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...
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.
We wandered, visited a church and the cathedral...
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!
I have a theory, most likely erroneous, that if you take a vehicle into a garage in dishevelled state it will be treated with less care than it would be if perceived as looked after and cherished.
ReplyDeleteI too have put shorts into hibernation.
There must be some subconscious effect, at least on tidy people, to the effect that a looked-after vehicle should be looked after. The problem is when the vehcile meets a technician/engineer who doesn't notice such things. When Bertie was MOTed this year he was handed back to us with oily boot prints all over the floor (why had he felt the need to enter via the habitation door and walk though?!) and black marks over the bits of seat that weren't encompassed by the plastic seat cover. I'm sure the chap was completely oblivious to both the clean state of Bertie at the start of the MOT and at the mess he'd made by the end.
DeleteEven so, I will still make sure Bertie's all clean and tidy when he goes back to the same garage again for his MOT next year.