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.)}