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.)}