Making tracks across Europe

15 July 2017 - 28 July 2017

We made a fairly last minute decision to join my parents for the interment of grandpa's ashes in Milwaukee at the beginning of August. This meant rather than spending the next four weeks making our way from Croatia to London we would instead spend only two weeks. What then follows is a bit of a whistle stop tour through Europe.

First on the list was Slovenia. We stayed at a "camp ground" near the capital Ljubljana that was essentially a car park with a shower facility. Unfortunately, the toilets were blocked and there was mystery water coming back out of the drains in the floor. I would like to go back to Ljubljana as I don't think we really gave it a fair chance. By this stage of our trip it had been really hot (high 30's) for many days and we had been on the road for a while - so we were both a bit tired and cranky. We did a walking tour there but it was not overly noteworthy. An art installation where sprinklers stretched across the street way overhead made it rain in one particular spot was appreciated. The highlight was the night at the camp ground having drinks with a mid-fifties couple from Christchurch in their caravan. [F- Slovenian wine is excellent.]

The town of Bled with it's beautiful lake was much more of a hit with us. It was much cooler in the shade by the lake with a couple of books. We hired paddle boards and had a lovely time paddling downwind to the church on the island, with great views of the castle on the cliff above where we'd started from. Then on the way back we had a bit of a mission returning into the teeth of the headwind and trying to make our paddle-board return deadline. Good exercise for Frank, and another bloke doing the same thing looked absolutely bushed when he made it back.

So happy we had time for selfies.

All smiles as we head downwind...

Next stop on the whirlwind tour was Austria. Although to begin with we didn't actually realise we were in Austria... We have got so used to borders involving us handing over massive piles of paperwork and showing border guards through the contents of our van. This border, which was really just a line on Google maps and a "welcome to Austria" sign, went past more or less unnoticed by us. 

Austria reminded us of New Zealand, but bigger.  

So massive.

We stayed at delightful little mountain campgrounds such as "Alpencamping Mark," where we tried at hand at slack-lining once all the kids who normally monopolised had had gone off for their horse riding and archery. Frank was surprised to see cows living in the ground floor of people houses in such a rich country when she strolled through the village. All the little villages we drove through were super-pretty by the way, the actual style of buildings every ski-village in the world tries to copy, and most surfaces covered in pretty flower boxes somehow always in full bloom.

We then had a quick trip through Germany. It was mainly a driving trip as we made our way further west. Frank was keen to have Black Forest cake in the Black Forest so we made sure to stop on the way so we could tick that off. [It was yum - F]. That night, in our campground in the depths of the black forest, the heavens opened up for an unthinkably massive donner und blitzen sturm. We appreciated this through the sunroof and were glad that we weren't in a tent.

We had read about Strasbourg and it seemed like a good place to make a stop for a couple of days. We had the unusual experience of staying in a camp ground in Germany and then catching the train into the middle of the city - which was in France!

Scenic cycling in Strasbourg

Where's Markie?

One of our evenings in Strasbourg we decided to eat at the restaurant based at our camp site. My German extended to knowing that a wurst is a sausage. I ordered the Wurst Salad expecting some kind of mixture of salad veges with a bratwurst or similar nicely grilled up and chopped through it. My expectations were way too high. I got a plate full of what appeared to be shredded cold luncheon sausage, cheese, carrot and onion. It truly was the Wurst Salad.

It tasted even wurs than it looked.

What followed was a mega travel day where we collected countries faster than you collect giant roadside food items driving through New Zealand. From the camp site in Germany, we travelled through France and Luxemborg before stopping for the night in Belgium - at the most expensive camp site of the whole holiday. The staff were very excited that we came from somewhere as exotic as New Zealand. After the check in process we were accompanied by a very cheerful employee who was riding his bicycle ahead of the van to show us the way to the site. Although it was a pretty large camp ground it was very obvious where we needed to go to get to our site. There was one main road through the whole camp ground that you drove along before the clearly numbered sites branched off the main road. We however got full assistance from the man on the bike - any time the main road curved even a little he turned around, gave us the massivest cheesy grin and pointed in the direction we needed to go to get to the camp site. Just in case following him as he cycled in front of the van wasn't obvious enough....

We stopped off in Ghent to wander around some churches and castles. I managed to continue the trend of only ordering waffles, beer and fries during my time in Belgium.

A beautiful damsel at the castle in Ghent.

Two out of three ain't bad.

After Ghent we spent a couple of nights near Ypres, where most of the significant NZ division action in WWI was. We went and toured around Messines ridge and looked down the hill the kiwis attacked up standing on top of the old German bunkers and trying to imagine the whole scene made up of shell-churned mud and wreathed in smoke. There were a few NZ cemeteries, other battle sites, and the hundred-year-old remnants of the massive craters from the "mines" they blew up before the attack after spending months tunnelling under the German lines and filling them with explosives.

Through some average planning we failed to realise that the 100th anniversary of the battle at Passchendaele was only days after we were leaving the Ypres area. Once we realised this it became clear why the camp site was full. We ventured out of town and had two nights freedom camping in the forest with just us, the occasional cyclist, and the ghosts. It was beautiful and quiet and we even spotted a couple of deer bounding through the forest. 

Our last night on the continent was spent at a camp site in Belgium near the border with France. It was set at the edge of the sand dunes, a kilometre or so from the ocean, and I realised that this was probably the most realistic option for me to swim the English Channel from one country to another.

A couple of hours before we had to leave for our ferry to England, I chucked on my best stubbies and lucky Hawaiian shirt, and jogged down to the coast to start my international ocean swimming career. By the time I got to the coast, the already murky weather had darkened considerably, and grey storm clouds were looming overhead. Then the wind started picking up as I left the shelter of the dunes. I started stalling for time, running up and down the beach to stay warm and try to work out exactly where the border was.

The beach was a very gentle slope, with at least a hundred windswept metres of ankle-scouring sandy beach before the white-capped brownish-blackish North Sea, which I suddenly remembered that I usually heard of in phrases like "bitterly cold North Sea."  I spotted a straightish fence running perpendicular to the water with a sign next to it with the relevant national flags, and figured that was as good a bet as any. I stashed my shirt, shivered, and ran back down to the waters edge, where the wickedly fast-flowing tidal current ensured it would be a one-way swim in the France → Belgium direction.

I resumed pacing back and forth to work out where I'd need to enter and exit the water. Deep Thoughts about the arbitrary nature of borders, the artificiality of the narratives we weave about our lives, and the ethereal nature of "integrity" wove through my mind. There were no witnesses here, I was pulling a completely stupid stunt that derived any vapid "meaning" it might have from the coin-toss whims of long-dead aristocratic slaughterers, bureaucrats, and cartographers. It made no difference in the cosmic scheme of things whether or not I did my swim or just ran back to a hot shower. The frothing sea and my own inexperience made it impossible to identify any rip tides, I'm an average swimmer at best and not built to survive in cold water for long, there was nobody watching to call for help if it was required, and I was still shivering and covered in gooseflesh from the biting wind even standing there dry...

Fuck it, the sort of person I admire would do it, and everything else was probably just the cold talking. I ran another dozen metres up-current to be safe, and charged in to join all the codfish and oil rigs and dead sailors. Wading and splashing and swearing, I got deep enough that I could fairly claim to be "swimming" rather than "crawling while wet." I set out, diving under to make sure the bottom was still nearby every couple of breaths, and swam/drifted a couple of hundred metres or so through the spume until I was sure I could fairly claim to have completed my stupid quest.

As I staggered back up the beach, patches of dry sand streaming painfully over my feet in the wind, the heavens opened up. By the time I'd grabbed a fistful of shirt and started running as best I could through the deep dry sand of the dunes, a proper heavy rain had started washing the salty taste out of my great scraggly beard. I think I let out a couple of yells of triumph: running half-naked through the alien landscape of the sand dunes being pelted with rain and slowly warming up from my victorious swim was an awesome feeling, well worth it.

Quixotic quests completed, we caught the ferry across to the UK and managed to return the van almost in one piece - apart from a bit of a door issue which occurred only minutes before the van was safely parked in its car park in London. A quick stop with Sarah and Andy for the night and then it was time to catch the plane to Chicago for our brief visit to the States.