Sunday 17th May 2015 – WELL, WASN’T THAT EXPENSIVE?

There I was, deep in the arms of Morpheusin the small hours in my little rest area at the side of a Swiss Autoroute when there was a banging on the door and a cry of “Kontrole!”

Yes, the Swiss police are not noted for their sense of humour but then they do have a job to do, I suppose, and I duly presented my papers.

While they were being checked, I had a lengthy chat with one of the other officers about this and that, and then it came down to the crunch “where’s your vignette?”

If you use a Swiss autoroute you have to buy a special sticker to give you the necessary entitlement, and in all my years of travelling I’ve never ever bothered with it. But sooner or later I was bound to be picked up, and sleeping in a rest area on the autoroute made it an odds-on certainty.

No complaints from me about it, although it stopped me going back to sleep again. And while I was lying there in half a daze, it occurred to me that I’d carried on a conversation for about 15 minutes in German without even pausing for breath. Things are looking up!

Next morning in the bright sunshine, a took a photo of the rest area just to prove that I had been here, and then I made myself a coffee. Nothing else though, because I realised that I had forgotten to buy anything for breakfast

I was definitely having a bad morning.

The irony of all of this is that just about 15 minutes later, The Lady Who Lives In The Sat-Nav directed me off the autoroute and into the Jura mountains for a leisurely drive home, most of which was completely uneventful except for at the boulangerie where some woman moaned like hell because I had the nerve to complain that she had blocked me in on the car park. Silly four-legged animal well-known for giving a high-quality dairy drink!

My road back took me via Macon and that gave me an idea. I telephoned my friend Jean-Marc who lives up in the hills at the back of the town to see if he was in for visitors, and to give him an opportunity to flee the country before I arrived.

We first met when we were both 16 – Crewe was twinned with Macon and we exchanged families during one summer. I went to live there and he went to live in Crewe. And we met up again last year under the most bizarre circumstances, as long-term readers of this rubbish will well-recall.

We had a long chat and discussed old times for quite a while, and drank a couple of cups of coffee, for which I was very grateful.

And then I had a completely uneventful drive back home, arriving at about 20:05.

And as Barry Hay once famously said during a live Golden Earring concert on Scheveningen Beach back in 199(3?) – “let me tell you one thing, man, it’s always good to be back home!”

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Saturday 16th May 2015 – IN SWITZERLAND

It’s taken me long enough to find a ferry on this journey, but nevertheless here I am.

This is the ferry across the Bodensee, or Lake Constance for the English-speakers amongst you and it sails from Friedrichshafen in Germany to Romanshorn in Switzerland and I am about to make my triumphal entry therein – the first time on this journey.

The waterfront is quite modern too, and unashamedly so. and not the result of wanton vandalism on behalf of the civic authorities but wanton vandalism on behalf of RAF Bomber Command in World War II.

Not that too many people can have too many complaints about that for once (although they might protest at the lack of accuracy) because there are at least two good reasons why the town of Friedrichshafen was a legitimate military target in World War II.

And indeed not to mention World War I because the first ever bombing raid in World War I took place here just a matter of a couple of weeks after the start of the war took place here and given the primitive state of the equipment and navigation, was a stunning success that matches anything that the Dambusters could come up with in World War II.

We’ll be going for an inspection of these two legitimate targets in due course.

But it took me ages to arrive at the Bodensee as I was being continually interrupted.

This is a suspension bridge over the River Argen. according to a sign at the bridge, it was built in 1896/97 under Kaiser Wilhelm, and that shows you just what a really big man he must have been because the bridge really is quite impressive.

Today it’s flanked by a railway bridge and a modern pre-stressed concrete road bridge, but this one outshines them all.

The village of Eriskirch a little farther along the roa was full of surprises, and this is just one of them.

It’s one of our old friends a wooden covered bridge. We encounter dozens, if not hundreds of these on our journeys around North America, but Europe has its fair share to offer as we have seen in the past, and as we shall indeed see again before we are much older. I would have gone for a wander through here, but it was closed for repair.

And that’s not all. Eriskirck also came up with a Ford Cortina Mk V too, excet that this is a mainland European version called the Taunus.

This was parked in a yard with half a dozen other noteworthy cars. I gave it a good going-over and I reckon that a good weekend’s work would have this back on the road. There didn’t seem to be much wrong with it and it was solid in all the suspect places

It’s amazing the things that you encounter on your travels but seeing this flying over me as I travelled further west reminded me of what I was doing down here in the first place.

And that’s just a baby too. could you imagine something maybe five or six times as big flying over your head, because that’s what used to happen in World War I when these monsters were legendary.

Yes, well done that man. It is indeed a Zeppelin and here on the outskirts of the town of Friedrichshafen are the headquarters of the company.

On a Bank Holiday weekend it was expecting too much for me to be able to go for a trip around, much as I tried, but I had a nosey about instead.

And my hat went off to the intrepid pilots of November 1914 who flew here in rickety string and canvas biplanes who managed to fly here from France and hurl a bomb into a Zeppelin shed, even if they didn’t manage to accomplish very much

I did say that there were a couple of legitimate military targets here in Friedrichshafen. The second one was the Dornier aircraft factory here.

Dorniers were known mainly for their seaplanes and they were built and tested down on the waterfront, hence the bombing raids down there. They also made bombers, the Do-17 and Do-217 but manufacture of those was dispersed throughout Germany

The only aircraft here from before the war are those that have come from elsewhere, such as the flying boat which, if we are to believe the registration number on it, is that flown on the Amundsen expedition to the North Pole in 1925 but which I strongly suspect is a replica.

No Do-17 though – not even a replica and I found that very disappointing. I can understand there not being a real one, although if they made an effort they could certainly find some bits, but no replica is a shame.

Back on the ferry now and I forgot to take any details of the boat upon which I was sailing, which isn’t like me at all.

Anyway, it was a boat that looks very much like this one. This is sailing in the opposite direction to us and while they might not look very big, they are ten times bigger than the Hatteras Ferry boats that sail across the Hurricane belt in the Carolinas.

I’m back in Germany again and that’s the River Rhine just there.

The town in the background is called Diessenhofen, a beautiful little walled town that is first recorded in 757, although there are considerable remains from much earlier than this, even as far back as the Stone Age, and a substantial Roman hoard was discovered here.

To cross the Rhine is a substantial covered bridge, and this was part of the secret of the wealth of the town – the tolls that were generated by people wishing to cross the river.

Today though, there are no tolls, and not even a border post, despite Switzerland not being in the EU. I simply wandered across unchallenged.

But why I crossed over back there was so that I could cross back here. That’s the border and the Rhine is behind me. Theres a little finger of Switzerland that is north of the Rhine, near the village of Ramsen and this was the favourite spot for escaping prisoners of war to cross the border from Germany, where they didn’t have to contend with the Rhine.

On the German side of the border here, the guard was asleep and in the Swiss hut, the place was deserted. And the border was so unguarded (well, relatively, anyway) during the war that one escapee passed through and out the other side where he was recaptured, without even realising that he had been in Switzerland.

Ive come here to see the Rhine falls at Schaffhausen. This was somewhere else where I came on my honeymoon with Nerina and with it being mid October, the river was fairly low.

This time of year is the peak time to see the falls as the last of the snow melt roars through and it certainly was impressive from up here.

From close to, while they may not be as impressive as the Niagara Falls, they are certainly as good as anything else that Europe has to offer and it’s well worth the trip to come to see them, even if you do have to fight your way through the participants of a bus trip from the local mosque.

But be warned – it’s quite a hike back to the top again so I was glad that it was late evening when I passed by here.

I now try to find some accommodation for the night and I’m not very successful. I forgot about the Bank Holiday weekend and everywhere is either full or closed.

I do manage to find an old Renault van from the 1920s, in a very sorry state, so it isn’t all doom and gloom, despite the fast-approaching night.

In the end, I give up and head for the autoroute. There will be a rest area there and I’ll sleep in Ccaliburn tonight.

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Friday 15th May 2015 – I’M BACK ON THE ROAD …

… but I didn’t get too far. And when I sort myself out a little better, I’ll show you why.

But those of you who follow this rubbish on a regular basis will recall that I have been having kitchen and bathroom worktop issues. I mentioned this to Hans because Germany is the place to be if you want high-quality but affordable products, and so he had taken me on Wednesday evening to several furniture and DiY places.

So to cut a long story short, for which you will all be grateful, on my way out of eching I went and picked up 5 planks of 28mm light-oak, 60cms by 240cms. Cost? Just €375 – for the lot, not just for one. If that’s not going to do the job that I want, then nothing will.

From here I went to a town called Donauwurth, situated on the banks of the River Danube at its confluence with another river, the name of which I have forgotten.

It’s yet another walled city, of which there is an enormous number in Germany, and if you look very hard, you’ll see a pedestrian gate down there at the end of the path. That’s the way in. We are actually looking at the old moat right now.

It’s quite a beautiful little town, calm, quiet and peaceful with some beautiful buildings that look quite old.

But don’t allow yourself to be misled by appearances because it isn’t all what it seems. These buildings may indeed look old but you will be hard-pressed to find anything in the centre dating from before 1945. That’s because despite it being calm, quiet and peaceful, it was selected for the target of the British Bomber Command in April 1945, when the war was all but over and when whatever there was that went on (or didn’t go on, whichever is the case) here had long-since ceased to be of any military significance.

Not that that had ever bothered anyone in Bomber Command. Lord Cherwell’s infamous “de-housing” report had made it quite clear that the German civilian population was to be the target of the bombers, and Bomber Command carried out these perverse attacks to the extreme degree, long after they had ceased to have any point (if they ever had any point in the first place).

As the American Strategic Bombing Survey, that visited Bombed-out Germany so succinctly put it in its report, all it did was to divert post-war Allied resources to repair the damage and to house and feed the destitute when these resources could have been better-used elsewhere.

I’ve talked in a few previous posts about the problem of the Sudeten Germans, and this was something that took me quite by surprise.

I didn’t expect to see anything like this here a memorial plaque in honour of the Germans of the Sudetenland, and in particular the first batch of 12,000 who arived here in February 1946 and dumped out of the goods wagons in which they were travelling.

They were of course the lucky ones. Most of them arrrived much later, having undertaken the journey on foot, through the savage Central-European winter and having faced all kinds of horrors on the way, death being the least of them.

There are still some old structures remaining here in Donauwurth despite the devastation of 1945.

These are the old city walls and if my Latin is up to much after all of these years, the plaque tells me that they were built in 1091 and destroyed in 1818, with a few bits added on and knocked down in between.

Donauwurth hadn’t finished with me yet.

At the local branch of Media Markt was this nice under-the-counter fridge with small freezer compartment. What was interesting about this was not the price (a mere €199) but the energy consumption – just a claimed 89kW per annum.

If it really does all of that then it’s the most economical of its type that I have ever seen. 89000 watts is about 250 watts per day and I could run that quite happily all year without worrying. You’ve no idea just how much I was tempted.

June wasn’t at home so I pushed on to the Bodensee. My aim of spending a night in Austria came to naught as everywhere in Bregenz was either closed or full. Not only that, at one place I had a most unusual experience anyway, in that someone actually asked “what do you want?” when I rang the bell. Of course I couldn’t contain myself and relied “what do you think that people usually want when they call at a hotel?” and I was impressed that I could say that right off the cuff in German.

Lindau was full too and parking in the old town had passed beyond the expensive into the absurd. I headed out, looking for a quiet layby to lay my weary head when, having taken a wrong turn somewhere, I encountered a guest house, at just €38:00, miles from anywhere.

Primitive and very 1950s it might have been, but I wasn’t arguing at €38 for the night.

I’ve been to Lindau a few times in the past, but it’s been a good few years since I’ve been here. The last time was on my honeymoon with Nerina back in 1988, and I was itching to return as it really is a beautiful city and I cared not a jot about the driving rain.

Very medieval as you can see, and a favourite spot of the Royal house of Bavaria who had a chalet nearby for the summer.

And in news that will startle just about everyone reading this, I had a Chinese takeaway for tea.

Its well-known that I don’t like Chinese food all that much but I didn’t have much choice here as the takeaway food outlets are not exactly thick on the ground here – I don’t suppose that Mad King Ludwig would have approved.

But €4.50 for a huge plate of tofu, vegetables and rice to eat in the comfort and privacy of my own bedroom is not to be sniffed at.

At least, something has gone right for me today.

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Thursday 14th May 2015 – BATTLING BRAVELY ON …

… despite the crashed hard drive in the laptop, I’m prepared to confront the morning.

Hans made breakfast, and I really do mean that, because today is Himmelfahrt, Ascenscion Day, and everywhere is closed, including the bakeries. What Hans did was to bake a loaf of bread and if I knew anyone in France who could bake bread quite like that, I’d never ever visit a bakery ever again.

With it being a Bank Holiday, theres a festival down the road in the town of Friesing. And in a German festival, they dont bother with just a simple pie hut or a French buvette, they go the whole hog, with beer tent and ooom-pah band.

And much to my complete surprise, one of the food stalls is selling just vegan roducts so I celebrate Himmelfahrt and the vegan pie hut with a late of falafel.

There are all kinds of things and all types of entertainment going on here too, including a barber’s shop quartet. Complete with real barbers too, it has to be said.

The young lad on the right isn’t all that impressed, is he? Mind you, the music wasn’t my style either although there was no disputing the ability of the singers. That’s the kind of thing that you can’t deny.

In the evening we went to the beer garden just down the road from Hans’ apartment.

It’s the centre of the local universe and seeing as how Hans knows everyone around here, we ended up being quite a crowd. Strawberry Moose met plenty of new friends and became quite popular with the locals.

another thing about this area is once again to do with vegan food. Theres an ice-cream parlour in one of the array of shops around the beer garden and so I wandered off, more in hope than expectation, to see what they had.

Sure enough, there was a choice of about 10 flavours of vegan ice cream (mostly sorbets, but vegan none-the-less) and so I made the most of the opportunity.

Back at the apartment, I had left the laptop running all day to see if it might repair itself past the point at which it keeps stalling. But to no avail. I’m going to have to write this off as a total loss, I reckon.

Thats a catastrophe, but it can’t be helped.

-1

Wednesday 13th May 2015 – IT’S USUALLY FRIDAY …

… the 13th that is the day for things going wrong. So Wednesday 13th must be the day reserve for disasters because, believe me, we’ve had one of those today – and a major one at that too.

In fact it started off as we meant to go along. I had climbed most of the way up to the Schloss here at Tittmoning and it was on stopping to take my first photo that I realised that I had forgotten to put the memory card back in the camera last night.

Consequently I had to walk all the way back down to Caliburn, recover the memory card from the laptop, fit it into the camera, and climb back up the hill.

Finally I made it into the Schloss and had a good wander around.

I did mention last night that it had something of a sinister reputation. This was where British civilian internees, including many people deported by the Germans from the Channel Islands, ended up if they had been naughty, and if they were naughty here, the next (and final) stop was inevitably Buchenwald.

And that does remind me – something I said a few days ago – while many people criticise what they perceive as a lack of resolution by French and other occupied nations, I’ve yet to see one of these critics say anything about a similar stance taken by the vast majority of the (British) inhabitants of the Channel Islands.

But I digress.

I continue my walk around the Schloss and I’m impressed by the silence here. I seem to be the only person up here admiring the beautiful buildings.

I end up at the museum, because there is a museum on site and, as you might expect, theres a sign “Closed until 13:00”. That was rather odds-on, wasn’t it?

I also mentioned last night that Tittmoning was only about 400 metres from the Austrian border. So with the aim of visiting as many countries as possible, Caliburn and I cross what is a totally unguarded frontier. Hooray for the Schengen Agreement.

And despite the protests from the Lady Who Lives In The Satnav, we continue in Austria for a little while in order to see what is happening, nearly crushing a party of little kiddy learner-cyclists on our way around.

After a drive of about 20 kms we cross back into Germany at the town of Laufen.

This is quite a beautiful little town, right on the border between Austria and Germany, and the two countries are linked by a gorgeous girder bridge. It was built at the turn of the 20th Century and refurbished a couple of years ago.

And if you want to know why I’m being so vague about everything, read on.

Laufen, a beautiful gated medieval city was also the site of a Prisoner-of-War camp somewhere in the vicinity. Oflag VII-C was quite a famous one from which a couple high-profile escapes were made, and which later became a civilian internment camp.

The President of the ruling council of Guernsey was one of the civilian detainees here at Laufen, and Patrick Reid, a Colditz escapee and writer of several books about P-O-W life, including the book on which the film and TV series “The Colditz story” was based, was probably the most famous military prisoner.

Not knowing exactly where Oflag VII-C had been situated, I wandered off to the Town Hall to make enquiries. Thats always the first port of call on any occasion such as this.

However, as anyone who has followed my adventures for any length of time might expect, The Town Hall is “closed exceptionally” today and there was no-one there.

No surprise here then.

So that was the end of that then. Back on the road once more, Caliburn and I headed to Eching, in the suburbs of Munich (and only a couple of kilometres from Dachau)

My old school-friend Hans runs an archery club, called Sherwood Forest, here and they have recently moved into larger premises.

It was club-night tonight so he took me along to see the activity there and I was quite impressed with the set-up. I was invited to have a go but I declined, not out of fear of showing everyone up by my prowess, but the fact that with a bow and arrow in my hand I’m a danger to everyone around me, except of course the enemy.

Now right at the very beginning, I talked about disasters. And quite right too. because on booting up the laptop to load up todays work, the laptop failed. The thing is only booting up part-way through the notmal opening cycle and then flashing up an error message “Your computer has encountered a problem and must close down. We are collecting details of the error and then your computer will restart”. And then it restarts and at exactly the same point in the boot-up process, it all starts again.

In fact, this is more than a disaster. Its a calamity. And I wish that I knew where all of my old notes were from T223, the Open University’s computer course that I followed, where we learnt (and I have since forgotten) how to hack our way into failed disks and extract all of the information.

All help on this subject will be gratefully received.

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Tuesday 12th May 2015 – I KNEW …

… that if I looked hard enough, I would be able to find some evidence of the previous occupants that had not been ethnically cleansed from the city of Zatec.

There were in fact a couple, some easier to find and easier to see than others, and here’s the most obvious one

I strongly suspect that the German writing on the walls over these shops may not be the original.

It seems that once again I’ve stumbled upon a film crew – this one from Czech Television and a corner of the town has been cordoned off while they film some kind of costule drama here. They’ve picked a nice part of the town to do it in because it is relatively unspoilt down at this end.

that’s more than can be said about this part of the city.

I mentioned yesterday that the Economic miracle hasn’t penetrated as far as here yet, and there are parts of Zatec that look very sad indeed. Several buildings at this end of the city look as if they were abandoned during the ethnic cleansing of the region and never taken over by new inhabitants

The city is quite historic however, dating back to at least 1004 when the first mention of it was made.

It sits on a hill, on a promontory overlooking the river valley, and was walled and fortified. There are some of the fortificiations still remaining, as well as a couple of the city gates.

There are also a great number of Comecon-styled blocks of flats, but we’ll gloss over those.

Here’s a surprise though. As well as the usual German discount supermarkets we have a British supermarket chain operating in the Czech Republic and with a branch at Zatec too.

I went in there to buy my bread and fruit for the day and ws surprised to be asked for my club card. I wonder what she would have said had I produced it.

The drive down south was beautiful through some lovely scenery and picturesque towns and villages.

This is the town church in the town of Prestice and it’s just one example of the hundreds of photos that I could have taken had I had the time.

I saw several Soviet-era lorries too. Most of them were on the road so I couldn’t photograph them.

This one, which I think is a LIAZ, was conveniently parked up in a field while I was stopped at some roadworks, of which there were plenty along my route.

No old Tatra cars though, and that was disappointing.

Here’s my lunch stop, at Jeseni in the Sudeten Alps. And you can see why the Sudeten Alps were vital to the defence of Czechoslovakia – it’s not possible to move a squadron of tanks, never mind a division, through here in any kind of order.

It’s no wonder that the Nazis stirred up the Sudeten Germans to such an extent, in order to have a fifth column making a “peaceful” takeover of the region, but it beats me why, knowing that their country was doomed from the start, why the Czechs didn’t make a fight of it.

A guarantee from France and Britain of the security of the rump of Czechoslovakia was totally worthless and I’m sure that the Czechs realised that.

Here I am in tonight’s stop – the town of Tittmoning in southern Bavaria.

In fact you can’t get much more south than this because if you turn left and go down to the bottom of the slope you arrive at the Salz River and across there on the other side is Austria, and I shall be wetting my feet in Austria later in the day tomorrow.

Tittmoning is a beautiful little walled town with a huge and impressive central square, but it also has something or a sinister reputation.

There’s a castle here too just like at Colditz, and just as in Colditz, it was a prison camp in World War II. But not for the military (well, there were some soldiers here at very first) but for civilians – British civilians in fact because although not many people know this, part of the United Kingdom fell into German hands during World War II and many British civilians were mistreated during the war.

Tittmoning was the home for 5 years for British male civilians from the Channel Islands who were considered unsuitable to remain in their homes during the German occupation, and was in fact a halfway house to Buchenwald, where several did indeed end up as the war progressed.

Monday 11th May 2015 – LAST NIGHT WAS ANOTHER …

… one of those nights where a bomb could have gone off in the vicinity and I wouldn’t have paid it the slightest moment of attention.

Here on this rest area on the autobahn towards Leipzig, I slept the sleep of the dead until the alarm went off at 07:30 and it was a struggle to rise up and make breakfast.

Back on the road though, with a nice hot coffee, I carried on heading south. And it didn’t take too long to arrive at my destination.

Here I am at Colditz Castle, and this is another one of my lifetime ambitions fulfilled. Brought up on a diet of RAF stories and PoW escape books, I’ve been wanting to come here for years.

Visits to the castle under the Communist regime were strictly discouraged and in fact most of the prisoner artefacts that were still here in 1955 had long gone by the time the Communists left.

Nevertheless, there were still plenty of surprises to come.

A digger working up on one of the courtyards suddenly disappeared from view as the courtyard collapsed underneath it. Closer inspection revealed the remains of an escape tunnel (a French one, as it happens) that the Germans had failed to uncover. Its discovery certainly took everyone, especially the digger driver, quite by surprise.

Another surprise was sprung on the roofers.

When they lifted off some of the tiles to replace the roof, they found a hidden alcove with a radio receiving set from World War II still in it. This was one of the four secret radio rooms operated by the prisoners, and the only one that remained undiscovered.

Mind you, a great deal was already known about the history of the escape plans and it just remained to actually track them down.

Perhaps the most famous tunnel was the one that involved sliding down the weight chamber of the tower clock and digging out from the cellar. This had been filled in after the Germans had discovered it, but some of it has been unfilled as you can see.

Strawberry Moose is quite interested in giving them a hand, and maybe himself escaping from the castle.

The guided tour was quite expensive, but it was worth every penny and I really enjoyed my visit.

From here I headed south and crossed into the Czech Republic. Years since I’ve been here and Caliburn has never been here at all, and you may remember from last year that I’m trying to expand Caliburn’s sphere of operations.

I’ve ended up in a town called Zatec, not too far from Plzen. I was doing a tour of the town when I came across a hotel right in the centre. I couldn’t say fairer than that.

I know that I’m supposed to be sleeping in Caliburn as much as possible, but east of where the Iron Curtain used to be, the police sometimes still have attitude issues and it’s not as if the cost of living is expensive here.

The town itself is gorgeous, although there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the post-Communist economic miracle has not quite penetrated thoroughly into the region.

Mind you, this is the Sudetenland and the inhabitants, mostly of German origin, were ethnically cleansed out of the region in 1945-46. This might account for some of the issues here, although there’s nothing that I have seen that can detract from the beauty of the place.

There’s a fast food place across the road from the hotel so I resolved to call in on my way back from my walk so that I could pick up a plate of chips. But you can guess what has happened.

You would think that I would be used to this by now.

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Sunday 10th May 2015 – AND JUST TO PROVE …

… that at times I can talk the most utter and unadulerated rubbish … "surely not" – ed …

You may remember the other day at Bilstein I was going on … "and on and on etc etc" – ed … about the lack of a War Memorial to the dead of World War II and how it seemed to be that the Germans were ignoring them …

So here at Dossem in the village cemetery is a War Memorial to the dead of World War I and World War II.

And to give you some idea of the suffering, then in complete contrast to the situation in the UK, there are far more dead in World War II than World War I, and I reckon that about 80% of those deaths in World War II came in the final 12 months of the war.

The situation in Germany must have been more cataclysmic for the Germans than anyone could imagine in that final 12-month period.

Here are some other people for whom World War II was quite cataclysmic.

The neighbourhood was home to a Prisoner of War Camp and some of the inhabitants were Polish, whose country had of course been erased from the map.

When the camp was liberated towards the end of the war, there are about 130 Poles who remained behind.

Unfortunately, they would never return home, for they were lying in the cemetery, and of those, about 84 had a very sorry tale to tell.

One Sunday evening before the xamp was liberated and they were still prisoners,, they were in the Prison chapel praying when an RAF bomber flew over to attack a nearby railway station. It missed its aim completely and the bomb that it dropped fell squarely onto the chapel.

Any time other than a Sunday late evening, the chapel would have been empty.

This is the site of the camp and the road here is the main track that ran through the camp back in those days.

Intended to be a military airfield, the site was taken over in September 1940 as a Prisoner-of-War camp and was known as Oglag VIB, or more colloquially as Warburg. Its claim to fame is that it was the site of what became known as the Warburg Wire Job, where a couple of prisoners fused the searchlights and in the darkness the remainder stormed the fences. Incredibly, three of them actually made a “home run” back to their home.

You may be forgiven for thinking that it’s a shame that there’s nothing now left of the camp, but these huts are actually on the site of huts that I once saw on the plan of the camp and for all I know, they may well be the originals.

Today, they are being used to house refugees and asylum seekers, “mitarbeiters” as the sign told me. So I suppose that it still does have a connection wit prisoners then. It’s just a shame that I couldn’t manage to go in for a wander around though.

This is my hotel from last night. A gorgeous place with a lovely view out over the Mohnesee and with breakfast included, it came to all of €69:00. In fact, I had to have the receptionist write down the price to make sure that I had it correct, because it really was such good value as that.

I had a couple of good showers and washed my clothes, the main reason why I stop every so often in a hotel. But if ever I’m out this way again, I’ll be making a beeline to here without a doubt.

On my way to Warburg I came by the Eder Dam, the third dam that the Dambusters attacked. This was another beautiful drive to reach here and the setting of the dam is totally stunning. It’s easily one of the most spectacular places that I’ve ever visited.

It must have been no mean feat to build it because its situation is such that it is a challenging environment to say the least. But the lake that they created when the steep valley was dammed was well worth the effort. It’s definitely my favourite of the three dams, although due to the steep sides of the valley, parking is rather limited.

And building it was not the only thing that was challenging. Destroying it was a monumental task.

The Lancasters had to come out of that valley to the right, behing the castle, swing hard left across the lake and then head for the dam at 240mph, settling down to a height of 60 feet as they were doing it, and releasing the bomb at about 500 yards from the dam wall. So my reckoning is that they had about half a mile to adjust themselves, which in real time is about 7 seconds

Once they had done all of that, they then had to do the difficult bit, and that was to climb up over the mountain that is on the other side of the dam, which you can see in the photo just here.

Destroying the Eder Dam and surviving the attack was without a doubt the most challenging task that the Dambusters had, and it’s no surprise that the crews had been hand-picked for the mission. Not many aircrew could have been trusted with this attack.

My inexperienced eye managed to pick up a few things that are suggestive of repaired bomb damage. Parts of the parapet stone are much smoother and so probably newer that the original stonework, but it’s here at the pressure buttresses that the evidence is clearer.

If you look at the caps, you’ll notice that some of them (the ones nearer the edges) are made of stone but others (the ones nearer the centre) are made of brick. That’s my opinion anyway, for what it’s worth.

So having visited Warburg, I’m now on my way south-east. I’m in the former East Germany and while the contrast with the West isn’t as devastating as it was when I was last here in 1988, you can still see the difference, even after a quarter of a century of unification.

However, there are signs of things to come.

Here at Benterode, on the site of an old coal mine, there’s a company called KD Stahl und Maschinenbau that manufacture horizontal-axis wind turbines so I went for a wander around. These need more wind to make them turn and are rather heavy on bearing wear, but for confined spaces they are quite ideal.

They had several designs available, but of course being a Sunday evening there was no-one around to talk to about them. And in any case, with the amount of German that I can remember, what chance would I have of talking to anyone?

So tonight I’m parked up on a rest area on the Autobahn to Leipzig. And tomorrow I’ll be on my way again.

-2

Saturday 9th May 2015 – AND IF I THOUGHT …

… that the other night’s sleep was something special, then I’m not sure what to say about last night’s. In bed by 22:30 after a nice meal of pasta, mushrooms and tinned veg, I remember nothing until about 06:30. Perhaps there was the odd lorry shunting around somewhere in the vicinity but I really didn’t care less.

Mind you, I was off on my travels during the night. I was a serial killer with bodies all over the place, including inside the doors of my car behind the door cards. And I remember having to move them and dispose of them properly, so extracting them from their hidey-holes was interesting, particularly as they now had the size and consistency of sausages.

After a nice leisurely breakfast of bread, jam, fruit juice and coffee, I hit the road and fahr’n fahr’n fahr’n-ed up the autobahn for my first dam.

I wasn’t on the autobahn for very long – the Lady Who Lived In The SatNav soon had me in the mountains.

I came to a dead stop in the small town of Bilstein.

We saw some War memorials in Austria last year, but this is the first one that I ever recall seeing in Grmany. Interestingly, it contains names from the 1866 war against Austria and names from the 1870-71 war against France, but nothing from World War I or World War II.

Whilst World War II might in some circumstances and some quarters be considered controversial, I’m totally bewildered as to why the dead of World War I haven’t been honoured with a memorial.

As for World War II, my own opinion is that probably 99% of the German military were just as much victims of the war as anyone else and were no more guilty of war crimes than anyone else in any other army. Regardless of the cause that they fought for, their individual sacrifice should still be commemorated and I reckon that they deserve a memorial.

From there, the Lady Who Lives In The SatNav took me right into the mountains and over some stunning roads (some of which I was obliged to decline).

There were some beautiful things to see too, such as the village of Rohrenspring – just one of a thousand places that I could have stopped to photograph had there been anywhere convenient to park.

Still, I arrived at the Sorpe Dam soon enough and had a good drive round.

And it’s easy to see why it is that, despite the importance of the Sorpe Dam, the dambusters were unable to breach the dam.

They couldn’t fly along the length of the dam (although I’m not sure why as it’s a clear “in and out) but came in over the church steeple, dropped their bombs and then climbed up and out of the valley.

and you’ll notice the dam – on the right-hand edge of the photo about halfway up. There isn’t much to aim at, is there?

Only one of the bombs hit the dam and that did no more than damage the parapet. And there isn’t any evidence that I could see of the damage.

However if you notice the photo, it’s actually a composite photo. Some of the seating bays have stone walls and facings and are clearly the original onces. Some others have wrought iron railings.

It’s tempting to think that the wrought iron ones are the modern ones built as a cheap temporary measure to replace original ones destroyed in the blast.

However, you can see how much water is in here judging by the height and the weight of the barrage here.

That really is an impressive structure and had the dambusters been able to let that lot go, there would have been a catastrophe. But they were always on a hiding to nothing with an earthen-banked dam. The earth would simply absorb the shock of the explosion.

From there, I went to look at the Mohne Dam.

This was the classic dam, the one about which everone has heard and which collapsed in dramatic fashion after three direct hits. The planes had to fly at a height of about 60 feet at 240 mph right between the two towers, which were equipped with machine guns, and drop a bouncing bomb in a precise position.

30 years or so ago, you could still see where the stone from the new repair work differed from the original.

Today, however, I couldn’t see any difference at all, despite having a good luck around. But what did impress me was that within just a mere 4 months, this dam had been rebuilt of sorts and was back doing its job again.

And that’s the big issue with the British Bombing campaign. If it didn’t involve the gratuitous killing of defenceless civilians, “Bomber” Harris dismissed it as a “panacea target” and refused to carry it out, even when presented with a direct order.

Once the dams had been bombed, Harris abandoned them, when it was odds-on that they would be rebuilt. Anyone normal would have had high-level bombng raids every week to damage the rebuilding, and that was what most of the Germans expected.

Most except Alber Speer, that is. The German Minister of Economic Planning was well-aware that Harris would never come back to the dams (there was one further raid on the Sorpe Dam with the huge earthquake bombs, but they didn’t work and in any case it was far too late to influence the outcome of the war) and that they could be rebuilt in peace.

And now I’ve found a hotel right on the shore of the lake, with the water lapping at my feet, and this is where I’m staying the night.

-1

Friday 8th May 2015 – HERE …

.. is where I spent last night – at a motorway service area at Heverlee, near Leuven. And I slept the sleep of the dead too – totally painless it was. Didn’t feel a thing.

And even better, there was a nice hot shower available too. And didn’t I enjoy that? I haven’t felt so good in ages.

Mind you, I forgot to buy a bottle of water and so my morning coffee, in a roadside rest area while they cleared away an accident down the road, and coffee made with sparkling water is certainly different, that’s for sure.

I wasted the morning not doing very much at all, and then met up with Alison for lunch. Alison and I worked together for an American company for almost a year, and we both walked out at more-or-less the same time. And for the same reasons – basically that American companies have no idea of the notion of cultivating staff loyalty, and rule their employees by fear. There’s no place in my environment, nor in Alison’s environment either, for an attitude such as that, and we can’t understand why it is that other people allow themselves to be pushed around.

Afterwards, I went to check up on Marianne and to have a chat. It’s hard to believe that it’s two years since she passed away, but then at this sort of age time passes quickly.

It seems that I wasn’t the only person to go to visit her either, for there were a couple of other pots of flowers that had been left on her grave. I’m glad that she hasn’t been forgotten and that she is being looked after by people locally. It’s not feasible for me to come to Brussels to tend to her as often as I like.

It’s also VE day today – the end of the War in Europe, so it’s only right to go to pay a visit to the interred in another part of the cemetery here at Ixelles. There are some military graves here, but there are also some graves of civilian victims of the Gestapo.

There are many people, one or two of my acquaintances amongst them unfortunately, who criticise the French and the Belgians, and a few other people too, for what they see as a lack of resolution by the population of those countries when it came to resisting the German invaders.

But if you have a look at these gravestones, you’ll see fusillé – “shot”, or executé – executed, or decapité – decapitated. These were the risks that people were running every day for four and a half years of the Occupation, so it’s hard to be as resolute as some might like when you are risking all of this.

And, of course, it’s very easy to beat the drum when there’s an ocean between you and the invader. I’d be interested to see just how brave these critics would have been had they been over here amongst the Gestapo during the Occupation.

I braved the rush-hour traffic and set out for Germany. I’d forgotten just how busy the roads could be on a Friday afternoon and I’m glad that I’m no longer involved in any of this.
And here I am crossing the border into Germany not too far from Aachen at the back of Liege.

The camera on my new phone has quite a high resolution and isn’t far off what the Nikon D5000 can come up with on a good day. It’s also easy to use on the move so moving pictures are back with us again.

However, I needed to be careful. Can you make out the blue flashing lights just down the road? I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had been waiting for me.

It seems that I have entered my destinations into the Satnav in the wrong order and it’s doing the route backwards. That’s clearly no good so I need to change it all. At a rest area at the side of the Autobahn I pulled up to reprogramme it, but then I thought “what they heck” and it’s here where I’m going to be bedding down, German police permitting.

And talking of the Police, I’ve managed this year to avoid having a run-in with the Belgian police this year. Either my luck was in or else they must have been all asleep.

-3

Thursday 7th May 2015 – WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME …

… that you saw one of these? I can’t even remember when it was that I saw one in the UK, so I never expected to find one parked in a supermarket car park in Brussels.

I can’t remember when it was that they stopped making them but I don’t recall any later than the mid 70s so this one is at least 40 years old.

But make the most of it, because it’s not going to be here for long. To be frank, it’s an absolute nail, full of rust and rot and simply painted over, rust, rot and all, as a display advert. What a waste of a good old BMC Minivan

Here’s where I spent the night last night, at a motorway service area at Nivelles, on the outskirts of Brussels.

I didn’t think that I had had a particularly comfortable sleep, but I must have done, for I was off on my travels during the night. Playing in goal for Pionsat’s 3rd XI as it happens. And then I was off to see my friend Kris. She was living up on the moors right near the crest, and had a huge pile of wood that needed sorting out and would I help her?

Not too far away, on the edge of a village right on the crest, was a Muslim monastery (yes!) just like a huge castle but with an enormous tower in the centre. Round and comparatively modern (like Flemisn 15th Century architecture) it was 14 storeys high but the 14th storey had fallen off. each of the remaining storeys was let out as a separate apartment.

Each time Krys and I went somewhere we saw the tower from a different viewpoint and each time I asked her what it was, and each time she told me.

I’ve sorted out the gas issue by buying what I needed from a sports outfitters here. I reckoned that it would be cheaper then paying to eat out every night, but having had to buy it in Belgium, I’m not so sure. The price was totally shocking.

I’ve solved the beichstuhl issue too. Seeing as how IKEA was right next door to the sports outfitters, I paid them a visit. I’ve bought a galvanised metal pail, and also the curtains seeing as they had the exact colour that I need. And as you might expect, it was the most expensive that they had. I always seem to have the most expensive tastes and I just wish that I had the money to back it up.

Talking of expensive tastes, I’ve found exactly the worktops that I want for the bathrrom and the kitchen.

A mere €295 per square metre, but it really is beautiful and I would love to have this about the house. The biggest problem is that the worktop in the bathroom needs to be 45cms and in the kitchen 50cms, and the smallest sinks in IKEA (they have to be factory-fitted) are 45cms for the bathroom and 50cms for the kitchen.

That’s clearly not going to work so I need to have a really good think about this.

For lunch I stopped off at the Etangs Mellaerts to eat my honey and nut bread, and to watch an old woman feeding the ducks and swans.

As you can see, she had quite a crowd around her – clearly the most popular form of waterfront entertainment.

And at least, I could watch it from the van. For tea tonight I went to my favourite restaurant in Ixelles for a falafel supper, and ended up having to park a hundred miles away . Parking in Brussels these days is something of a joke, that’s for sure.

I’ve also been to sort out the bank as well. I needed to activate my bank cards for my forthcoming trip to Canada. And I took advantage while I was there of sorting out a few financial arrangements. I visited the Post Bank too – I had completely forgotten about an account there and that has been frozen. I need to contact them to reactivate it.

But here’s a thing – it’s the first time that I’ve ever been to the Post Office at Schuman and been served straight away without ever having to queue. That’s a record.

So tonight I’m on the motorway service area not too far from Leuven. I hope that the showers are working because they weren’t this morning at Nivelles.

-3

Wednesday 6th May 2015 – DOESN’T CALIBURN LOOK SMART …

… with his new front number plate?

Here we were, going up the autoroute to wards Paris yesterday late afternoon in a howling gale and I stopped to make what is called a “comfort break”. Going back to Caliburn afterwards, I noticed that the white refelective part of his number plate was detaching itself from the background.

Cheap number plates, I suppose, and here I was off to Germany for two weeks. If it all comes apart in Germany I’ll be sunk, and the controle technique as soon as I return, I could do with having this fixed instanter.

Back on the autoroute again and we drove around the town of Nemours. And there on the Trading Estate I could just about make out one of these car accessory places. 18:55 it was, 5 minutes to chucking-out time, but nevertheless when I arrived they were still there. The plate cost an arm and a leg as you might expect, but they also had a fitting service for a couple of Euros. Anyway, there wasn’t much option. It’s cheaper than a fine and I’m going to have to have the number plate anyway for the controle technique. May as well do it now as later.

I’m not sure whether you can see it in the photo but I now have my dash cam installed. I had that running for the journey. It’s cheap, as you can tell by the price and by the quality of materials, and the instructions, written in basic Chinglish, are, shall we say, “unhelpful”. However, it does what it says it does, and quite good enough for what I want, although I’m going to have to stop talking to myself when I’m driving.

I was on the road by 15:00, having spent the morning tidying the house and doing a little cleaning, and I arrived here at about 23:45 after several stops. One of which was at Melun, where I discovered a new takeaway where they did me proud.

On the way up, though, I started to make a list of things that I have forgotten, including the cooking stove and the portable beichstuhl.

It’s going to be one of THOSE journeys, isn’t it?

-2

Tuesday 5th May 2015 – HAVING CURSED ORANGE TELECOM …

… with what can best be described as “an expletive-ridden rant” on Saturday, it’s only fair that I report on my visit this morning to the main Orange Telecom shop in the centre of Montlucon. And apart from not being open unti 10:00, I do have to say that the personnel in the shop could not have been more helpful. It was a stark contrast to Saturday, and had I had today’s treatment then, I would have been delighted.

So now, after having been to Montlucon and back, reconfigured the new Livebox and made a couple of phone calls, I now have a proper working home telephone, a proper working mobile phone (and one of the guys in Orange helped me configure it so that I could access the internet) and my e-mail and website back up. So it’s all systems go here in Pooh Corner.

As for the website, I finally managed to speak to someone at the Danish Domain Registration Service, and they were so horrified about my two-hour hold yesterday that they extended my domain renewal by 12 months free of charge. So all’s well that ends well there too.

So having done that, I propped Caliburn up on axle stands, removed the spare wheel (and checked it over) and then made a start on rustproofing the underneath.

As you can see, what I have done so far has come out quite well.

The wire brush on the angle grinder was far too savage so in the end I cleaned it off by hand, and the rustproofing paint went on quite easily, giving a lovely finish. I let in dry for a couple of hours and then put the spare wheel back and dropped Caliburn back off the axle stands.

I’ll be doing the rest of the floor bit by bit (there’s nothing cluttering the rest of the underside) and then going round to give it all a second coat. Once that’s been done and it’s all stabilised, I can underseal it all and that will keep it good for another 8 years.

When that had been done, I checked over Caliburn to make sure that there was enough oil, water and so on and then gave the back a really good clear-out.

While I was starting to load up Caliburn, I had spectators. The French Air Force came for a look around to see what I was up to. They’ve come round to check up on me a few times

But in Caliburn there’s now about half of the stuff that I need to take with me, and I’ll do all of the rest tomorrow before I go. It shouldn’t take too long, I hope, and then I can clear off.

I’m taking the horizontal axis wind turbine with me too. I’s never had a decent run out yet, and I reckon that parked up on the side of the autoroutes, or by the side of a big lake, it ought to do something, and this would seem to be a good time to try it.

-3

Monday 4th May 2015 – HAPPY STAR WARS DAY

And it’s another day when I’ve been heavily sidetracked and not done anything like what I intended to do.

A late night last night, and I was on my travels too. A Mercedes 25-seater bus, a 407-type of thing, came down the lane and when he reached the junction he didn’t know which way to go, so he travelled straight on, right through my hedge (which I don’t actually have of course).

Naturally, I was furious, and buttonholed the driver, and his response was “it’s okay. I’ll buy you a srink and it will be fine”. I told him that I expected much more than a drink for the damage that he had caused, but he ran away.

After breakfast, I did all of the paperwork for Orange Telecom and then went into Pionsat to post it off. On the way back, I gave Caliburn a really good wash and soak. And I can see that I’m going to have to give his bodywork some attention in the near future.

From there, I could carry on with cleaning and grouting the beichstuhl, and once I’d done that, I started to fit the top. And that took a huge amount of work – much more than you might think. It needed considerable modification.

Cecile hadn’t been able to contact the telephone company about my line, but at lunchtime I noticed that Liz was on line, so she gallantly took up the cudgel. And with Liz and I exchanging messages on here and Liz passing them on to the technician on the phone, we finally worked out that the problem was in the Livebox, That’s no surprise as it’s quite flaky and nothing like as good as the previous one.

However, about 10 minutes after the call ended, the Livebox gave a peculiar squeak and Lo and Behold, the phone line came back.

That was the queue to catch up on a few outstanding phone calls and having been kept hanging on the line by a Danish computer company for no less than TWO HOURS, I called it a day.

So tomorrow, I’ll have to change my plans and go to Montlucon for this blasted Livebox. I wasn’t anticipating having to waste my time doing that.

-1

Sunday 3rd May 2015 – TODAY WAS ANOTHER DAY …

… where I’ve hardly set foot outside the door. In fact, the only time that I went out (apart from doing the stats) was to rescue my coffee mug from Caliburn.

And as it was Sunday, I had the alarms switched off and so I slept through until 09:50 – and quite right too. It’s what Sundays are for;

I was on my travels last night and I had one of those rare (for me, at least, but not apparently so rare for other people who were on this study that we did) occasions where I wasn’t a participant but a spectator. All the events took place in the USA, in quite a wealthy area in a huge modern house inhabited by a banker. He and another banker were busy trying to undermine the bank of a rival company and I was watching them try to use all kinds of disreputable tactics, including implicating the children of this third banker, to achieve their aims.

The interesting thing about this was the viewpoint from which I was observing the events. At times, I was in the room with everyone, and ay other times I was high up in the sky with a kind of drone’s-eye view. And the view from this viewpoint included a splendid school of a circus school and in particular the school for the flying trapeze and my view from here was being continually interrupted by trapeze artists flying through my field of view.

Apart from that, I’ve been working on the radio programmes for Radio Anglais. I finished off the rock music programmes and then did the additional notes for the next five weeks of Radio Arverne radio programmes.

As well as that, I did some research into where I’ll be going in Germany next week

And that’s my lot really. And quite right too. I’m entitled to a day of rest. Tomorrow, it’s back to work.

-3

EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality