2pm, that we'd not had any lunch, that we don't have any bread in, and there's no shop nearby. This was the result:

I've spent most of the rest of the afternoon coming up with a notional route for the rest of the trip. I'll not publish it as it's very much subject to change if we find there's not much of interest to us in the places we plan to go. Even though we're going back into Germany, it seems that there aren't many free Stellplätze in the areas we'll be, so we'll likely be paying for most nights from here on - either that or we'll be kipping in car parks and playing boy-racer/banging tunes roulette - a game in which we seem to have had a below average level of success so far this trip**.

Statue of the Day

Today's drive wasn't great either. Lots of relatively busy little roads where oncoming vehicles both have to drive two wheels off the road in order to pass. Then there was this cobbled section that went on for far longer than was reasonable (2km?) after we'd left a town.

^{(*We asked the waiter where he came from as he spoke perfect English with a London(ish) accent. Turns out he's from Baarle and has never been to England in his life.
**Last night in Baarle was close to car-park-kipping perfection. Absolutely quiet until on the dot of 6am the HGV tow truck, that had pulled in next to us at about 8pm, started its engine, ran it for a couple of minutes, then left. If we weren't intent on being in Eindhoven tomorrow, I would have happily stayed there another night.)}

Thursday 22 September - Baarle-Hertog Belgium/Netherlands

Where's Bertie? He's in a free car park in the town of Baarle-Hertog. Exact location: 51.44095, 4.93117
Weather: Only a small amount of high level cloud, otherwise sunny, reaching the low twenties. Wore longs today and by afternoon wished for shorts.

At midnight I woke up to find Mick peering out of the kitchen window. It was the screeching that had woken him, and subsequently me. Boy racers. The bane of our lives. They'd decided that it would be great fun to see how much speed they could get up in driving around and around the roundabout next to which we were parked. Getting faster and faster, their tyres would squeal, then they'd start to lose control of the car, whereupon they would slow down and start the process over again. When I got up to see what they were up to about half an hour later, they were going the wrong way around the roundabout. Comparing notes today, Mick and I had reached the same conclusion: there was a lampost, a signpost and a tree in between us and them; if they completely lost control, we were safe. Finally, after about an hour of coming and going, they went away.

In spite of the disturbance, we still got up at the usual time for a run along the Roeselare-Leie Kanaal...

...then frittered away the rest of the morning*, before finally getting on the road. Today's destination came about because a couple of days ago, I spotted this on the map:

The black lines are country borders. The one along the bottom of the map sits as you would expect, dividing Belgium from the Netherlands. But what was going on in Baarle-Hertog/Baarle-Nassau? Were those really all country borders? After a quick Google, we decided that even if there wasn't much to see, we had to come here.

Around half of all of the enclaves in the world are in this town, where there are 22 small parcels of Belgium, completely surrounded by the Netherlands (the smallest being 50mx50m). Within the Belgian enclaves, there are also 7 Dutch counter-enclaves. So there are enclaves within enclaves. How crazy that seems to my mind!

It turns out that it's a nice little town, that happens to have the bizarre feature of national borders being marked on the streets at intervals. In walking the length of the main street, we left Belgium, went through the Netherlands, entered a different bit of Belgium, entered a different bit of the Netherlands, then, just before the next border, turned around to retrace our steps.

Border marked on the ground, zig-zagging across the street

Every lamppost identifies which country you're in

Seeing that there's a tourist information office in town (shut by the time we passed by at gone 5pm), I looked up their website, where I learnt about other peculiarities, like the house who, when the borders were formalised in 1995, switched the location of its front door and the adjacent window, so as to prevent the 95-year-old resident from having to change nationality (it's the position of the front door that defines which country a house is in, even if the house straddles the border)...

Red door and barred white window switched in 1995 to allow the resident to stay in Belgium

...and the house where the border bisects the front door, so it has both a Belgian address (in Baarle-Hertog), with one house number, and a Dutch address (in Baarle-Nassau) with a different number.

What I've not yet found out is how this situation developed in the first place.

As for the journey to get here: it wasn't great fun. We had to pass Antwerp for the third time on this trip, and our luck with the traffic ran out. The motorway past Antwerp is, in my view, comparable with the section of the M25 between the M23 and the M40 for traffic jams, and today's 170km journey, mainly on motorway, took us a few minutes under 3 hours.

Traffic a-go-go



^{(*The owner of the motorhome dealership had asked to see us this morning, with a suggestion that we may have to pay for some of the work that had been carried out on Bertie. Given that he's still under warranty, and that we have met all of the terms of that warranty, we were spitting feathers and ready for an argument. No argument was needed. By the time we met with the owner this morning, he had clarified the position in our favour. By the time that was sorted, and we'd walked to Lidl and back, it was lunchtime, so we had lunch. All of those delays at least gave the sealant on Bertie's repaired wheel arch time to cure properly.)}

Wednesday 21 September - Izegem

Where’s Bertie? He’s spending another night in his motorhome dealer’s customer parking.

Weather: Mainly overcast but becoming sunnier this afternoon.

The day didn’t get off to a roaring start. Literally so. When Bertie’s heating fires up it sounds like a jet engine for a second before becoming barely audible. This morning there was no roar and a fault code came up on the display panel. Oh no! Not another problem! 

I cleared the code and tried again, but with the same result. A quick Google of the code had me suspect what the issue was. About a week ago I checked the levels in Bertie’s gas cylinders and he had about 4.5 litres in the first, with the second being full. As we go through about a litre per day, that first cylinder should have run out a few days ago, and the system should have automatically switched over to the second cylinder. However, the gauges aren’t overly accurate, and it seems that we only reached a low gas pressure in the last 24 hours (because the heating worked yesterday morning) and the changeover valve hadn’t done its thing. Out I went to the gas locker to manually change it over (just a matter of turning a knob), and having done that I thought I’d just check the crash-detection trip valves – and there was our problem. It seems that when we turned the gas back on having filled the cylinders a month ago, we failed to reset that crash valve on the second cylinder and thus the changeover valve was seeing it as empty. A relief that it was operator error, rather than a genuine fault.

Annnnnd, that is the entirety of what I have to report today. The rest of our day has looked like this:

Tuesday 20 September - Ghent and Izegem

Where's Bertie? He's spending yet another night of his life outside his motorhome dealer in Izegem. There are worse places to stay, in that it’s level enough and with free electric, but we’d rather stop coming here now!
Weather: Sunny intervals, a few short spells of rain.

It turned out that there wasn’t much more to Park Fort Liezele than we saw yesterday, so we ran laps around it this morning until an appropriate distance had been covered. 

Mick had a couple of phone calls to make, and I did some housework (taking Bertie to the dealer makes me come over all houseproud), then with lunchtime approaching it was time to move on from Puur. With no need to be at the motorhome dealership until evening, I thought, as we were passing, we’d nip into Ghent for a quick look around.

When I’d first floated the notion of going to Ghent a couple of days ago, Mick thought we’d already been, whereas I had no recollection of the place. Blog to the rescue! It turns out that in March 2018 we tried to visit, but found our destination car park taken over by a fair, so we abandoned the attempt.  

I have no idea where we tried to park on that occasion, but this time, with no intention of spending the night, we headed to a Park and Ride on the north side of the city, which not only provides free parking, but also a free shuttle bus. After lunch, off to the bus stop we went, soon coming to appreciate, as we loitered there, that the season for wearing shorts may be behind us. By the time we arrived in the city a light drizzle was coming down and my hankering after long legwear increased. 

We had no intention of doing any ‘proper’ sightseeing, but based on what we saw, I’d happily go back and do a more structured tour.

City views

From this vantage point, I felt like someone had picked up a whole load of monumental buildings and put them down on a single square of a monopoly board.

We wandered, visited a church and the cathedral...

... wandered a bit more, then headed back to the bus via Graffiti Street:

The alleyway is too narrow to be able to see the walls properly, and there are lots of grafittied tags obscuring much of what looked like it was originally artistic work

The other bonus of the Park and Ride was that it was adjacent to a big Decathlon store, so we made the obligatory at-least-once-a-trip visit, before heading back to Bertie, then onwards to Izegem.

Rush hour was upon us by the time we were driving, so it wasn’t the quickest of journeys, but in the only country we’ve visited that comes near to the UK for volume of traffic, it could have been worse. 

I had pans on the cooker by the time Mick had us plugged in, and we settled down for what was left of the evening feeling glad that Bertie wasn’t in the sorry state of the motorhome next to us. An expensive 4x4 Mercedes Hymer model, that had obviously had a coming together with a low canopy, disconnecting the length of its roof from the body. Ouch!

Monday 19 September - Puur-Sint-Amands, Belgium

Where's Bertie? He's in a free Aire in Puur-Sint-Amands, which sits in between(ish) Antwerp and Brussels. Exact location: 51.07473, 4.28425
Weather: Sunny intervals and 19 degrees, with just a couple or three showers whilst driving.

It wasn't a quiet night last night. The first group of yoofs arrived at around 11pm and only stayed for an hour. The second arrived soon after and stayed until 4am. Neither made huge amounts of noise, but the first group kept guffawing at intervals, and the second would go quiet for long enough to allow me to fall back to sleep, only then to sound their horn, start playing some music (inoffensive music, as it went, I just didn't want to listen to it at that time of night), or shout a few words, before going quiet again. Their staying power impressed me, considering it got down to 9 degrees last night and they weren't running car engines for warmth. I also had plenty of time to ponder: do these people have jobs? If they do, why aren't they going home to sleep? If they don't, why don't they do all this socialising during the day? Perhaps the answer is that they worker the 2-10 shift?

We finally got three hours of solid sleep before being woken by the heating firing up just before the alarm went off.

Perusing Park4Night over breakfast, I announced that we were coming to Puur-Sint-Amands today, a two and a half hour drive away. It took us much longer than that with a detour to a Lidl to reclaim the deposits on a bagful of bottles before leaving Germany, and to top up the fridge, with groceries being cheaper in Germany than in Belgium. The drive was then only broken with elevenses at a Dutch motorway rest area. Surprisingly, nay incredibly, we got past Antwerp without hitting any stationary traffic.

As is my usual way, I hadn't made any effort to see what Puur has to offer before arriving here, but over lunch I discovered that it has a fort, housing a museum (unfortunately closed until 2023), and a big church. After lunch we set out to see the former.

Big chunk of parkland in which the fort is sited

Attractive moat, even if the concrete structure isn't as aesthetically pleasing as some forts we've seen. This one was only built in 1908-1914, and subsequently modified when taken over by the Germans later the same year.

Hmmmm. Not sculpture of the day

We might have wandered more about the park, but having decided that it's a good location for tomorrow's run, we headed off to find the church instead. We managed to avoid the entirety of the town centre in doing that, but the residential streets held our interest, with their terraces of no-two-the-same houses.

St Peter's Church. Would have liked to have seen inside as it looked to have some fine stained glass, but it was closed.

From there we located the town centre, where it became apparent that some event has gone on this weekend. It turns out that this is the 730th birthday of the town and they're celebrating with a year of events (strikes me as an odd number to celebrate, unless they use it as the basis for a big party year once a decade). This weekend saw all sorts of entertainment in the town, and today is the clean-up operation. That also explains why three bays of this 5-bay Aire are closed due to being full of wheelie bins and barriers (fortunately one of the two other spots was free when we arrived, the other being taken up by the first British van we've seen since Day 3 of this trip).

We're hoping for a quiet night tonight. Not sure if it's a bad omen that someone opened Bertie's door this afternoon whilst we were sitting here, presumably having failed to notice that we were inside. As it was only a school boy, and he seemed appropriately cowed to suddenly find himself with two foreigners standing over him shouting, hopefully he'll have learned a valuable lesson about touching other people's property (or, if he was genuinely trying his luck with a mind to stealing stuff, hopefully he'll not be back again later to indulge in more mischief).

Sculpture of the Day. I feel there's a story/legend behind this one. 

Not sure what I can say about this...