Things have to get worse before they get better.

 

"Wait", I hear you say"what happened to the last couple of weeks of your trip last year - you know the road trip in Scotland, and what about the bit about the Queen's demise?"

Well you might ask, but all that does is serve to illustrate a point that I haven't yet made. There is a very, very long list of things to be done and a correspondingly few days in which to do them. 

By my current estimate, we're running about 18 months behind, which is when the van was due to be completed had that trip to the far North not got in the way, so have a little patience please!

Life at our place must be a bit like how it feels being a silicone chip manufacturer; delivery may or may not happen at some future point but if you wait long enough you'll either forget what it was you were waiting for, or realise that you can get along quite well without it anyway.

In the meantime, the number of parts coming out of the van appear to be in excess of the number that went in, and where the car once slept is standing room only I'm afraid.

Death by a thousand projects.

 

It's hard to explain to ourselves, let alone anyone else how we never did quite get back to finishing the van, but we never seem to run out of things to do, places to go and people to see and it's pretty clear that on our list of "fun things to do today", "pulling the van entirely apart and working in a humidified oven for a couple of weeks" hasn't actually figured very highly.

There are eleven other months left to choose from this year, months that promise cooler weather, less humidity and generally much better conditions for lying upside down in confined spaces while spraying toxic substances around, but they are also much better for doing other things.

So we've started.   We've backed our poor thing up to the garage, borrowed the ramps, and have begun pulling everything apart and spreading them all over the garage, workshop and house.

We have five weeks to sort it.

Surely that's enough time.

Surely.

Times of Uncertainty Saturday 17th September - Brussels to London

The day began delightfully at a railway station in Brussels well before sensible people are out of bed, with a Belgian Waffle for breakfast, and continued that way with an equally delightful and terribly British lunch in Wandsworth High Street.

The lead -p to those points of delight had been somewhat more fraught however.  This was the day that our EU visa expired, so we had to be gone.  As we had originally planned to be in Corsica by now, we  had lashed out on fairly flexible Business Class seats on an aeroplane to take us from Ajaccio to Paris and then to London.  When our friend’s illness caused cancellation of those plans, the airline (bless them) agreed to fly us from Paris to London in economy class at no extra cost.

That was all well and good, but the train from Brussels to London was about the same as to Paris, and we could save a day’s worth of travel and visits to two airports as well, so we took the momentous decision to “walk” away from our (now non-changeable because we were already feeling somewhat bruised and what could possibly go wrong(?) tickets.)

Perhaps we could have foreseen the sad demise of the Monarch, and the even sadder last-minute contraction of Covid by our friends, but we hadn’t, and with every seat on every bus and every bed in the whole of the realm unavailable while folk mourned as our Australian PM would say “in his own particular way”,  this leg of our journey was beginning to look a little more adventurous than we would have preferred.  Suffice to say a rather large black hole had appeared in our schedule.

Thankfully Matt and Kathy, who we were hoping to catch up with in a week or two, welcomed us like a long-lost Uncle and Aunt, and our evening ended no less delightfully with them and our little grand-nieces, with an awful lot of catching up still to be done.

Puzzle Friday 16th September - Brussels

 The cold and rain of autumn has really been making itself felt over the last few days, and it seems that once one reaches a certain age, traipsing around a strange city in the wet and cold is not as exciting as it once was despite the plethora of sights and attractions awaiting our call.   

Since Brussels has an enormous network of very affordable public transport, the thought of travelling in a heated tram was infinitely more appealing than spending the day in wet joggers.  We have in the past, managed our way around many of the world’s great cities with little fuss, but in the absence of a degree in Brussels transport, the transport maps were puzzling to say the least.

We were looking for line 6 on the tram we thought, and the sign said we were in the right place, but it wasn’t too long before we observed that all the trams on this route were number 81.  We concluded after quite a bit of searching, that the subway was referred to as “the tram” by the nice lady in the hotel giving us mis-directions, and it ran just one story below where we were.   When we did find the correct subway line, we were non-plussed to discover “our” train covered in “do not enter” tape and a plethora of security guards, each of whom was suggesting that we should think about taking a train to somewhere far away from where we wanted to be.

We did get there in the end, to the Museum of Modern Art, and spent far too much time on our feet astonished and a little transfixed by the “Rubik’s Cubism” exhibition by once famed graffiti guy “Space Invader” - Hundreds of pieces constructed entirely of stacked Rubik’s Cubes manipulated to create pointillist style pop images.

We weren’t sure that we really felt like walking the few kilometres back to the hotel because we were on such a high from the artwork, or whether we were just a little gun-shy about tempting fate with the transport network, but we were sure that our shoes would be dry by morning in any case, and it really was quite pleasant out there after all with our raincoats on.

Taking the Manniken Pis Thursday 15th September - Brussels

 

Brussels is one of those worldly cities which everyone has heard of but no-one knows seems to know much about.  Oh for sure it is the administrative capital of Europe, and it’s got some quaint old bits and some pretty ones too, but for reasons that are not easily understood, tourists seem to flock to view the “Manniken Pis”, a tiny little bronze statue of a little boy having a wee into a fountain just off the main city square.

As we consider “tourist flocking” to be beneath our station, we had apprised ourselves of neither its history nor exact location so it was with some chagrin that we accidentally stumbled upon it and it’s crowd of admirers.  Perhaps had we known more, the fact that it was clad entirely in a cartoon lion suit would not have been so surprising, but as it was we thought some practical joke was playing out.

We even started looking for the cameras when what we thought was a caricature man in a jacket clearly marked “Official Dresser” began fussing and cleaning around the statue.  As we stood transfixed, he lovingly undressed, bathed and re-dressed the little fellow in a Puerto Rican Boy Scout uniform while a group of dignitaries from that country stood by waiting for an official photo session.

Had we undertaken even the tiniest pre-visit research, we would have known that the Manneken spends a good deal of its time dressed in a manner appropriate to world events or seasons, and there is actually a museum nearby displaying all of the outfits he’s ever worn.

We can’t help but think however, that had we done that, much of the joy of the discovery that we experienced would have been lost.  We are therefore unlikely to change our admittedly hap-hazard methodology for at least the foreseeable future.

 

Rain  </br> <small> Wednesday 14th September - Hooge Zwaluwe to Brussels</small>

It turns out that the region around Hooge Zwaluwe and it’s neighbour Drimmelen is yet another place with a large dose of the “pretties”, and we’d had a bit of luck with our accomodation as well, having accidentally chosen a place which had once been the Town Hall.  

Rested, breakfasted, and  mindful that arriving on the Antwerp Ring Road too early, or too late, or perhaps at any other time would result in us contributing to the daily traffic jam, we  set off for an hour or two in exploration mode.  

Exploration was mostly confined to bits we could see without leaving the car as the year’s rain had finally begun to fall and the single digit temperatures came as something of a shock after wearing nought but shorts and tees for the last three months. Every now and then we’d venture out for an ever so short distance from the heating in the mother ship, to explore little villages and felt for all the world as though we were in the Cotswalds, (if the Cotswalds had been made of brick), before scampering back for a bit of artificial warmth.

When we did turn onto the motorway which is near the top of our list of those that provide the least lovable freeway-like experiences on the planet, despite our best efforts our timing was exactly wrong.  We had a little over three hours to travel the eighty kilometres remaining.   In heavy traffic and rain which sometimes lifted a little to allow visibility as far ahead as the cabin of the semi trailer in front, we needed all of that time, but made it happily and in one piece, ready to see what Brussels had on offer for a day or two.   

A bit of belated planning. Tuesday 13th September - Engwierum to Dokkum to Hooge Zwaluwe

Some time during the evening yesterday, we realised that our intention to “pop in and visit” Ron and Robin had gone somewhat awry.  It became clear that while we had apparently not overstayed our welcome, we’d completely lost track of the time and it was no longer Sunday afternoon.  .   

Suddenly we realised that if we were to have the car back by the appointed time without having to deal with the enormous stress that a tight deadline would undoubtedly deliver, we should really leave some time today.  Some hasty plans were concocted involving a swap of navigators, a bit of car vs boat cat-and-mouse and a reunion in Dokkum.

Once there although we had decided and were fully committed to moving on, after another gentle exploration of the town, little bit of shopping, a studious avoidance of anywhere that looked as though it was selling apple cake, and a lengthy conversation with a man painting the front door of a house (in the shadow of a windmill) we realised that we hadn’t actually made any decisions as to where perhaps we might arrive by days end.  

We convened a meeting over a plate or four of pepper steak, and using a method derived from “the old pin in the map trick” except without using a pin because we didn’t have a map and no-one would volunteer their phone as a substitute, booked a room in a place called Hooge Zwaluwe that none of us had ever heard of, typed it into the "destination" space in our navigation app, and hoped for the best!