Where's Bertie? He's still in the Stellplatz in Baumholder, and today the website worked to enable us to pay.
Weather: Some cloud this afternoon, and a really breezy spell, but otherwise sunny and warm (24 degrees).
Whilst in many respects Germany is an excellent and easy place to visit by motorhome, I've always found it to be lacking in self-service laundrettes. It seems that, as in the UK, 'Laundry Revolution' is spreading here, and there's the usual set of three machines in the car park of a supermarket just a few hundred metres along the road. We walked up there first thing this morning, but at €10 for a wash and dry (assuming everything got dry in one drying cycle), and without a full load of washing needing doing, I decided to just hand wash my running shorts and some smalls. We're not in a location where we can put a washing line out, but Bertie's windscreen wiper held my shorts directly in the sun this afternoon and they dried nicely. I left the smalls on the dashboard, hoping no passers-by would notice the non-standard adornment.
Before that, in fact on our way back from looking at the laundry machines, we fell into a bakery at what must have been its busiest time of day, and with only one person serving. Baumholder has a large military base, and a whole table full of camouflage-clad army personnel were having elevenses and buying their lunches to take away. We got served eventually and only added to the hold-up when I requested the jasmine tea - the only box that was pushed back on the shelf. The lady serving made efforts to reach it with some sort of implement, but only manged to push it even further back. She had to go and get a ladder.
Weather: Some cloud this afternoon, and a really breezy spell, but otherwise sunny and warm (24 degrees).
Whilst in many respects Germany is an excellent and easy place to visit by motorhome, I've always found it to be lacking in self-service laundrettes. It seems that, as in the UK, 'Laundry Revolution' is spreading here, and there's the usual set of three machines in the car park of a supermarket just a few hundred metres along the road. We walked up there first thing this morning, but at €10 for a wash and dry (assuming everything got dry in one drying cycle), and without a full load of washing needing doing, I decided to just hand wash my running shorts and some smalls. We're not in a location where we can put a washing line out, but Bertie's windscreen wiper held my shorts directly in the sun this afternoon and they dried nicely. I left the smalls on the dashboard, hoping no passers-by would notice the non-standard adornment.
Before that, in fact on our way back from looking at the laundry machines, we fell into a bakery at what must have been its busiest time of day, and with only one person serving. Baumholder has a large military base, and a whole table full of camouflage-clad army personnel were having elevenses and buying their lunches to take away. We got served eventually and only added to the hold-up when I requested the jasmine tea - the only box that was pushed back on the shelf. The lady serving made efforts to reach it with some sort of implement, but only manged to push it even further back. She had to go and get a ladder.
Mick suggested yesterday (not unreasonably) that it's not particularly healthy to be having pastries every day, so we made do with a pretzl between us.
With barely a stop at Bertie, next on the agenda was to check out the parkrun course (hilly!), and by the time we had done that lunchtime was upon us.
After an uncommon amount of research this afternoon into places we might visit and various museums and other attractions (goodness, the Strasbourg-Alsace-Pass website makes it hard work!), at around 8 this evening we headed out into town to see what was going on at the Altstadt Fest. Not an awful lot, really. There are a couple of streets lined with food and drink vendors. The grill place (with two-foot-long meat-on-stick things that had Mick wishing he hadn't just eaten tea) was doing a good trade, as were the drinks vendors, but many stalls looked to be sadly lacking in customers. I wonder if business picks up later, or whether what we saw is the extent of it?
After a quick walk around there was nothing to hold us there, so back to Bertie with enough time for me to tap these words out before bed.
(Just jumping back to last night: the music at the event next to where we are parked had a loud beat all evening, but it didn't really disturb us and it finished promptly at 10pm. What did disturb us was young kids running around next to us and squealing loudly and persistently at that pitch that cannot be ignored. They finally disappeared a while after the music stopped.
Second belated thought: I got an email back from the Tourist Office about not being able to pay the Stellplatz fee. They said that if I emailed them my name and postal address, then they would mail me an invoice. I'm pretty sure the admin and postage would have cost more than the fee, so a good job the website started working again today.)
No comments:
Post a Comment