Cities in the Sky

Today had been a rather nothingish kind of a day. We decided that, as it’s a Sunday, not much would be open anyway so we’ve had a lazy day. Also, it has been raining ALL day so it was good not having to do much. We got up at 11ish, had some brekkie, then set off over the bridge again.

We caught the tram (for free again!) to Ubiering where we got off in search of an internet café we had seen the other day. Sure enough we found it and looked at the weather – it said it would be pure sunshine for the next few days which raised our spirits. After reading Tim and Emsy’s blog and looking at various emails, we went off in search of lunch. We found another nice bakery, that’s one thing we’ve found Germany is good at. We had a roll each then shared a yummy apple cake thingy.

On the way back to camp we got wet again and were glad to get to the shelter of the tent. We whiled away the remaining afternoon with Ben reading and me napping (well if you can’t when on holiday, when can you?!). Then we cooked the bacon brunch for dinner. It tasted more of burnt than anything else as we had no oil to fry it in! Then after having an ice cream in the brief 30 minutes or so of sunshine, we are back in the tent and the rain has resumed! We are hoping for sun in the morning as packing the tent in the rain may prove difficult…

Yesterday (I’m writing this a day late) we went into Koln. Getting there was a little odd as there weren’t any nice guides given to us, and the signs around us gave us no clues. We crossed the bridge nearby (which took a while, it’s quite a huge lump of metal!) and found a tram stop which we figured would take us to the town centre. There wasn’t a town centre marked on the map but one of the stops was written in bold, so we went for that one. We couldn’t get tickets as there was basically nothing at the stop, which puzzled us. Once we got on, we still had no idea how to pay. We changed at Uberring, and found on the next tram that there was a ticket machine, but unfortunately the card slot wouldn’t take any of our cards! As such, we rather cheekily got away without paying €9.60!

Straight out of the station, we were greeted by the cathedral, a rather impressive piece of architecture to say the least. It took a long time before I was far enough away to fit the whole thing in one photo!

We wandered around the town for a bit, which was pretty average. We had a roll each from another lovely bakery, then a stroll along the riverside. We found some interestingly colourful little shops and had a delicious ice cream from one of them.

After that, the tour was a little more slapdash… we didn’t have a map or any idea where the interesting bits were meant to be! After spending quite some time stumbling around the backstreets past construction yards and hotels, we got back to the station.

Rather than leave straight away we decided to poke around inside the cathedral, which turned out to be even more impressive on the inside. We could but imagine how long it all took to build, it really is stupidly large and elaborate.

We then found an Aldi and stocked up on breakfast stuff as well as buying our dinner. Tortellini and mini salamis, delicious!

Overall, I guess Koln was a nice enough place, though lacked character when compared to Amsterdam, culture when compared to Brugge, and grandeur when compared to Rotterdam. Germany will have to try better with the next town we visit.

Woke up this morning in de Nederlands and luckily it wasn’t raining. We had hasty showers then packed up and left, to the delight of a young boy who was impressed by our bikes. We set off for Rotterdam, then Nijmegen then on to Koln. On the way we decided to stop off for lunch a town rather than a service station. The town we stopped in was Alpen, just inside Germany. We were glad we did because it was very picturesque. We had lunch in a bakery – Wurst Brotchen = ham roll. Then had a delicious cake thing each; Ben had an apply thing and I had a creamy summer fruits thing – delicious! We sat and ate in the sunshine next to a fountain so were very glad we stopped there.

Then we continued to Koln but got caught up in some heavy traffic and got very hot! Finally we arrived at the campsite. We are right on the edge of the river Rhein and the views are lovely. For dinner we strolled along the river and came across a tennis club and restaurant. We had a carbonara and a spag bol; real food Made a nice change from instant noodles and packet pasta. We stayed there for a while to soak in the views of the river, then wondered back along the river to the campsite. This campsite is €10 cheaper than the one in the Nederlands and seems nice so thumbs up. Hoping to bus into Koln tomorrow. We travelled ~180miles today so are a bit tired!

Well, what a crazy place Amsterdam is! We’d heard stories, of course, but didn’t realise it’d be so… explicit! It was really very different to Rotterdam – whereas Rotterdam is full of big-name commercialised shops and huge office blocks and hotels, Amsterdam seems to be mostly odd little shops, hostels and ‘coffee’ shops, that don’t smell much like coffee…

We got up relatively early and headed into Delft to start the day. We walked to the station via my cunningly crafted route, and saw some of the sights; it turns out Delft is an absolutely lovely place, with a lot of culture and great architecture of its own. Well worth a visit!

A long-ish train journey late, and we were in Amsterdam. It was hellishly busy, and rather confusing! We headed for tourist information to get a map or a walk through the city first, but after that still had no idea where to go first. After a quick lunch at a lovely sandwich shop east of the centre, not far from the station, we decided to take a boat ride round the canals.

After that we just sort of wandered a bit through the crazy busy streets, looking at the odd fast-food places (where your food is stored in a safe?!) and coffee shops full of wide-eyed smokers.

Since I forgot the camera, we found a little camera shop (also crazy), which was a lot like those in Fisherman’s wharf, San Francisco. A bit of bargaining and false indecisiveness later and we had a shiny new camera.

After this we saw that the map we bought had lots of sights of interest marked on, and not long after that we realised that the map had rather poor taste, so we took a makeshift route around the canals. Not long later, we stumbled across the famous red light district! Again, this was very crazy, there were all sorts of things on show… We were offered a discount for ‘kinky couples’ by one cheeky Dutch stereotype!

We left very shortly after that, and came back to a delicious meal of hot dog sausages, crisps, lettuce and rich tea biscuits. We’ve got 270km to travel tomorrow, to Koln, so I hope the rain doesn’t get any worse…

We have had a lovely day today. Got up at 9.30ish because it was sweltering in the tent! We had breakfast in the glorious sunshine and hung our still soaking wet jeans and shoes out to dry. After breakfast we caught the bus into Delft town centre to catch the train. The town looked lovely with lots of waterways and loads of bikes! We then caught the train into Rotterdam and followed a designed walk around the city. We stopped for lunch in a café outside the town hall and discovered that speck means bacon. We had a lovely beer and wine in the sunshine.

The city itself is full of very strangely designed buildings, including the cube houses and a huge suspension bridge. We spent the day on the walk taking in the sights and sounds and were altogether very impressed with Rotterdam. It is also full of building works as the brochure was keen to emphasise – “the city is not afraid of rebuilding” and there was certainly a lot of this going on. Another thing we have noticed about the Nederlands is that everyone gives way to cyclists, even trams seem too!

Anyway, I digress. We finished the walk and caught the train back to Delft, then the bus to the campsite. Then found we were both sunburnt! We have had a peaceful evening with wine, cards and noodles for dinner. We’ve decided to stay another night here and visit Amsterdam from here tomorrow as the train is very easy to catch, so Amsterdam here we come!

Well yes, we got up after hardly any sleep due to the horrific weather! We waded through the bog that used to be the field to the showers, then returned and hastily packed everything away. Luckily we managed to get the bikes out of the mud, paid €10 for our stay and were off. We headed first to Gent and stopped on the way for a yummy pizza from pizza hut. Then on past Antwerpe, through some tunnels and a toll then into the Nederlands!

Whilst heading towards Rotterdam we found signs to a campsite which we followed as we as already travelled more than 100 miles. (Little did I know what distances we would be doing each day in the weeks to come!). Luckily for us the campsite is lovely with lots of facilities and a friendly atmosphere. We have hung all our wet stuff out to dry and might go for a drink in the bar in a moment. We can hear music being played not too far off and I feel much happier at this campsite than the last, although it is a lot more expensive…

So, to summarise today; a lot of motorbiking! Looking forward to visiting Rotterdam tomorrow, and hopefully some sunshine

It had been raining all night, so we woke up deliberately late to avoid having to leave the tent. We ate our cheerios in the tent and got dressed and ready, and decided what we wanted to do. We got fed up of waiting for the rain to stop, so left with the brolly to find a bus to take us to Brugge. It turned out the buses only came every 2 hours, so we went and had a croque-monsieur while we waited (made up for the lack of one on the ferry). We realised we’d forgotten (well, I’d forgotten) the camera so decided to get one from one of the shops in Brugge. They turned out to be rather expensive, so we got a disposable one to tide us over.
Brugge turned out to be an absolutely lovely place, despite the rain, and we had a lovely time looking round all the medieval buildings, gothic architecture (or at least I assume it was…) and picturesque waterways.

We headed home on the bus and returned to the tent. We cooked some burgers we bought in Brugge on the tiny little camp stove (indoors due to the rain!), which were surprisingly yummy. We then sort of sat around in the tent for ages since it was getting worse outside.

After a fair few hours of reading and playing on the game boy we noticed that the tent was starting to become submerged, which I was not happy about! Since things were getting worse quickly, I decided to do my first ever tent move…. I unpegged everything, got Helen to hold the porch open, and dragged the tent to higher ground.

I’m very glad we did that, as the weather just got worse and worse as the night went on. It got very windy too, so much so that a lot of the other people in the field packed up and left during the middle of the night, a lot of them after their tents gave in to the wind! Ours suffered a bit of damage too, but after some cunning repairs we made it through OK.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t really sleep so I’m not really sure where to end this entry… I’ll leave it at 8.30, when the alarm sounded and our next day began…

We woke up at 5am and had left the house by 6.30. We had some pannier issues but these were solved by a squirt of good old WD40. We had a fast journey to Dover with one stop for petrol, but we were held up by queues at passport control, and we were told that we were too late for the 9.30 ferry. So £20 less well off we were queuing for the 11am ferry instead. We got chatting to some other bikers in the queue who were off on a day trip to Belgium for some tobacco! We drove onto the ferry where our bikes were flung up onto their centre stands by a small but surprisingly strong deckhand. They were tied to the side by a rope. The ferry journey was short, but there were no croque-monsieurs which was very disappointing. Amazingly, you could see Dover from Calais. Calais greeted us with long sandy beaches and sunshine, a bit of a contrast from rainy Dover!

Once off the ferry we decided to head along the coast to Belgium to avoid the toll roads. There was no passport checking between France and Belgium, simply a small road sign that said Belgium with stars around it. In Belgium we stopped for petrol and an ice cream and decided to head for a campsite on the coast between Ostende and Brugge in a town called De Haan. After getting slightly lost we found it and set up camp in a field full of tents.

As it was nice and sunny, we headed off to the beach in search of food. It was a ~500m walk through some woods, and the beach its self was beautiful. It was large and sandy, stretched as far as the eye could see and had hardly anyone on it, just some couples walking along, some horses and a model having her photo taken in the freezing North Sea! We strolled along and found a café where we both had tagliatelle, Ben had a beer and I had an amazing Sangria with berries, strawberries, melon, apple and orange in. After that we strolled back to the tent and collapsed after a long exhausting day.