Tag Archives: caliburn

Wednesday 12th August 2020 – ANOTHER SWELTERING DAY …

… in the middle of this heatwave in Southern Germany. And I have surrendered to it all by buying a desktop fan to go with the USB fan that I bought for Caliburn yesterday (did I mention that?).

This morning, it was again 28°C early on and the news that there had been a cloudburst and that my home town back in the UK was 12 inches under water and they were all complaining now about too much rain didn’t really abate my humour all that much.

But anyway, I digress.

This morning I was awake quite early yet again and spent some time bringing the paperwork up to date and listening to the dictaphone.

Back in England everyone was worried that the amount of viruses was rising and yet people still weren’t taking things seriously, still not taking their masks seriously. We were walking between a couple of towns on a nice shady road near a river. We could see people disobeying the mask instructions all that kind of thing. We were convinced that they won’t last very long at all if they kep on going like this. There was a lot more to it than this but I don’t remember it now.

Later, it was time to disembark from the ship which was in fact an aeroplane so we all have to get ourselves ready and we all walked off down the gangplank a few of us together laughing and joking a little bit. One of the guys with whom I worked at the EU, he was coming on behind us and about to get into this queue with us. A couple of us said “we really don’t want to be in the queue with him”. Castor and Pollux were there too, and it’s nice to see them back with me again on my travels. They had changed into some nice clothes – I remember Pollux in a nice little top and a dark blue skirt. They just walked through Customs and walked away and didn’t look back, which left me feeling extremely disappointed.

When Hans came in we had a coffee and a good chat and organised a pile of stuff that needed organising.

Going to the bank to pay in his shop takings was next and then we went for breakfast at the bakery across the road. it was crowded with people and we had to sit inside for a change.

Gathering up the camera (but forgetting a bottle of water) we walked off out of town towards Garching in the sweltering heat.

A couple of kilometres outside the town on the left-hand side across the motorway is a nature reserve, the Echinger Lohe. It’s actually a piece of primeval woodland that was set aside in 1978 totally unmanaged as a natural forest reserve – some kind of experiment to see how a natural wood would have behaved before human intervention.

And what with all of the urban expansion in the vicinity of Munich that’s a feat in itself

Scrambling through the wire fence via a suitable opening we went inside.

It’s totally fascinating to see how it’s turned out. Nature is certainly doing a fine job here in this magnificent example of a climax forest. And all of the rotting tree trunks and branches that are passing through the “interesting shape” stage and disintegrating into powder and slowly regenerating the soil.

This is just as nature would have done several thousand years ago. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

We pushed our way deeper into the forest. It seemed to be the sensible thing to do in view of the heat.

One thing that impressed me about the place was how silent everywhere was. It was very broody and mysterious in there. Had a pile of Hurons leapt out from behind the trees, bow in hand, to overwhelm us I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised.

And although we didn’t see any large mammals, there is PLENTY OF EVIDENCE OF THEIR PRESENCE.

When I say that the forest is totally unmanaged, that’s not to say that there hasn’t been any human intervention.

These stranee, crude constructions are apparently hides for cameras. Some University or something is carrying out some kind of survey on activity that takes place in the forest.

Of course they aren’t going to park themselves up in full view of the wildlife, but all the same I can’t say that I’m very impressed with disturbing nature like this. Surely they couls have brought in some artificial hides that would have done the trick and which they could have taken away later on, leaving very little trace.

There is plenty to see in this particular corner of Eching and so we left the cover and shade of the forest to go to see it.

One of the things to see, which might not appeal to everyone, is what is going on in the air. We are right in the flight path for the descent to Munich Airport which is about 5 or so miles and even with the grounding of many flights due to the effects of the pandemic, there is still the odd one passing overhead.

At first I didn’t recognise the livery of this plane, but having photographed and enlarged it, I can see that it’s one of the planes that fly for the big holiday company TUI.

Out here beyond the forest there’s a huge natural, unspoilt heathland, the Garchinger Heide too.

It’s a haven of wildlife that you wouldn’t usually find so close to a major city and large transportation hub. The wooden thing that you can see that looks like the handle of a spade is actually a perch for the various birds of prey and the like that are around here.

218 different varieties of natural plants have been recorded here, of which about 50 are on Germany’s “red list” of plants subject to Conservation rules, type that would be difficult to find anywhere. This is good news because the flowers attract butterflies, of which a couple of visitors are quite rare types, and also bees.

And we are very lucky to have it too because in the late 19th Century during the grand expansion of Germany’s economy there were proposals to transform the heath into farmland.

However due to the energetic efforts of Franz Vollmann, the “Saviour of the Garchinger Heide“, 23 hectares of unspoilt land were bought by the Bavarian Botanical Society between 1907 and 1904 and in 1942 it became an official nature reserve. A monument was erected on the site in honour of Vollman.

Unfortunately much of the heath was badly damaged in early 1945 when prisoners from the Dachau Concentration were instructed to turn it into an emergency airstrip. Some work was begun and you can still see some of the damage that they did.

Eching is apparently an ancient Celtic town and there’s what is, I suppose, a Celtic cemetery here – a part of the heathland where there were plenty of small barrows. We went over there to have a look at them

Some other work that was undertaken here was the excavation of the barrows, so I was told, apparently in the search for various artefacts and grave goods. The excavations were carried out all that well and now there isn’t very much left now, but the outlines of the barrows are still visible.

There are several pools here that were formerly the site of gravel extraction and now abandoned to nature and the surroundings overgrown by vegetation.

Our route to the cemetery took us past a small one that was very quiet and secluded, and here we surprised a bunch of nudists. However I do have to say that if I had a body like any of those, I wouldn’t be exhibiting it anywhere in public like they were.

On our way back home we stopped for a drink at the football ground, and then we picked up Caliburn and went to track down a battery for Hans’s jeep. No-one had one in stock so we ended up having to order one.

But at one place that we visited I bought my desktop fan. this heat really is killing me right now.

While we were in the van we decided to push on for an afternoon out in the nearby town of Freising, the region’s capital.

We found a car park just outside the city centre and Hans led me through a maze of alleyways and narrow streets. This one is called the Mittlerergraben and it’s a typical example of the little streets around the northern part of the town.

In fact, much of Germany looks like this, and while some property is quite clearly modern, it’s very difficult to tell with others which is contemporary and which is new to replace war-damaged property.

, so we went for a walk around while Hans pointed out a few of the local sights. The cathedral was up the top of a huge set of steps so in this heat we ruled that out. We went for a cold drink instead.

From where I was standing to take the previous photo there’s a little Gasse, an alley that leads down into the main shopping street. These alleys are another feature of medieval German cities – in fact most medieval cities. As you know, Granville, where I live is littered with them.

In the background are the towers of the cathedral and to the left just down there is the Bayerische Hof, an upmarket hotel that has rooms at prices that the likes of you and I can only dream about.

That column is actually at the entrance to the hotel car park and I bet that more than just a couple of people have had fun trying to put their car into there.

We walked down the alleyway into the main shopping street and the first thing that I did was to disappear up another Gasse

The town is littered with these little alleys and this one is certainly one of the prettiest. It’s called the Hummelgasse and leads on down to the river at the bottom of the hill.

We weren’t going that way though. We were heading down the main street and so I had to come back. But not before I became all nostagic about the yellow walls on this house here. It reminds me too much of MY HOME BACK IN THE AUVERGNE.

So back in the centre of Freising, in the Unterer Hauptstrasse.

It’s not very often that a town site changes position throughout history so it’s very likely that where we are walking now is the same street that people were walking down 1500 or so years ago. The first recorded mention of the village of Freising was as long ago as 555AD – it was certainly in existence before that date

And it may well be even much older than that because it’s known that there was a Roman Road in the immediate vicinity along the banks of the River Isar and this would have been a likely situation for some kind of regional settlement.

You can see what I mean from this photo just here taken in the Heilinggeiststrasse – The Street of the Holy Ghost.

Where that tower is in the background is on an eminence overlooking the river and that would be the ideal situation for some kind of fortified site keeping an eye on the traffic passing up and down the river valley either by the road or the river.

The building on the left is the Church of the Holy Ghost with its associated Hospital complex. The hospital dates back to 1374 when a local dignitary left in his Will his entire estate to the benefit of building some accommodation for the poor, the sick and the needy.

We eschewed the possibility of climbing up to the cathedral and the other official buildings on the eminence. I’m not too good, hans has a bad leg and it was far too hot for a scramble.

Instead we threaded our way through the maze of back streets into the Fischergasse. There’s a little stream here that runs eventually into the Isar. The stream has been canalised and the banks reinforced and it makes quite a pleasant walkway back to town.

There was a café down here too and so we took the opportunity to sit down and have a nice cold drink. We needed it in this weather.

Heading back into the centre of town we came across some road works that caught our eye.

According to Hans, there’s “District Heating” in the town – a communal heating system of hot water that’s pumped around the town. it looks as if the system is receiving some attention. Here are some of the water pipes, covered in insulation.

It’s interesting to speculate as to why they have put that big U-bend in the pipework I can’t see any logical explanation for that

One thing about these early medieval cities is that it doesn’t matter how old a building is, it’s likely that the underground works are even older.

Consequently, when I saw some renovation being undertaken in the groundwork of a building in the main street I dived in there with the camera. Unfortunately this cellar is the exception that proves the rule. It’s nothing like as old as I was expecting.

We walked on through the town for a while and Hans showed me a bar that he had at one stage been thinking about taking on, but city parking regulations scuppered that.

And so we walked back to the car park and Caliburn

Out on the edge of the town is the site of a factory, the Schluter Tractor Company, where they made tractors until 1993.

The factory has now been transformed into a shopping centre where there is a display of photos of all of the products that the company manufactured. We went for a look around to see them, and discovered that there was even a restored tractor on display here as a centre-piece.

While we were here we went for a look around at the rest of the shops on the factory site but there was nothing of any interest so we went back to Caliburn and made our way back to Eching.

Back here, we parked up Caliburn and walked back to the football club where I had a delicious Thai curry with rice. And then back to the Bier Keller for a drink and a chat and to listen to some music.

Now I have my fan, and I feel so much better. I’m not going to say that it’s nice and cool of course, but it’s a lot better than it has been and i’m hoping for a comfortable sleep tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll be hitting the road.

Tuesday 11th August 2020 – I’VE BEEN SPENDING …

… my money yet again.

While you lot admire some photos of people having fun in the water in the Englischer Tur, regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have been on the lookout for a new acoustic guitar.

My current one was a £25:00 special of no quality or finish or anything, and rather disappointing all round, and so one of my reasons for being in Germany was to visit the large music shops to see whether there was anything that was more suitable.

Thomann’s had been very disappointing so I was hoping for better luk back in Munich. That was the plan for today.

Anyway, this morning I was wide-awake quite early (Hans’s sofa really is comfortable) and attacked the paperwork.

Heidinnguaq, my Greenland Inuit friend appeared on one of my voyages last night and we’d met as she was doing something as a kind of student so I’d recruited her for my travel company as receptionist, called Heidi, we changed her name to Heidi and she was working there. No matter how I tried I couldn’t make our work relationship into a personal relationship unfortunately. On one occasion we were walking towards the canteen to go and have a meal and she said “I’ll see you back at the office at 13:30 (it was now 12:50)”. I said “yes OK, or you can come and have lunch with me”. “Oh no” she said “you can go and have your lunch in here” she said, pointing to one of the dining rooms. “It’s a smoking one and you can make a mess if you like”, something like that to do with smoking and so on. Definitely doing everything she could to keep me at arms’ length, and I can’t say that I blame her. I would keep a good distance away from myself if only I could.

Later on there was a murder case involving some Chinese people. All of the papers and all of the evidence had been stuffed in an old blue minibus. People had broken into this minibus and started to search through the contents. This was clearly not right and I was wondering why they hadn’t sent the boxes to something like Iron Mountain, something like that. I was wandering around back at my office, getting in arrears again at work and doing some stuff that I didn’t really like. Someone was doing a survey on food and found that we only had something like 81% of food that we needed to survive. I was trying to think of ways to cut down on different things and how to make the food go further which involved taking more care about it but every time I mentioned cheese there was some cheese about someone would say “well so-and-so hasn’t had his cheese yet. Do you want some cheese?” Of course that wasn’t my plan at all because I didn’t want to give it away gratuitously like that. I wanted to keep it. There was some pie left over and I thought that I’d put it in a safe in the spare room but when I went to pick it up this guy there said “oh so-and-so hasn’t had any pie yet” and started to ask around who wanted more pie, whereas I was going to put it in a room and serve it up at tea later that night. I was thinking that there will have to be some really drastic economies of food if we were all going to survive. We can’t afford to waste it all and give it away like this.

Hans appeared at some point and made coffee, and we had a good chat.

Later, we headed out across the road to the cafe where they do very reasonable breakfasts. I had a couple of delicious German bread rolls with jam.

Off into town now. Caliburn took us to the main-line railway station in town and to catch a train for Munich.

The train that pulled up to take us was one of the lightweight Class 423 units buolt by a consortium including ABB, Adtranz, Alstom and Bombardier specifically for the suburban networks of many German cities during the early years of this century, the first ones actually entering service in 1998.

Clean, tidy, comfortable and quiet, it whizzed us into the city and at the rather appropriately-named Moosach station we alighted and took the Metro down to the Olympic Park. At the big shopping complex near there is A place called Just Music, one of the largest music shops in Germany.

Here, they did EXACTLY what Thomann’s should have done the other week. A salesman listened to what I was telling him about my requirements, sorted out half a dozen guitars, put them in a little room with me, and then left me to it.

After about half an hour I’d whittled the choice down to two and following a lengthy discussion with Hans and the salesman I finally made my choice. So I paid up and left the guitar there for later collection.

We then headed off back to the underground for a train (and a bus) back to the city centre.

We were planning for a mega-ramble around Munich today to see some of the sights and we started today at the Karlsplatz.

Mind you, it’s not everyone who knows it as the Karlsplatz, not even on some occasions the announces on the Underground system. Charles Theodore, the Elector of Bavaria after whom it was named was not very popular with the locals and the story goes that when he died in 1799, the locals held a party that went on for several days.

The locals call it the Stachus, which apparently was the name of a bar that once stood on ths site.

In winter, by the way, the fountain is switched off and it becomes a skating rink.

Probably the most impressive building in the Square and one of the most impressive throughout the city is the Karlstor, or Charles’s Gate.

It goes without saying that being an important city in medieval times, there were fortifications here that included a city wall – or maybe I should say “walls” because like most cities back in those days, rapid growth led to several concentric rings of walls to protect the expanding town.

The Karlstor, originally known as the Neuhauser Tor, is one of the very few surviving structures from the sesond generation of city walls erected in the latter part of the 13th Century and was certainly in existence in 1302.

But what we see today isn’t the original. The original was used as a munitions store and in 1857 the munitions exploded, destroying the gate. In the 1860s the gate was built and it’s quite different now from how it used to be.

We walked on into town down the Neuhauserstrasse, stopping for a cold drink on a terrace where we could admire the Burgersaalkirche on the corner of the Kapellenstrasse.

To give it its full name, which is a bit of a mouthful, it’s the Bürgersaalkirche Marianische Männerkongregation Mariä Verkündigung am Bürgersaal, or “Citizens’ Hall Church of the Men’s Congregation of the Annunciation of Mary at the Citizens’ Hall. It’s a Catholic Church then, which is quite evident as Southern Germany and Bavaria in particular is a Catholic region.

It seems to have been at first a Civic Hall when it was built round about 1710 and became a church in 1778. Within it is the grave of Father Rupert Mayer, a Jesuit priest who was a firm and outspoken opponent of the Nazi regime but was spared execution by virtue of his popularity and also by the fact that he had won the iron Cross for bravery as a regimental chaplain in World War I during which he lost a leg while administering the last rites to soldiers in the Front Line in December 1916.

A little earlier we were at the karlstor at the west end of the city. We have now walked all the way through the centre and are now at the Isartor, the gate near the River Isar.

When the second circle of city walls was built between 1285 and 1337, this gate was added to control entrance to the city. The tower was built first and the two flanking towers later when the moat was created.

Unlike the Karlstor, the Isartor is pretty much as it would have been when completed. It is said that the restoration taken place in the 1830s followed the original plans, as were the repairs after the end of World War II during which it was heavily damaged.

Hans had saved the best until last. It took quite a lot of finding but in the end Hans led me to the Asamkirche.

For this we have to turn the clock back once more to our favourite period of Munich Architecture and head for the years 1733-1746 and the Baroque period.

A couple of brothers, a sculptor named Egim Asam and his painter brother Cosmas wanted their own private church and so they bought four houses in the Sendlingerstrasse. Having done that, they set to work to create a veritable masterpiece to showcase their individual talents.

Although it’s known by the locals as the Asam Church, Its official title is the Church of St Johann Nepumuk.

Because it’s a private church, they didn’t have to conform to any established design and so could pretty much as they pleased. And for that it has some delightful little quirks. You’ll notice (or maybe you won’t) that the altar in the church is to the west, not to the east and Jerusalem which is traditional.

It’s said (and I have to say that I didn’t check) that the altar was so positioned that Egim could see it through the window of his house.

Another little quirk is that it’s symbolically on three levels.

The lower third is for the congegation and is dark and sombre to represent the suffering of the world. The second section is in blue and white and is reserved for the Royal Family of Bavaria and whoever might be the Holy Roman Emperor.

The third part, right up in the roof with all of the wonderful illuminated paintings is reserved specifically for God. The fresco up there is called “the Life of Saint Nepomuk” and is said to be an example of the apogee of the talent of Cosmas Asam.

The story goes that despite it being a private church and built to please the Brothers Asam rather than the church authorities, the neighbours were not very co-operative and insisted that it become a public place of worship and it’s for that reason that we are allowed in today.

And we are lucky to see it too because although damaged during the blitz of Munich in 1944, it survived without suffering very serious damage. Imagine a group of modern-day artists and sculptors trying to reproduce all of this?

In conclusion, I have seen some very opulent churches in my time – many that hardly correspond to the idea of “give all thou hast to the poor”, but this one outdoes them all

While we’d ben on our walk to find the Asam Kirche, we’d seen and interesting building away in the distance so we went to see what it was.

It turns out that it’s the Munich City Museum, in the Sankt Jakobs Platz. Ordinarily we would have gone for a wander around inside but with it being so hot, we’d sat for 15 minutes or so by the fountain just outside to cool down, and by the time we realised what time it was, we had to clear off.

Also in the square was a hideous concrete Brutalist structure that I didn’t photograph, considering that it was of no architectural merit whatever. I found out later that it was the Bavarian Jewish Museum.

Anyway we hurried across town to the Munchener Freiheit where we had arranged to meet Ulli on the way and stopping for a drink and a chat. I like Ulli.

Having done the socialising bit (after all the time that it took to find Ulli too) Hans and I threaded our way through the back streets to the English garden to see the swimmer and the surfers (and I am not making this up, as you have already seen).

We’re back in the days of the unpopular Elector Charles Theodore again. In an attempt to win back some popularity amongst the people after his failed attempt to sell them and their lands to the Emperor of Austria, he decided upon a series of civic imrorvements.

In 1784 he engaged the services of Sir Benjamin Thompson, a Loyalist American who had fled after the American Revolution, to undertake a modernisation of his army, and one of Thompson’s suggestions was a garden.

Although one of the aims was to make a public open space, its real purpose was to train the military in agricultural practices so that they could be loaned out to perform civilian work during times when the Army wasn’t fighting

Gradually, the military importance faded and the civilian leisure use of the park increased and under the direction of Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell who assumed responsibility of the Gardens in 1804, the Gardens adopted their current form

This building here is the Monopteros, built on top of an artificial hill that was created using leftover rubble from the renovations of the Royal Palace. There had been a wooden temple nearby but this had weathered away and so in 1836 they erected the hill and this stone temple of 10 columns, designed by Leo von Klenze.

The dome is actually made of copper, although you wouldn’t think so from here.

It’s not just the mound that’s artificial in the park. The river that runs through here and the waterfall are too.

The river is called the Eisbach, which means “Ice Stream and runs for about 2 kilometres through the Gardens, and the waterfall was created here in 1815. It’s an ideal spot to come and soak up the shade on a stifling hot day and to admire many of the wonderful sights that nature can create.

Hans and I remained here for quite a while resting out of the sun and contemplating the scenery.

The Eisbach lives up to its name because it really is cold. I’m told that the temperature doesn’t exceed 15°C although of course I have no intention of finding out for myself.

Officially, swimming isn’t allowed but as the river is about the fastest that I’ve ever witnessed and the police would stand no chance whatever of catching the people who are flouting the law. They might just fish out a few of the bodies because there have been a number off atalities in there, people succumbing to the cold or to the speed of the river.

It’s not for me, of course. If the water isn’t at 37°C I’m not interested at all in it.

So we went off to watch the surfers, who you saw earlier.

Surfing first started here in the early 1970s, much to the dismay of the local authorities who tried to stop it. However, various forms of action by interested parties succeeded in reversing the Council’s decision and in 2010 it was afficially permitted and since then, surfers have enhanced the waves by using artificial devices.

We watched them for a while and noticed that they didn’t seem particularly proficient in what they were doing. I suppose that you can’t expect too much in an inland site like this.

Kayakers sometimes have a go at the waves too although they are not made welcome by the surfers and there have been confrontations between the two groups.

Later on, we went back to the music shop to pick up the guitar, and our walk concluded with a trip to the Munchener Freiheit and the Indian café there where I had another bowl of their delicious curry. And then it was time to come home. And hardly surprising – I’d walked 14kms today in the heat.

The guitar is beautiful. It’s an Ibanez softwood acoustic with a beautiful tone and sound, a nice deep bass and a good low action. I’m really pleased with this one. We had a play on it for an hour or so and then one of Hans’s friends phoned us up. Our evening concluded with a session in the beer garden.

Tonight is another night on the really comfortable sofa. And I’m going to make the most of it because there are apparently some Celtic remains in the vicinity that have recently been discovered. Tomorrow’s plan includes a little visit of the site to see what we can see.

And with my interest in that kind of thing, it should be good. My career has been in ruins for quite some considerable time.

Sunday 9th August 2020 – HOW LONG IS IT …

… since we’ve had a ship of the day on here?

This time of year we are usually posting one or two every day as we stroll up and down the St Lawrence in Canada. This unfortunately is not the St Lawrence but it’s the best that I can do right now. Right outside the window of tonight’s hotel the River Danube is flowing by and it’s making me quite homesick for the mighty Canadian river.

When I download all of the photos from the camera, edit them and upload them again, you’ll see an enormous cruise ship – a kind of luxury barge – sailing past. Not a 100,000 tonne container ship but it will have to do.

In my really comfortable hotel, the Hotel Minerva in Mosonmagyarovar I had a really good sleep and even though it was Sunday with no alarm, I still awoke at about 05:50.

There was tons of stuff on the dictaphone again. It had been a really busy night

At one point during the night I was somewhere in Eastern Europe in a car, a Sunbeam Alpine convertible. I was driving through the mountains at a really rapid rate of knots but the headlights were set far too high and on main beam you could only see clouds. Dipped beam was set too high as well. I’d been driving around like this doing my best to avoid an accident at night. I suddenly realised that the windscreen was wrong. It was too far sloping back and I was sitting in the wrong position. I organised myself sitting properly and carried on driving. I eventually ended up somewhere where there was a girl. My brother was chatting her up obviously. I had a bit of pastry left so I started making some pastry for a pie and it gradually evolved into a crumble when I added sugar to it although I didn’t actually add any oats. This girl was very interested and came over to talk to me about it. She said “if you have any more interesting recipes let me have them”. I told her that I had dozens, and we had a huge intellectual discussion about my pastry and apple crumble and so on.

Later on, I was away on another voyage but i’ve forgotten half of it. We were .. I’d been out somewhere taxi driving. I had my old Ford Anglia and I dropped some people off in the mountains. I was coming back but I couldn’t get round one of the bends. I had to get out and push the car round. Three guys came to help me so I offered them a lift. They were going all the way to Shavington so I took them there and they booked a taxi for a couple of days time going from Wybunbury to Shavington. I went home and all of the papers were everywhere. My brother and Nerina were going through trying to sort out some kind of system with the paperwork, looking for vehicle records. They had a really good sort through it. I was thinking “I ought to be doing some sorting out while they were doing all of this but I decided in the end that I would start to look at my clothes. I had 2 chests of drawers but I only found 1 drawer with my clothes in it so I wondered where the rest of my things are. I had 2 more chests of drawers somewhere so I went off to have a look through those. While I was doing that there was a young girl, obviously nothing to do with our family having a play around and there were some people admiring some clothes belonging to this girl that were hanging up. I half-expected them to engage me in some kind of conversation but they didn’t. In the end I got on the bus and went to Chester, and walked from Chester towards Wrexham and came to a housing estate of modern terraced houses with a garage on the groud floor, then a first floor and then a second floor. For some unknown reason I thought that this was Brickfield. I was wandering around this estate looking at things and thinking that it would be nice for me to come and live here. Then I heard people talking about how they lived here and the winds and how cold it was so I decided maybe I won’t. I carried on walking a little further but lost all the signposts and I was on a modern 1930s semi-detached type of estate place. I saw a sign for Flint but I thought that i don’t want to go there – i want to head back towards Wrexham so I tried another road. I heard people talking about the Nobel Prize for Literature and how all the people who had entered for this year, and they were saying that if they don’t enter for next year we’ll know that they were just one-hit wonders and not really significant. There was a primus stove and it had been a long time since I’d seen one so I got it and pumped up the pressure and went to try to light it but I couldn’t get the nozzle to work. A guy saw me and came running over the road. It turned out to be his and he was one of these authors. We talked about his live stove thing and he said yes, that he uses it for heat mostly rather than lighting. We had a talk about it aand he went to pump it up, found that it was pumped up and went to light it as well but he couldn’t. he had a kind of Piazzo lighting arrangement where he clicked on the button to light it. I chided him about that. “You really ought to do it with a match”. Someone came along. He had something else and said “you light it with that” but I can’t remember what it was. It turned out that it was all kinds of things like cabbage leaves and so on. I knew exactly what it was and I told him but I can’t remember now. They lit it and started to smoke it and said “yes! This is really good. We had a good chat about that as well.

Going back to sleep, I found myself back in the same dream. So where was I? All the time that this was going on I was thinking that I’d caught the bus to Chester and now I was walking down the road to Wrexham and I’d missed the last bus back by a long time. The only way home for me now was to carry on walking towards Wrexham and then back to Crewe that way. That was going to take me all night at the very least to do all that but I hadn’t even given it any thought about what I was going to do about getting home.

But when I really do get home I’m really going to be having a lot of fun editing all of these photos and transcribing all of the dictaphone notes.

Unfortunately I’m afraid that the days when I could do that during the evening when I arrived at a place of repose are long-since over. Usually now, when I arrive at somewhere for the evening I simply crash out on the bed for an hour or two.

But I digress.

Breakfast was quite nice – not as nice as I had in Lech but nevertheless it was something to be going on with. I didn’t like the coffee but that’s probably more to do with the fact that I couldn’t understand the Hungarian instructions on the coffee machine.

Later on, I headed off for the border in the heat. 09:30 and it was already 31°C. I shudder to think how hot it’s going to be later in the day.

The scenery around this part of Hungary is very flat and monotonous and there wasn’t all that much to see. There were some delightful little Osterreich rural cottages along the way and In the village of Hegyshalom, not far from the Austrian border, there were some splendid examples in the shade of the trees.

The big BMW lets the show down unfortunately. It seems that even in Central Europe the price of a rural cottage is way beyond the means of the average rural-dweller and now the province of the big city-slicker.

But I was surprised at the border. There was all new security fencing with razor wire, a full and complete border patrol and interrogation, and a Romanian lorry being slowly dismantled over on one side.

It reminded me just like the old times pre-1992. Although, interestingly, the old Hungarian border installations from the Cold War days, including the watchtower, were all still there but abandoned, empty and closed up. All of the excitement was on the Austrian side.

This just goes to show you just how much the world has turned round on itself over the last 30 years – something about which I have commented ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS in the past.

Photography is of course not allowed at border crossings but rather unfortunately, I seemed to have forgotten to switch off the dashcam in Caliburn. So when I finally get round to editing the video recordings, we can see my border crossing.

A mere cockstride from the border in Austria I came to the village of Zurndorf, where my attention was drawn to this rather impressive war memorial.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have a great interest in war memorials in Central and Eastern Europe. The political situation here has varied greatly over the centuries as the Austrian Empire dealt with waves of Muslim invaders, grew to its greatest extent with the annexation of Bosnia in 1908 and then disappeared completely in 1938 with the Anschluss.

Consequently, different regions found themselves fighting different wars as well as quite often being on different sides in the same war, so it’s interesting to see all of this reflected on some of the memorials.

This one unfortunately is quite banal – with just a mention of the two World Wars and nothing about the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 or any other conflict in which Austrian troops were involved.

But these monuments in Axis countries are quite different from the monuments in Western countries in a very significant way. In the West, the number of casualties in World War I vastly exceeded the casualties of World War II. But here in Austria, this War memorial shows something quite different as we have seen in many Axis countries.

The upper photo shows the casualties from World War I, and it’s known that the casualty figures of the Central Powers were in a similar region to those of the UK and France. But in World War II when Allied casualties were much less than in the previous war, the caualties of the Axis powers were enormous. The bottom photo shows the casualties from that war, so just compare the two and see what I mean.

There are no dates of death unfortunately, but we have seen on many others that the greater part occurred in the final couple of years of the war. It just goes to show the horrors that were taking place on the Eastern Front in the second half of World War II when the Axis Powers were on the run from the Soviets.

Anyone who denies the overwhelming efforts of the Soviet Union in defeating the Axis Powers unfortunately somewhat misinformed.

In the heat I carried on across Northern Austria. But not too far. Only to the town of Parndorf.

If someone were to ask me whar car I would really like, from anywhere in the world, then if I couldn’t lay my hands on one of Erich Ubelacker’s Tatra 77s, i’d have to go for something like a GAZ M21.

And sure enough, to my surprise, here parked up by the side of the road in Parndorf is a rather sorry-looking M21. Where’s my trailer just when I need it?

GAZ stands, of course for the Gorki Avto Zavod, the Gorki Auto Factory in the Soviet Union, and they were the cars to own if you were anyone in the Soviet Union in the 1960s

Many people have suggested that this was because they were the only car available in the Soviet Union, but that’s doing them a great disservice because they really were a much better car than anyone ever gave them credit with a great many modern features and, unlike cars from the West, were built to last for ever.

One very happy owner of an M21 was the astronaut Yuri Gagarin who often spoke kindly about his car

This particular one is a Series III GAZ M21 Volga – known as the baleen or “whale”. You can tell that by the radiator grille.

They were nominally made from 1962 to 1970 but that’s only half a story. So popular were they with taxi drivers and the like that there was an outcry when the model was withdrawn and a flourishing aftermarket set up where “new” vehicles were assembled from factory spare parts combined with other bits salvaged from scrap yards. I once met someone who had a “new” one that was first registered as late as 1988.

For a short while they were on sale in Belgium, where a diesel conversion was quite popular, but I never found one for sale when I lived there.

So yes, I would bring this one home with me in a heartbeat.

Having satiated my interest for the moment I continued on my way westward.

Not being a fan of big cities when I’m in a hurry, I gave the centre of Vienna a wide berth, even if it is one of my most favourite cities in Europe. But away in the distance I could see it from a suitable vantage point on a low hill to the south so I took a photograph.

It’s a shame though that the photo showed nothing of the city’s magnificence from here. Nothing of the really classical buildings – just more banal late 20th Century high-rise architecture. One of these days whenever its possible to do so, I’m going to catch the overnight train to Vienna and spend a week here.

Through the southern suburbs of Vienna I pushed, and onto St Polten.

For lunch I found a nice shady spot on the edge of a forest and settled down in my comfortable chair in the shade to eat my butties.

I stayed there for a couple of hours too as the heat passed me by. A good book was quite a help, although I ended up drifting away with the fairies at one point.

A little later I picked up the Danube and followed it for a while. And here I ended up in the town of Melk, another place where I would have been happy to spend several hours wandering about had I had the time.

Although the Benedictine Abbey dates from the early years of the 18th Century, it replaced one from the latter part of the 11th Century which in turn replaced a castle owned by Leopold II of Austria. The family of Leopold, the Babenburgs, ruled Austria for another 150 years or so until 1246 and several of the rulers are buried in the Abbey, as is the Irish Saint Colman.

It became a great centre of learning in the Middle Ages and had a magnificent library, although several fires throughout its history have caused irreparable damage to some of the collection. Because of its academic stature, it survived several attempts at dissolution, including the persecution by the Nazis after the Anschluss.

Regular readers of this rubbish will know what this is because you have seen one often enough. There’s ONE SITTING IN THE BACK OF MY WORKSHOP in the Auvergne.

Taking photos of a moving vehicle from another moving vehicle is always a challenge , and I seem to have managed to catch a road sign right in the middle of the photo that obscures half of the car. But what I reckon is that it’s a Traction Avant Lght 7, and with the curly bumpers rather than the straight ones.

And that’s confirmed by the design of the boot lid. Although you can’t see it in this photo, it did indeed have the shape of the spare wheel on the boot lid, being an early model.

For a few miles I followed the Citroen until we crossed over the Danube where he turned right and I turned left.

Having seen the barge on the river – the one that I showed you earlier, I pulled up in a small town further along the river. Behind me up on a hill is the Basilica of Maria Taferl, one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Austria where it is said that a couple of local people made a miraculous recovery from serious illness and injury by praying to Mary.

The current church was built in the second half of the 17th Century to replace an earlier one, and It’s said to contain all kinds of important relics and souvenirs left by pilgrims who have come to visit the site over the centuries

Further along the road I stopped off at one point to put some fuel in Caliburn and shortly afterwards my journey brought me into the small town of Au An der Donau where there’s a luxury hotel, the Donauhotel Lettnerhof, on the banks of the Danube. There are some cheaper rooms down in the basement and one of those was available.

No air-conditioning down there but they supplied a portable fan for me and that works fine. There’s also an ice-cream stall on the river bank with a fine selection of vegan sorbets. Banana and coffee went down really well.

So far I’ve had a shower and washed my clothes, which are currently drying on the fan here. I’m off for an early night and hopefully a good sleep. I’m slowly heading homewards, which is a shame. But I have to go home sometime, I suppose. I can’t drift around for ever.

But interestingly, leaving Eastern Europe filled me full of depression. It always used to do that back in the old days and once again when I WENT TO ZATEC a few years ago.

I’m surprised that it still does make me feel like that. It’s the kind of thing that makes me think that I didn’t make the most of my Freedom of Movement and Freedom to Live Anywhere when I had the chance.

It’s too late now.

Saturday 8th August 2020 – IT’S FAR TOO HOT …

… to do anything right now. This afternoon, the temperature on the thermometer on the van showed 41°C at one point and that was confirmed by one of these roadside thermometers so I’m sure that it was correct.

Last night was a really good sleep, and I slept right up to 05:47 when something awoke me – but I’m not sure what.

Nevertheless, I didn’t actually leave the bed at that time but … errr … somewhat later.

According to the dictaphone, I’d been on my travels too during the night. I had been going somewhere, driving and I was in Caliburn, I think. I was being followed by an old Morgan 3-wheeler with a couple in it, driven by a guy with a red handlebar moustache. They were piled up with luggage and seemed to be following me throughout all of my route across Central Europe and it was very interesting although I didn’t exchange a single word with them or anything like that and it was very intriguing to try to work out exactly what they were doing

And later on it was Welsh Cup day and there were 12 matches being played. 2 were postponed and some were being played later. We were going to go to Aberystwyth to watch the game. They were talking about this on the TV and radio which was nice. I was in Nantwich somewhere so I set off to walk. I got to round about Gresty, somewhere like that and there was a football stadium and there was quite a big queue outside. I climbed over the fence to get in, about 12′ high and I’m not quite sure why I would do that. I was hoping to meet the others, including my father apparently and we’d all go into the ground together. For some unknown reason it was half an hour to kick-off and I couldn’t find them at all. I wondered what had happened to them.

Having organised myself and packed my stuff, I said goodbye to my nice hotel and set off.

First port of call was the Billa Supermarket down the road where i bought some food for the journey – including some grapes. And bread was cheap too here in Slovakia, as I discovered.

Another thing was that I was impressed with the range of vegan food on offer – much better than anything that France could come up with in a mainstream village supermarket.

It’s a shame that I’m leaving the country today. I’ve always liked Slovakia. I spent several weeks here in the North-East of the country on the Polish border when I worked with Shearings and one of these days I’ll try to find the time to spend much more time here.

Having done the shopping for the next couple of days (I can’t buy too much and expect it to survive long in this heat) I set off and drove all the way south-eastwards through the mountains.

Driving through the town of Boleraz I had to do a U-turn and go back to check on something that I’d seen in someone’s garden here.

One thing that’s disappointed me is the absence of real Eastern European cars around here. No Gaz or ZIL vehicles, only one Skoda and not even any Moskvitches either come to that. I can’t believe that a whole lifetime of interesting vehicles has been wiped out of existence.

And so when I saw this old Skoda 1203 I breathed a sigh of relief.

This was Eastern Europe’s equivalent of the Ford Transit. Every businessman or tradesman owned one and they were the local ambulances and police vans too. You used to find them everywhere 30 years ago, but so far on my travels I’ve only seen one of them prior to this and that was on the road heading the other way.

Not that I would swap Caliburn of course, but I would love to take something like this back home with me to have some fun. It’s a real relic of the past, that’s for sure, and quite a curio too.

By-passing Bratislava, I ended up in the town of Velky Meder on the border with Hungary.

A railway like runs through the town and there’s a railway station here so I reckoned that I would go along and see what was happening her. And my luck was in because there was a goods train here in the siding.

The locomotive pulling it is an FOR type 742 – a heavy shunter built for Czech Railways and now used all over the Czech Republic and Slovakia for hauling small freight trains and on occasion even passenger trains. It’s painted in the livery of the Ostravská Dopravní Spolecnost – a freight logisitics company from Ostrava in the Czech Republic.

The railway station and the surrounding area have a very sinister reputation, something that is quite ironic seeing as currently back at home I’m reading a book about the Serbian nation in World War I.

After the collapse of the Serbian Army in 1915 the Serbian soldiers, as well as a great many civilians, who didn’t manage to escape to Greece were arrested and subjected to a most appalling savagery by the Austrian troops. A Prisoner-of-War camp or, to be more precise, a death camp was set up here and there are mass graves all over the area that contain the remains of the Dead.

No-one knows how many Serbians and Montenegrin troops lost their lives here but a monument nearby records the names of over 5,000e known to have died here. I wasn’t able to find the monument or any of the graves while I was here. My Slovak isn’t up to anything much – certainly not for asking about this.

But on another note, if you come this way, don’t go looking for a town called Velky Meder because you probably won’t see a sign for it. You’re more likely to see a sign for Nagymegyer.

That’s because although we are north of the Danube, the frontier between Slovakia and Hungary, this whole area for a considerable number of miles around is ethnically Hungarian but was occupied by Czech Nationalist forces at the end of World War I.

During the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia it was awarded to Hungary but recovered in 1945. Even despite the forced relocation of many ethnic minorities in the late 1940s the population is almost entirely ethnically Hungarian and almost everything is written in Hungarian.

So even had I been able to ask for the monument or the graves in Slovak, it probably wouldn’t have done me any good.

There was a LIDL in the vicinity so I stopped for a look around, and then crossed over into Hungary near the town at Gyor

Unfortunately there was nowhere suitable to park to take a photo of the border crossing so in due course I’ll pinch a still from the dashcam and post it. Even so, it’s more new territory for Caliburn and Strawberry Moose to visit.

Gyor was a nice place to drive around but there was nowhere to park and take a photo of the town. And in any case it was far too hot to go for a walk. I was melting.

. In the end I found a nice sheltered spot by a small lake on the edge of town.

Here, wedged up in the shade between Caliburn and a hedge I ate my butty and afterwards did a little tidying up. And while I was here, I had a little snooze in the sun. I was at one point thinking about going for a walk in the sun but not in this temperature.

As an aside, I didn’t find out anything about this lake except that it’s one of about three or four in the immediate vicinity. And they all look very artificial to me although of course I wouldn’t know about that.

On the way to my parking place I’d seen a dirt road that crossed a railway line and then seemed to follow the river so I decided to go for a drive.

But I ended up stopping at the side of the road by an area that looked as if it might be a car park or something like that. For in there, parked and partially dismantled with no engine by the looks of things is an old Austin Maestro.

There are many vehicles that I would never expect to see in Eastern Europe, for sure, but the possibility of finding an Austin Maestro is something that I wouldn’t have ever considered. It’s certainly living up to its model name as a “Special” and I notice that it comes with factory-standard body rot.

Further along the road I turned off, crossed the railway line and drove down as far as I could go until I reached the river, when I turned right to follow it for a while.

The river is the River Raba, a 300 kilometre long tributary of the Danube, and the part that I am following seems to be a canalised deviation of it. Where I’m driving looks as if it might be a service track on top of a levee and the amount of dust and gravel that I’m kicking up reminds me all too much of driving along THE TRANS LABRADOR HIGHWAY.

The road went for miles and I was reaching the stage where I was wondering whether I would have to turn around and go back the way that I came. However eventually I came to a house at the side of the track and wheeltracks of a couple of vehicles heading my way convinced me to carry on.

Eventually, having passed underneath a couple of other main roads that crossed the river on bridges, I came to an exit that brought me into the little town of Rabapatona.

The road into the centre of the village brought me past the church and there, in the churchyard, was a war memorial so I went to have a look at it.

It lists the dead of the village for the two World Wars, so there’s nothing special about that. It might have been interesting to see the dead from other conflicts too.

But what really caught my eye was what wasn’t on the memorial. If you look closely at the base of the memorial there’s a patch of a different colour. It made me wonder if there had been something affixed there that is deemed today to be inappropriate. All kinds of shenanigans occurred with Hungary and its political partners between 1848 and 1990.

Having moaned on earlier in the day about the lack of old Eastern Bloc cars to be found these days, I struck it lucky in Rabapatona.

This exciting looking vehicle is a Moskvitch 2141 Aleko, built during the period 1986-1997. Based somewhat on the old French Simca 1307, the early models were said to have been some of the best cars ever to have come out of the Soviet Union although after the end of Communism, anarchy at the car plant led to a rapid deterioration of quality of the later ones.

Although the saloon cars were quite popular, I can say without fear of contradiction that this is the first ever Aleko pick-up that I’ve ever seen. I didn’t even realise that they were made.

Fighting off the heat (in mid-afternoon it reached 41°C according to two different thermometers) I found my way out of the town and into the countryside, disturbing a wedding as I drove through another small town.

And eventually I managed to track down a hotel – the Hotel Minerva in Mosonmagyarovar. Another lovely 3-star hotel at a bargain price and the first time that I’ve spent a night in Hungary since 1988.

First thing was to have a shower and wash of my clothes, and then I crashed out on the bed for a couple of hours. Rosemary awoke me with a phone call so we had a chat for a while, but I was too late to make any tea.

If the heat lets me, I’ll have a good sleep and then I’ll be ready to move on tomorrow.

Time to think about going home, I reckon.

Friday 7th August 2020 – STRAWBERRY MOOSE AND CALIBURN …

… are breaking new ground today. And here is the obligatory photo of Strawberry Moose and Caliburn, to prove that they were here. We mustn’t go forgetting that.

As for me, it’s 28 years and more since I last set foot in Slovakia – one of the very last coach trips that I did for Shearings back in 1992 before I left and I’m glad to be back because I happen to like Slovakia very much, despite the reputation that it has in certain quarters.

This morning I was awake at something resembling a normal working day. I’d heard all of the alarms go off and I managed to haul myself out of bed by about 06:30 – the first time for ages.

There was plenty of work to be done, such as listening to where I’d been during the night. I was going somewhere, driving and I was in Caliburn, I think. I was being followed by an old Morgan 3-wheeler with a couple in it, driven by a guy with a red handlebar moustache. They were piled up with luggage and seemed to be following me throughout all of my route across Central Europe and it was very interesting although I didn’t exchange a single word with them or anything like that and it was very intriguing to try to work out exactly what they were doing

Not just that but everything else delayed me to such an extent that I was rather late going down to breakfast. But afterwards, I came back here to pack and headed down to pay for my stay. It’s refreshing, the politeness in Eastern Europe. The guy at reception called me “sir” even AFTER I’d paid the bill.

Back outside I headed off south-east. 414 kms in the sweltering heat, roadworks and diversions everywhere.

But after I’d been driving for an hour or so I suddenly found my self tagged on behind an old Czech car, a Skoda Estelle coupé. The “Estelle” was the name given in the Uk to a whole range of Skoda rear-engined cars produced from the mid-60s up until about 1990

In Czechoslovakia, they were identified by their model names, starting with the Skoda 1000MB in 1964 and then passing through the Skoda 100 all the way up to the last 136. As far as I can tell from the rear lights, this one may well be a Skoda 110 from the early 1970s.

Seeing it on the road somehow restores my faith a little in Eastern Europe. One thing that I’ve noticed on my travels so far has been a total lack of Eastern Bloc vehicles and that has been causing me some not inconsiderable dismay.

After seeing the Skoda there wasn’t very much of note or of interest until I saw this magnificent structure right in front of me. This has to be something worth a good look.

It’s called the Zdakov Bridge, built between 1957 and 1967 and has a claim to fame in that at the time of its completion the span of its arch at just marginally under 380 metres made it the longest single-arch span in the World. However it’s subsequently been surpassed by many other bridges, particularly in China

The total length of the bridge is an impressive 543 metres and it’s just under 50 metres above the water underneath it.

The river over which it passes is the River Vltava, the longest river in the Czech Republic at 430 kilometres long.

This is a tributary of the Elbe and so the general flow of water is northwards-ish from its source near the southern border of the country. It’s navigable by ships of up to 1,000 tonnes as far as Prague and then by ships of 300 tonnes as far as Ceske Budejovice.

Further on, progress is impeded by the existence of various hydro-electric barrages and only very small boats can pass up and downriver beyond there.

In fact, that’s one of the reasons for the bridge here because the river has been dammed here by the Orlik Dam to create the largest hydro-electric dam in the country, with power of about 360mW. You can see some of the power lines in this photo.

The bridge is named for the village of Zdakov which is somewhere underneath us, flooded by the lake that was created and which we can see just up there. The lake is the largest along the river by volume but not by surface area and contains 720 million cubic metres of water for a surface area of 26km².

Built between 1954 and 1961, the barrage is 91.5 metres high and 450 metres wide.

Seeing as I needed to make a call of nature I decided to go for a walk along the river to see what might be happening here , and to stretch my legs as well.

The scenery was quite stunning and I really envied the people down there on the river cruiser that runs some kind of shuttle service along a navigable section of the river.

However, much as I would like to, I can’t spend all day sunbathing and admiring the scenery. I am running to some kind of timetable, although you may not believe it, and I have a long way to go today. The Czech republic is bigger than you think and I need to be making tracks.

And so I climbed back into Caliburn and continued on my way south-eastwards for a couple of hours.

For lunch I simply pulled up at the side of the road in the shade, had a nibble on some stuff and a little snooze for half an hour. I’m not as young as I was

Ohhh loook what i’ve found now. Had I known that I was going to pass by here I’d have brought a potato with me and had fission chips for lunch.

This is the Dukovany Nuclear Power Plant, which will be instantly recognisable to anyone who has ever played “Ton Clancy’s End War” (not that I ever have). The second Czechoslovak (and first Czech Republic) nuclear plant, built using Russian technology in the late 1970s and came on stream in the mid-80s.

There are four nuclear power units in here, all of which are in operation and three of them have been modernised in the first decade of this Century. It produces in total about 1.4TW of electricity, some of which is exported to Austria.

It’s due to be decommissioned in the mid-30s and approval in principle has been given for a replacement unit on the site

So pushing on along my route, I eventually come to the town of Mikulov with its beautiful Romanesque Chateau.

Just a cock-stride away to my right is Austria but I’m not going that way. i’m going past one of the most important historical places in the whole of the Cezch Republic. The first written mention of the place was in 1149 and 100 years later it was in the possession of the Dukes of Liechtenstein, passing to the Hapsburg dynasty in 1560, by which time it was known as Nikolsburg.

There was a medieval stone castle situated here built before the Dukes of Liechtenstein arrived here, although the one here dates from 1719 and completed in 1730 following a fire that damaged the original. This one was burnt out by the Germans retreating from here at the end of World War II and rebuilt in the 1950s.

It’s now a museum an is said to contain one of the largest wine barrels in Europe – a mere 22,300 gallons.

Being so close to the Austrian border there was a very great Germanic influence here in the town but after the end of World War II the ethnic Germans, who made up the bulk of the population, were “removed”. The large Jewish community here had been “removed” during the War and very few survived.

But despite being one of the major centres of Jewish life in Moravia there’s a significant Christian pilgrimage chapel here too, the Chapel of Saint Sebastian on Holy Hill at the back of town.

The hill itself at 1100 feet is quite significant and is a nature reserve with a load of Protected flora and fauna but the Chapel is the main attraction.

Following a plague here in 1622 the Bishop of Olomouc authorised the construction of a chapel here that would resemble St Peter’s Church in Rome. However it underwent several alterations over the years to obtain its present shape.

There were many rumours about miraculous healings associated with the site and it became a centre of pilgrimage, with accommodation being created in the town and the nearby monastery to cater for the number that arrived.

The Chapel was abandoned in 1786 under the Emperor Jospeh II’s attempts to bring the Hapsburg Empire into the modern World following the death of his traditionalist mother, but having fallen into decay, a restoration programme began in 1861.

Every year since then, except in World War II, there has been a procession of pilgrims on 8th September. They come to walk the famous “Way Of The Cross” and to see the copy of the “Black Madonna of Loreto” that is kept here.

ontinuing on my way, dodging more and more roadworks and diversions, I crossed over into Slovakia round about 18:00.

It’s the Euro in Slovakia, much to my surprise, and so with what remained of my Czech Kronor I fuelled up Caliburn at a local petrol station near the border. This brings back many memories of travelling around Europe back in the 1970s and 80s.

And then I went looking for a hotel.

Here I am in the Hotel Senica, in the town of Senica in between the border and Bratislava.

It’s a modern hotel on the edge of the city, very clean and tidy and, like most places in the former Eastern Europe, very good value.

First task once I’d installed myself was to set tea on the go, and then clothes-washing and a shower. It was so hot in here that after tea I crashed out again, but having worked out how the air-conditioning works, it’s a much-more reasonable temperature now.

And so I’m hoping to have a good sleep tonight and hit the road tomorrow. I’m not going to be travelling very far but nevertheless there is plenty to do.

But something else will turn up to distract me – it usually does.

Tuesday 4th August 2020 – STRAWBERRY MOOSE …

… has Czeched in to his latest accommodation.

It’s not the first tile that Strawberry Moose and Caliburn have visited the Czech Republic. We were here IN MAY 2015 when we took the short cut from East Germany and Colditz Castle to Munich.

This time, we’re going to spend a few days exploring the town of Karlovy Vary, or Carlsbad as it was called in its days as a city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

We’re installed in our hotel already but we haven’t had a chance to visit the town yet because after the horrible night that I had had last night, I crashed out as soon as I sat down on my bed.

But returning to the beginning, having crashed out earlier yesterday evening, I awoke at about 23:00 and then I couldn’t go back to sleep again for hours. I remember seeing 02:30 come round, and probably a few other times as well.

Nevertheless, I was up at something reasonable, like 06:30, feeling like death again.

There was a pile of paperwork to do, such as transcribe the notes off the dictaphone

There was something going on like an exhibition or a fete or something. I was wandering around somewhere and i’d come across some old shoes of children and I’d stacked them somewhere to hide while I attended this fete. On the way back it was dark and I had awful difficulty finding them. In the end I found them and walked on home. It was a really steep slope and I walked up with someone else. A third person said something like “this is the right place to be to give yourself an alibi. They hadn’t known that I had only just got there. I said “no” and something about how I know people here so I could get down the front. I walked up this really steep slope with this woman. In the dark I had to grope around and eventually found the pile of shoes that I’d hidden. I walked on through this village and this guy accosted me and said “where are your shoes? Why haven’t you your shoes on?” I though to myself “God, is that the only thing he’s noticed?” I felt like giving him a right mouthful then I suddenly realised that I’d dropped some of this pile of shoes so I had to go back and get them. I walked back and retraced my steps and eventually found them. Then I put on some trousers and started to walk back thinking that I’d put on my trousers but I’m not putting on my shoes just for him. If he asks anything I’ll show him these shoes that I have in my hand that I’d now found all of. I also had a box and it was a matching mother and daughter swimsuit that I was going to give to someone. When I got to where I was supposed to be going with all these things they looked at this box and said “God I hope that they can get that in their luggage”. I was thinking that they could always undo the box and take the things out, can’t they?

Next task was to download the files off the dashcam. For some unknown reason the data cable wouldn’t work and I had to dismantle the machine to take out the SD card and insert it in the laptop. It took so long that I ended up with the hotel cleaner banging on the door.

Eventually I found myself back on the road again, heading north.

My first port of call was at Thomann’s at Burgebrach. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, my acoustic guitar is a cheap and nasty £25:00 cheap thing and after trying to play it at home more regularly than ever I used to, I’ve decided that I want a new, decent one.

Thomann’s is usually said to be the place to go but actually it was something of a disappointment. They didn’t have available what I wanted and the labelling and pricing system of the guitars on display is such that you need to be a contortionist with a magnifying glass to read the prices.

Furthermore, the stock isn’t labelled to tell you what kind of guitar it is.

As for the staff, they seem to be another lot of minimum-wage shelf fillers rather than assistants and have no idea how to engage with the customers. No-one seemed to be interested in talking to me and when I finally grabbed hold of a sales person, he didn’t seem in the least bit interested in my story.

In the end, having driven all the way there, I drove away empty handed, full of disappointment.

At Burgebrach I’m only about 180 kms or so from the Czech border. At the moment the borders are still open but they won’t be for long, so Strawberry and I went for a drive. It’s been five years since we’ve been there.

And despite the short distance, it took an age to get there. The roads are narrow, steep and winding and full of lorries and tractors trying to negotiate them. At one stage we passed a speed indicator that showed that we were travelling at all of 12 kph.

When we arrived at the border we found it unmanned so we just drove straight through. Unfortunately there was nowhere to stop to take a photo of the border sign. We had to drive on to the first village before we could stop.

The village where I stopped was called Kyjov.

It’s not to be confused with the town of the same name that’s to be found in the centre of the country. This is a small village about 6 or 7 kilometres from the frontier with Germany, not too far from Planá in the region that used to be the Sudetenland.

The contrast between the rich West and the poor East is very apparent as soon as we cross over. It brings back all kinds of memories of times past when I used to come over what was the Iron Curtain 30 and 40 years ago. The modernisation of Eastern Europe is a very slow process.

The fuel in Caliburn started to run low so I took a deviation into the town of Marienbad, nowadays called Mariánské Lázne, and fuelled up there, seeing as fuel was cheaper here than in the West.

From Marienbad I pushed on to the north-east and ended up in the town of Becov nad Teplou.

This was a very interesting place to stop, and for several reasons too, one of which was this gorgeous Tatra lorry. Eastern European vehicles have always held a fascination for me but unfortunately these days it’s very rare to see one running around. Everyone seems to prefer Western vehicles.

Eastern vehicles were heavy, primitive and rather difficult to drive but they were built to last for ever and easy to maintain. There would still be swarms of them on the road today had they not become unfashionable after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

it wasn’t just the Tatra lorry that caused me to stop here at Becov nad Teplou. This magnificent building is enough to stop anyone in their tracks.

This is the Hotel Central and looking at it, it’s very hard to believe that at one time it was a luxury hotel. It was built for someone called Georg Rohm in 1876 and sold to a Maria Schmidt in 1892. She sold it on to someone called Franz Bachmann in 1901.

At the end of World War II Bachmann and his family, being of German origin, were expelled from Czechoslovakia and it was used as barracks by Red Army soldiers. After they left it was used as a barracks for miners and they stayed here until the mid-50s.

After being empty for a while it was restored by volunteers and became a Post Office and cafe but the economic situation in the country after the end of Communism meant that there was no money to maintain the buiding and it deteriorated rapidly until it reached the state in which it currently is.

And that’s a tragedy because it’s a beautiful Art Nouveau building with some wonderful features.

Over the road from the hotel is the local railway station. It’s on the line between Karlovy Vary and Mariánské Lázne (the old Marienbad) and I was lucky to find a pile of railway equipment hanging around there.

Over on the far side of the station were these two diesel multiple units with notices that they will be travelling to Mariánské Lázne.

Not knowing all that much about Czech trains, I reckon that these are two CSD class M 152.0 units coupled together. And if so, although they don’t look like it, these are quite elderly, having been built between 1976 and 1982 by Vagonka Studénka, a company which these days is part of Skoda.

They have undergone two series of modernisations, the latest being 2018, so it looks as if Czech railways is planning to have another 15 years of use at least out of these.

And this is another one of the CSD Class M 152.0 multiple units, all on its own this time.

This one is in the livery of Czech Railways rather than in the livery of a private operator and carries the logo “Regio Mouse” which is a marketing name given to these little trains running on the small local lines of the Czech Republic.

It’s a shame that I wasn’t able to go over and look inside them to see the interior. However I have seen a photograph of the inside of an unmodernised unit and they are quite primitive and basic, very 1970s in fact. I wouldn’t fancy the idea of going on a long-distance journey on one of these. They remind me of Crosville buses from the 1960s.

It made me wonder what the interior of a modernised unit would be like.

This multiple unit is a much more modern unit.

It’s a Siemens Dueweg Regio Sprinter of the type that was built in Germany between 1995 and 1998. They are quite lightweight and were designed to replace trams and city buses on longer tram routes, and are a great favourite in Europe to run on reopened railway lines.

And it’s for that reason that the Czech Railways have bought some, and called them the AŽD 654 . A large number of railway routes were closed to passengers due to the financial crisis of the early 1990s and a few of them have been subsequently reopened, some being worked by these train sets.

Back in Caliburn I set off from here into the mountains for my destination, Karlovy Vary. A town better known to travellers of 130 years ago as Carlsbad, it was the place to be back in those days, the principal spa town of the Austro-Hungarian Empire where all of the rich and famous “came to take the waters”.

My hotel is a few miles outside the town in the small town of Brezova.

And don’t be fooled that it’s only shown in the advertisements as a short distance away from Karlovy Vary. That distance is measured in a straight line. But in actual fact to reach Karlovy Vary from here you have to go in a tortuous winding direction following the path that the River Tepla has carved through the mountains.

And here’s my hotel – the Hotel St Michael here in Brezova.

It’s quite a beautiful hotel but it’s seen better days, that’s for sure. It would have been splendid back in the days of glory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but like everywhere else, it’s rather tired these days, just like me in fact.

After my rather busy day I’m quite exhausted and tired. I’ve smuggled my food and slow cooker into the hotel and made myself some tea, and then crashed out for a while. Now that I’m awake, I’m off to bed for a really good sleep, I hope. Tomorrow morning I shall go for an explore of Karlovy Vary.

Monday 3rd August 2020 – I’M NOT SURE …

… what it was that went past here at 05:49 but whatever it was, it made enough of a racket to awaken me.

I was in the middle of a nocturnal voyage too – something about an Austin 1300GT that was dismantled. It was bright yellow, the same colour as my taxis were, and we were discussing its paint job. I remember saying that it would come out of the factory with the underneath of the wings already painted like that and so there would only be one or two panels that you would need to pay for the painting.

Anyway, little chance of going back to sleep at that point so I did some work on the laptop instead.

Hans went out to the shop and came back with fresh bread rolls so we had a good breakfast and then went out to IKEA. And there I struck lucky – in the reduced section was a small folding camp bed for just €20:00. That is now in Caliburn ready for another adventure.

For lunch Hans made burgers and chips and then we went for a walk. Because of Brexit issues, he’s had to go back to work and so runs a small whisky shop in the town. He took me to see it and to show me around. And I think that I went on all of these walks today and I forgot to take my camera with me each time.

On the way back we stopped at the ice cream parlour for dessert and then it was time for me to hit the road.

A leisurely drive through the German countryside has brought me as far as Furth where I’m staying for the night.

This is a nice hotel too. There are several buildings here around a central courtyard so it’s fairly quiet and that suits me fine. I can smuggle the slow cooker into my room without any problems at all and so I’ve had another nice tea of all kind of tinned bits and pieces.

And having done the washing up, I’m going to have an early night. I’ve not done very much today but I’m totally exhausted having done it.

Thursday 30th July 2020 – STRAWBERRY MOOSE …

… and I have arrived at his favourite holiday resort. And we had to stop so that Strawberry Moosecould have his usual photo opportunity

We’re staying for a couple of days while we get our respective heads together, and we need to do that too because of the dreadful night that I had last night. Never mind what time I went to bed – I was still wide-awake as late as 03:05 with no sign of ever going off to sleep.

But I must have done at some point because not only did the alarm awaken me at 06:00 (and I even beat the third alarm to my feet) there was something recorded on the dictaphone too.

A girl whom I know from Crewe put in a visit last night. She was going off home and I’d lent Caliburn to her to tow a caravan. I walked back through Shavington to Vine Tree Avenue where Caliburn was parked. We could see my brother and father in the distance – my father was getting ready to come home from work – it was 06:00 and he was getting in his vehicle. As we went past, down the street was a policeman who was interrogating a couple over a book which was something like a book by Kerouac or something. He saw the two of us and made some kind of remark to which I made some kind of remark back and mentioned the book that I was reading. He clouted me with a book so I clouted him back with a book. By this time I noticed that this girl was actually holding my hand as we were walking down the street. One thing that was going through my mind was that the tax on Caliburn had run out and I had vehicles without tax parked all over the place. I was wondering if ever it came to the push that they might be towed away where was I going to put them. I got to wondering what my father would have to say about me lending someone a vehicle that didn’t have any road tax. And more to the point what would a person say, where would she be parking it or leaving it and the closer I got to home the more I was thinking about this.

There was plenty of other stuff to do this morning and then I went to breakfast.

My room is over there in the annex so I had to cross the garden to reach the main part of the hotel. On the way over I passed the postman delivering the mail. What cought my eye was not the postman or the post that he was delivering but the machine on which he was delivering it.

50 or so years ago everyone laughed at the Ariel 3, and yet here we are today, which just goes to show what proper publicity and marketing could have done for the British motorcycle industry had they put their minds to it. But being stuck in a timewarp of the early 1950s, british industry totally failed to move with the times.

I had to decline the cheese and the ham but the rest of the breakfast (included in the price) was very acceptable and despite the cost of the night’s accommodation, it was all pretty good value for Switzerland.

Collecting all of my stuff together I headed off – as far as the local Co-op. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that there had been an issue at the Hotel last night in that the Swiss plugs are different from the rest of Europe. The hotel had lent me an adapter but I had to hand that back this morning.

It’s not the first time that i’ve been caught out by the lack of a Swiss adapter so I reckoned that I may as well buy my own while I was here.

While I was here, I bought a baguette. In France it had cost me €0:45 but here in Switzerland where there is no Common Agricultural Policy it cost me €1:90. The silly Brits are going to be in for quite a surprise once the Transition Period is over.

Most of the day was spent driving all the way through Switzerland in the sweltering heat. Slightly north of east towards the Austrian border at Dornbirn.

Stuck behind slow-moving grockles for most of the day, and roadworks after roadworks after roadworks, it took ages to cross the country. It really got on my wick.

With the temperature at 35°C and feeling like every degree of double that, I was driving along the side of Lake Lucerne from Luzern north-east when I came upon a scenic viewpoint at the side of the road.

The views from here were tremendous. For example, down at the end of the lake I could see the town of Kussnacht where I turn off eastwards and head eventually for the Austrian frontier.

There wasn’t any shade at all here unfortunately, not even in the lee of Caliburn, but having been stuck behind all kinds of traffic in the streets of Luzern and Merlischachen, I was running much later than I wanted to and I had been ready for lunch for ages.

Chewing on my sandwich I had a good look around at my surroundings.

Across the lake from me is actually a “seaside” resort, the Strandbad Seeburg. That would have been a great place to go for lunch had I had the time. A nice relax on a sandy beach would have done me the world of good and I might even have gone for a paddle.

There are also bound to be several good hotels over there too, because the town is the birthplace of César Ritz, the founder of the “Ritz” hotel chains. He died there in the town in October 1918.

It’s a shame that we aren’t going that way.

That’s the spine of the Alps down there, on the border between Switzerland and Italy and it would seem to be the place to be right now because it wil be much cooler up there at those kinds of altitiudes. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that WE’VE BEEN IN THE SNOW UP THERE WTH CALIBURN in July.

If there hadn’t been as much haze around today, we might have been able to see snow. But as we’ll be pushing on into the Tyrol we might be lucky in finding some snow ourselves – or at least some cooler weather.

With that in mind, we pushed on into the town and then headed east.

In between Lake Lucerne and Lake Zurich we pass over a high range of mountains heading north-east, climbing out of one valley into another.

As we climbed up the pass, there was quite a distinctive mountain away to our right in the east that seemed to dog my viewpoint. I’ve no idea what mountain it might be but it piqued my interest. Eventually I cane to a place somewhere in between Steinerberg and Sattel where I could pull off the road and take a photograph it.

And it wasn’t just the mountain there either. There’s a modern concrete viaduct of either a road or a railway over there too, and there is some type of large bird, maybe an eagle, flying around over there too. And I didn’t notice that until I returned home.

The views were just as interesting to the south as well.

That’s the town of Steinen down there, I reckon, with Seewen in the distance, all of them in the valley of the Lauerzersee. We can see the spine of the Alps in the distance and just imagine how spectacular this view would be in cold weather when there would be no heat haze. But then again we wouldn’t have been able to climb up here in Caliburn as easily as this in the middle of winter.

Having taken our couple of photos, we headed off north-eastwards in the direction of St Gallen and the Austrian border.

A little further on we pick up the railway that has been following us through the mountains much more precariously that we have been travelling on the road.

As we drive through the Sattel Pass through Rothenthurm and out of the other side on the way to Biberbrugg the railway line makes another one of its regular level crossings across our path and I’m in luck at this one because as I approach it, the barriers come down and a couple of minutes later a train rattles past.

This is one of the 11 Sudostbahn, the South Eastern Railway FLIRT RABe526 trains made by Stadler, a model of train that works on the railway networks of many countries all over Europe and North Africa and even in North America, the city of Ottawa having purchased 7 for the upgrade of its “Trillium” Line and its new link to Ottawa Airport.

Eventually I reached the border and crossed into Austria.

Just outside Dornbirn I fuelled up with diesel. €1:06 a litre which is a relief after the prices that I saw in Switzerland and I subsequently saw it even cheaper too.

From Dornbirn there are two ways on into the interior of Austria. The first, and most common way, is along the main road, past Bludenz and either through the Arlberg Tunnel if you have plenty of cash or over the Arlberg Pass.

But there is another way – the Bregenzerwald Bundesstrasse Highway, the modern-day L 200, over the mountains. Despite it only being 63 kms long from Dornbirn to Warth, It took an unbelievable 75 years to build, construction having been started in 1879.

The final section, from Schrocken to Warth, despite being only about 10kms, took 25 years to build and was not finally completed until 1954.

It’s quite narrow, especially at the older Dornbirn end and not possible to take a coach over it which is why I’ve never been that way before. But Caliburn, Strawberry Moose and I managed it quite comfortably.

It’s a spectacular road and one of this days I’ll post the dashcam footage. You’ll find out why a 53-foot touring coach wouldn’t ever come this way

At Warth we turned off towards the Fern Pass and after a good hour in the mountains from Dornbirn, we ended up in Lech. As regular readers of this rubbish will recall, WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE and on several occasions too, including once with Nerina. It’s a place that Strawberry Moose, Caliburn and I really like.

Once we’d taken our photograph, we had to hunt down my hotel.

And it took some finding too. House numbers in Austria don’t follow any logical sequence and someone once told me that they are numbered in the order in whcih they are built.

Considering that it was one of the cheapest hotels in Lech, this is one of the best places where I have ever stayed and I’ll let you know tomorrow about the breakfast. If it’s anything like the rest of the hotel, it’ll be tremendous.

Having smuggled my slow cooker into the hotel I was able to make some tea.

While it’s cooking, I can tell you about my room It’s quite small but very comfortable and a nice view looking north-west. With it being the height of summer it’s staying light pretty late and we have a beautiful red sky at night- a sure sign that Zug is on fire, I reckon.

And having had my tea now, I’m going to bed. After that dreadful night and the fact that I haven’t crashed out at all today, I’m ready for it.

A few days here to recover my strength and then I’ll see where we go from there.

Wednesday 29th July 2020 – TONIGHT I’M IN …

… Switzerland.

This morning I was awake at 06;00 which was quite a surprise seeing as I had a really bad night when it took ages trying to get off to sleep. And even more surprising, I actually beat the third alarm to my feet.

It was a really beautiful morning again out there but I didn’t have all that much time to admire the view.

First task was to write my notes from yesterday. Everyone else was still asleep and I’d forgotten to ask for the internet password so I wasn’t able to upload it – that’s something for tonight.

But anyway there was a group of people setting out to cause mayhem in an Egyptian city last night, planting explosive and everything like that. Somehow I’d become roped in to this. We’d worked out our whole plan and tactics to do this. On the very day I had to go to meet them in the morning and they would communicate all right . I would have to walk into town with this and we would meet up somewhere and I’d pass the dynamite out to various different people. This was what I set out to do. I set out but I remembered that I had my fitbit on back to front or upside down or something and everytime I pressed one button it gave me the wrong reading. I started to develop really cold feet. I could see all things about treatment in an Egyptian gaol and surviving to be executed, all this kind of thing. I made up my mind to go to the British Embassy and give them the dynamite but walking into the British Embassy with an overcoat full of dynamite – all this came into my mind about how on earth do I get rid of all of this stuff and do it safely?

Sooner or later everyone else came out of their room and we all had breakfast together, followed by a nice long chat that went on for hours. And that’s quite a surprise really because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’m not usually the sociable type.

When it came to about 12:30 I reckoned that it was time to leave. If I stay too long in one place I start to put down roots and after all I still had a long way to go. So I said my goodbyes and Caliburn and I headed off into the hills.

We drove through Macon, confusing ourselves as we always do and ended up on the by-pass which was not the way that I wanted to go. I was hoping to head through the town centre and have a look around as I passed by but it didn’t work out like that.

On the way through some small village I stopped at a supermarket (it was lunchtime and all of the boulangeries were closed) to pick up a baguette. We carried on through Bourg-en-Bresse and then began to climb into the mountains.

The road that I’m on is the D936 that winds its way through the mountains from Bourg-en-Bresse and Dorlat, and at Corveissiat it drops down onto a clifftop following the meanders of the River Ain.

Just along here is a scenic layby with a good view overlooking the river and if there is a better place than this to stop and admire the view as I ate my butty, I would love to see it because it really was splendid.

The colour of the river was interesting too. I’m not sure whether that emerald green colour is actually the colour of the water, the reflection of the sky, the reflection of the forest, a trick of the light, a trick of the camera or a combination of one or all of them. And I pondered over that as I ate my tomato, hummus and salad baguette.

The town of Corveissiat is not without interest either.

There are the ruins of an old medieval castle – the Chateau d’Arnans – in the vicinity and htere’s a church, the L’église de Saint-Maurice d’Échazeaux which is very rare indeed in the western world because the last modernisation of the church took place in the 14th Century. It managed to escape the “Victorian Frightful” scale of modernisations that ruined just about every other church in western Europe.

there’s also a well-known cave system in the rock, complete with a submerged chamber that is said to be the favourite place for many divers to practise. As well as divers, it’s full of bats too. At least 7 species of bat have been recorded here .

But unfortunately I don’t have the time to go exploring. I’ve a lot to do and a long way to go today and not much time to do it.

A really nice drive through the Jura mountains brings me into Switzerland where there is the really weird road junction and border post

And then we reach our most favourite spot in the Jura mountains.

Strawberry Moose has to leap out of Caliburn and go for a look for himself at the view. There’s even a handy little bench on which he can sit. And I have to say that I was glad to see it because we had been roasting inside Caliburn even at this kind of altitude.

Where we are is actually by an old Roman road that runs between St-Cergue and Trélex in Switzerland. The modern road is a windy, twisty route full of hairpin bends but the old Roman road just goes straight up and down the slopes.

Where the Roman road and the modern road meet, there’s a scenic pull-in where we can stop and admire the view, and take a few photos here and there.

Down there is Lake Geneva – Lac Leman – and the fertile alluvial plain. We’re looking towards the south and somewhere in that direction off the photo to the right is Geneva. Beyond it are the Alps and we pass back into some more of France and encounter Mont Blanc on the border with Italy.

We’d be able to see all of that if there hadn’t been all of this haze. That’s a real disappointment this afternoon.

Down there at the foot of the hills on the shore of the lake is Nyon, famous for being the headquarters of UEFA.

We’re going to be driving all the way down there to the lakeshore and then turning left, north-eastwards towards the interior of the country and the Austrian border. We aren’t unfortunately going to get to see all that much of the mountains in the background as we travel and the hazy afternoon means that you can’t even see then properly from here..

So down the hill we went until we hit the lakeshore and then headed for Lausanne. At Lausanne we left the lakeshore and headed inland up into the hills.

Having consulting the internet, I found myself a motel, the Motel La Poularde, in Romont.

This is the most expensive hotel yet, but then again this is Switzerland and the place is good value for money. My room is enormous and I could even hold a ball in my room.

As is usual, I have forgotten to bring my adapter with me for the electrical plugs but they managed to find one at reception. That means that I can cook tea and then use the laptop. I must make a mental note to buy an adapter tomorrow because knowing my luck, I’ll be stranded here in Switzerland again and I won’t be able to find one.

ut talking about tomorrow, tomorrow I’m pushing further on and we’ll see where we end up. But right now tonight I’m off to bed.

Tuesday 28th July 2020 – I’VE BEEN RELIVING …

… a photo that was taken 50 years ago, almost to the very day.

But as you admire a few photos of the glorious views from today’s lunch stop, I’ll start off by putting things in their proper order.

To start with – or, more to the point, not to start with – I missed the alarms this morning as usual and it was more like 07:30 that I finally ended up crawling out of bed.

No breakfast this morning either. In view of the virus situation it’s a bag already made up and deposited outside your door and that’s not really very much good to new as there is nothing really in it that I could eat.

Instead I carried on with some paperwork for a while.

Nerina had been off doing something or other during the night and the first person to come back was Hans complaining that the collection had been absolutely nothing. I carried on waiting but as I walked away I had Nerina’s coffee with me and her white tag so I had to go and put her coffee back at the foot of the stairs into the cellar. Someone made the remark that that coffee was ruined. I said “it was only made 10 minutes ago” but they said that it had all skin and everything all over the top of it as if it had been made a day or two. I brought it down to show them but Nerina came down. I told her what hans had said about the collection and she replied that it was pretty miserable. There weren’t all that many people there. We carried on walking and she asked “is there any possibility that you can do something about your language courses, especially July and August as it’s going to clash with something here with the choir?” She told me all about it. I wasn’t sure that the language courses ran through July and August – they only do through the school term time. I said “that’s so far ahead that we don’t really need to see about that right now”. We went for tea and tea was porridge. People were making their porridge up and burning it. Mine was quite reasonably good and I was eating it. This Chinese waiter came past and saw one of the porridges on someone’s table which was burnt. he said “you’re just ruining that porridge here”. I asked “how would you go about doing it?” He said “you start off by making a tower of cereal and then you and then he started rambling and I couldn’t follow or understand so I asked him to repeat it. I couldn’t understand it again so he said it a second time.

And there was far more to it than this but as you are probably eating your tea right now i’ll spare you the details.

Having finished my notes I packed my things, I headed off out to the van with my luggage. On the way past the reception desk in the hotel I did pick up a coffee on the way out of the hotel. At least it was free and I had a free hand to carry it.

Having forgotten once more to take a photo of my night’s lodging I found my way around the industrial estate to the LeClerc where I picked up a few more travel essentials to ease me along on my journey to wherever it is that I’m going (which I still haven’t decided yet).

Including a new SatNav.

The one in my van is a cheap thing, about 7 or 8 years old, well out of date now and apart from that, the connection is loose. So you’re driving along and you suddenly notice that it’s switched off and you missed a turning or two a long way back. It takes a while to make another connection and then it drops again and we repeat the process.

In Leclerc though, they had a decent mainstream one with free updates and because it was the last one – the display item, they knocked me something off it.

There was some excitement there too. Someone wandering around without a facemask was being given a PV – a Procès verbale or on-the-spot fine by a Gendarme.

Back on the road again I headed on eastwards along the big dual carriageway towards the Rhone valley.

A little later on during the morning I stopped again in a suitable lay-by near Charolles. We had arranged to have a Welsh lesson this morning.

Determined not to miss it, I’d configured Zoom on my telephone and I attended that lesson accordingly. It wasn’t very convenient but at least it worked, which goes to show just how useful modern technology can be. This opens up all kinds of possibilities for the future.

view of church butte de suin 71220 saone et loire france eric hall For lunch I found a beautiful spot on a butte overlooking a village called Suin.

The N79 is a road that i’ve travelled on several occasions and each time I’ve been along it, I’ve seen a sign for a scenic viewpoint, the Butte de Suin. That seemed to be a suitable place to stop for lunch

It took quite a bit of finding too, for although it’s only a couple of miles as the crow flies from the N79, it’s a long and tortuous route to arrive at the summit and I was starving by the time that I reached the top of the butte

My butty with its assorted fillings was all the more delicious because of the wait and the view was even more delicious. It enticed me to spend a good hour or so having a wander around.

If the altimeter on my telephone is correct, I’m an 592 metres right now, on a bluff overlooking a couple of river valleys right on the watershed between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean river system. You’ve seen in several of the previous photographs the kind of view that there is from up here on top, but I’m not sure what that is on the horizon over there.

It could be a broadcasting aerial I suppose, or else it could be a water tower. But it’s far too far away for me to identify it clearly.

We are so high up here that away in the distance when the weather is clear you can see all the way to Mont Blanc in the Alps.

It’s over there in that direction towards the right but unfortunately you can’t see it today which is a shame. If you peer through the gloom and the haze you can just about see the outline of the Alps on the far side of the Saone Valley.

That’s probably 100 or so kilometres away and Mont Blanc is a long way further off beyond there on the border between France and Italy. And that reminds me – it’s been years since I’ve put my sooty foot in Italy. It’s high time I went over there again but I don’t have time right now.

On top of the Butte de Suin is a statue of the Madonna.

The design of this statue is said to be inspired by the statue of the Golden Madonna that can be found in the Basilique Notre Dame on the top of the Fourvières Hill, the eminence that overlooks the city of Lyon.

That statue was designed by Joseph-Hugues Fabisch and erected in 1852. The one here at Suin dates from 1884 and from what I’ve seen, the two do look pretty similar.

There’s quite an interesting story that’s often told around here about the positioning of the Madonna on top of the hill here.

Elderly people talk of how many pairs of oxen and the hordes of men who were required to drag the statue to the top of the hill, even though it’s many years before their time. And each time you talk to someone, it’s always a different number of oxen and people involved in the work. It’s just like some of these Chinese whispers

And don’t ask me why she has what looks like a radio aerial stuck behind her because I don’t know that either. I suppose that it might be a lighning conductor.

Apart from the statue of the Madonna that we have already seen, ther ehave been a considerable number of curiosités built here on this summit in the past but unfortunately there are little if any visible remains.

The first recorded object up here was a temple that the Romans built to honour the dod Mercury, one of the 12 major Roman gods and was said to be the god of commerce and also of travellers, and it’s for this latter reason that I imagine that his temple was erected in such a prominent spot because from here he would have had a really impressive view of all of the traffic travelling up and down the valleys at the foot of the rock.

That might also explain why in medieval times there was a castle built up here. In the lawless days of the 13th and 14th Century any nobleman bent on on improving his financial situation could see the travellers too from miles away and send out a war party to exact a toll from them.

And the existence of the medieval castle might also explain the presence of the village here.

There had been a settlement of sorts here for a good many years and known to have been in existence in the 11th Century but the castle would have required all kinds of ancillary staff – farmers, millers and the like – who would not live in the castle but would want to live close by for protection and their presence would attract other tradesmen.

There was a church known to be here in the 10th Century but the present church has been altered and modernised so much that it’s impossible to say whether there are any vestiges of the original church

The castle was demolished as a consequence of the Wars of Religion

What we’re seeing here is not part of the medieval castle but the site of an orientation table. That was installed here in 1963 and renovated in 2008.

Something else that we can’t see either is a rather large medieval cross on the summit that was known to be here in the 10th Century and which I imagine (but I don’t know) would have been swept away when they built the castle up here.

What we can see, apparently, are 52 church towers. But I didn’t stay to count them all. I have things to do, places to go and people to see.

Back in Caliburn I set off to drive to Leynes and the house of my friend Jean-Marc and his wife.

My route through the back lanes of Burgundy took me over the Col des Enceints on the D212 between Bourgvilain and Pierreclos. it’s 529 metres high, but a climb up of 242 metres. Plenty of hairpin bends and at one point there’s a climb of 12%. That’ll warm up Caliburn ready for his visit to the Alps in a couple of days time.

20 minutes later I turned up the house of Jean-Marc. He was a boy with whom I had a school exchange back in 1970. We had lost touch after that but a casual meeting with a relative of his 6 or so years ago had enabled us to re-establish contact.

We’ve seen each other a few times since then and it’s nice to be in touch and exchange news.

We had a good chat and then we went round to see his mother. She’ll be 90 very shortly but I’ve seen 70 year old people much older than she is. She’s in the peak of health both physically and mentally which is astonishing.

50 years ago it was the birthday of Jean-Marc’s sister and we had taken a photo of the party. Today the three of us (without Isabelle) arranged ourselves as we had done back then and re-took the photo.

Back at Jean-Marc’s, Jacqueline had already prepared a meal. Stuffed courgettes, which brought back many happy memories of living in the Auvergne when courgettes would be on everyone’s menu at this time of year.

Our conversation continued, as we had a lot to say, for quite some considerable time until bed time. They had very kindly offered me a bed for the night which was very nice of them, and I took myself off there and that was that.

Tomorrow I’ll be moving on because there is still plenty to see and to do that must be done while I’m still able to do so and, more importantly, before we have this second lockdown which I am anticipating once the holiday season has finished.

Monday 27th July 2020 – THAT WAS ANOTHER …

… horrible day today. At one point during mid-afternoon the temperature inside the cab of Caliburn was 42°C and I had to stop and get out of the cab.

Luckily I was able to find a nice place to do so. To my surprise I found a parking place in the street in the centre of Vichy down by the River Allier so I could park up and go for a walk to cool off a little.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

This morning I was awake and about of bed before the first alarm, something that is always a healthy ambition as far as I am concerned. Plenty of time to attack the notes on the dictaphone because by the sound of things I’d trvalled for miles during the night.

I’d been with Ingrid on board a ship obviously going somewhere and it’s quite clear that we are a couple. We were watching a few other things happening. A notice that we saw said something like “COVID 19 flights to Egyot suspended at the end of April”. As we were roaming about at the end of the stairwell which was cut into the rock evidently we came across another couple and we chatted to them. We ended up down in the basement of the ship trying to find out which were the doors to our particular deck but we were fooling around and quite clearly a couple, the two of us.

Later on we ended up back at my house but my house had been sold, although my possessions were still there. As we walked in through the door there were all these cats there. 3 small cats in waste paper bins and so on. I said “this is typical. Look at these cats. My cats are still in possession and they have sorted the other ones out”. We walked around the kitchen but heard a noise from the living room. I said “hello, anyone there?”. Eventually a Dutch guy came out, youngish, very tall. he came round and shook my hand, said “welcome back from your holidays” and had a really good chat to me, most of which wa in Dutch which I didn’t quite understand. I was with Rosemary and Lieneke. Of course Lieneke was very much in demand for this conversation too.

By now we were all on board THE GOOD SHIP VE … errr … OCEAN ENDEAVOUR but it was a coach. it was time for us to get off so I walked down to the front of the coach saying goodbye to everyone. Castor and Pollux were there so I said goodbye to Pollux but Castor, I smiled at her, put my head very close to her and said “thanks for everything”. She looked extremely uncomfortable when I said that. That was when I walked down the coach and got off. This was somewhere about Scholar Green and we were looking at a map to work out our way across to Alsager, that way. It was a bit difficult to work out exactly where we were because there were two roads, both of which went across and we could have been stuck by either of them. We were certainly out beyond the confines of Stoke on Trent in that particular area. But it was the look on Castor’s face that got me – a look of real fear. That was what awoke me.

Rosemary had brought me a cup of tea at about 07:30 and by 08:30 we were having breakfast. Afterwards, I packed and loaded up Caliburn, even rescuing my pushbike from Rosemary’s barn where it had been hiding for the last 6 or 7 years or so.

Before I left I fixed Rosemary’s settee and also finished off connecting up her television to her livebox – a task that involved telephoning the helpline.

Off on the road I went, as far as Clermont Ferrand. First stop was the Auchan where I encountered a most unhelpful Secury Guard, bought some more supplies and then I fuelled up Caliburn ready for the long haul east.

Second stop was at IKEA where I bought the rest of the storage jars that I needed, as well as a few other bits and pieces. But I didn’t buy a temporary mattress for Caliburn due to the absurd price that they wanted for one – €79:00 for a folding foam-rubber chair that opens out.

Ad as for the food, that was a major disappointment. I ended up with just a plate of chips and a lump of bread. No salad or anything.

The heat was stifiling when I went outside and it was really uncomfortable and the drive wasn’t very comfortable. Leaving Clermont Ferrand, I went north-east through the countryside and arrived at Vichy

But here I had to stop. It was impossible to go any further in this weather. I was melting.

There was a parking place at the side of the road near Parc Kennedy so this was where I stopped. It was a pleasant if not sweltering walk down to the banks of the river but once I was in the shade it was very nice indeed. I was quite envious of the people who were out there on their little home-made rafts going up and down the river.

Being a Pisces I would quite happily have been out there with them.

There’s a beach there too, the Plage des Celestins, and that was quite a popular place, as you can see in the photograph here.

There’s an ice cream stall, a place to hire deckchairs and also a place where you can hire little boats and so on. And then the row of yellow buoys out there mark the limits to which people can swim in the river. You can see that the boats going out into the river from the slipway at the far end of the swimming area.

A really nice walk along the river in the shade for half an hour cooled me down and I resisted the temptation to see if they had any vegan ice cream on sale. I didn’t fancy standing in the queue.

At the end of the Parc Kennedy there’s a bridge across the River Allier.

It’s know, locally as the Pont de Bellerive because it connects Vichy to the town of Bellerive sur Allier on the other side of the river, but as the legendary French politician Aristide Briand had died just a couple of months before its official opening, it was named the Pont Aristide Briand in his honour.

Until the eary 1960s it was the only bridge across the Allier at Vichy but it’s by no means the first bridge. There was even a bridge across the river here recorded by Julius Caesar in 54BC although it might have been built by his soldiers on their way to the Battle of Gergovie.

There have been several subsequent bridges here and this one dates from 1932.

having cooled down a little I headed off eastwards through the mountains towards the Rhone valley, but I didn’t get very far. Tonight I’m in a modern unit hotel in Paray-le-Monial. Because of the heat I had the air conditioning on full blast for an hour and then a shower and a clothes wash.

Tomorrow I’m not going far but I’m still having an early night. I’ve already crashed out once this evening and I’ll be gone again if I don’t get a move on.

Saturday 25th July 2020 – I’M WHACKED PART III

We’ve been hard at it again today.

And still suffering the effects of yesterday because no matter what, I still couldn’t rouse myself out for the third alarm. 06:40 it was when I finally crawled out of bed.

There was the usual cup of tea brought to me, and then I carried on with paperwork and the like.

There was a group of us last night in a hotel, a conference or something like that. I ended up sharing a table with someone who resembled a girl from the radio. It seemed that at every meal I was sitting next to her which pleased me enormously of course. This slowly developed over the period that we were there. We were all on our own in a group, a lot of us, talking about spices and herbs. She had a huge collection of spices that she bought and she told us where to go to get them. She said that anyone who would like to could buy her a spice as a memento. I was immediately keen to go along and do this. In the end I found where she indicated the spice shop was but is was a 2nd hand record shop. I was looking in there at the records and found loads of obscure American records of the type that I’ve been recording of my own collection but this isn’t really getting my thing advanced. At some point I’d been talking to a couple of guys. This girl and another girl had said that they had been friends for 22 years and they can’t possibly have been work colleagues for 22 years because they weren’t much older than that so we were wondering if they had been friends or something. I made some kind of remark “it doesn’t matter if they are 22 years old I could still keep up”. I was with her friend at one particular point when a Ford Cortina Estate mark III gold came by, covered in patches of underseal and rust preventer, that kind of thing. I told her that I had a vehicle like that. She expressed surprise but wasn’t very interested. That reminded me that somewhere along the line I was with Nerina at one point talking about getting a new car for the taxis but for our own private vehicle would we be tempted to get something decent that we could use for a taxi if necessary and was that really a good idea. I thought that I’d like my taxi business to be bigger but only in a bigger town where there is room and scope without treading on people’s toes. But back to this story with the girl from the radio – I remember that they went off on an expedition somewhere leaving some of us behind. I was left behind and feeling very disappointed about this.

At another point in the night there was a question about scaffolding – being on scaffolding and what happens if a pole breaks or someone cuts one while you are on it. Terry told me about a system that he had where there was always a couple of wires to attach the scaffolding to various points somewhere so that if it did break the wires would snag somewhere and at least give some kind of temporary support while you scrambled down.

This yacht thing – there was more to it than that, including me buying a yacht for some reason. And I would love to know what “this yacht thing” was all about and what did I forget to record during the night.

After breakfast we collected our wits and the like and then headed off to Ingrid’s with the trailer. I managed to reverse that all the way down the drive at Daniel’s and drop it off there although the socket would benefit from a pile of easing oil.

Ingrid was pleased to see us and we had a long chat – to such an extent that Ingrid made lunch for us. We were there for quite a while.

Later on we went to Les Guis. I found a few things that we needed either for Rosemary’s house or for the barn and did a little more clearing.

One thing that I did was to place the pane of glass in the frame above the door in the bathroom. I bought that just before I was taken ill and I’d never had the chance to fit it. Rodents had been getting into the shower room and I wanted to keep them out.

That was actually the first constructive thing that I’d done down there. The ret of the time I’ve spent either clearing up or weeding. Having inspected the hole in the attic I injected a pile of expanding foam into it to block it up and I’ll see tomorrow if that has done the trick.

With the van all loaded up we went round to say goodbye to my neighbours but they were busy so we didn’t spend any time there.

Back here we crashed out for an hour or so and then I unloaded Caliburn.

After tea I had a look at a chair that needed fixing. I managed some of it with the aid of an electric drill that had a jammed trigger which was something of a complication, but the project failed because the sunken nut that I had found was too large for the hole. That’s a job for a wood file in due course.

Having had a shower and a clothes washing session, I’m now off to bed. Sunday tomorrow so a lie-in. And I’ve earned that too after this week’s efforts.

Thursday 23rd July 2020 – I’M WHACKED!

Yes, it’s been a very hard day today.

Having crashed out so definitively yesterday evening, I slept right through and even missed the third alarm. Only by a few minutes but nevertheless …

First task was to write up my journal from last night, in the middle of which Rosemary brought me a cup of tea. Even so, I managed somehow to crash out again.

Afrer breakfast we organised a few things and then set off.

First port of call was near St Priest les Champs to drop off the door. And as it happens, Rosemary knows the lady of the house so we had a chat for a while.

Second was Ingrid’s at Biollet where she made us a drink. We had a really good chat and then went round to pick up her trailer – a big single-beast trailer much bigger than I was expecting. But the bigger the better. I can fit more stuff in it.

Rosemary and I said goodbye to Ingrid and set off to my place.

Tons of stuff lying around there that was of no use to man nor beast and that was something that I was always going to do “tomorrow”. But it was depressing me seeing it all lying there like that so we heaved it all into the trailer regardless.

But as an aside, I need to work on my reversing. I’m somewhat out of practice and I made something of a dog’s breakfast getting the trailer down the track to my house.

One thing that I wanted to do while I was there was to check on the pointing of the wall that I had built in 2012.

No cows in the field and no farmer about so we went in to check.

It’s all holding up remarkably well, all things considered, and I’m proud of the job that I did on that considering that it was my first proper effort at building a stone wall. But the joint between the lean-to and the main house wall is separating and if I do ever make it back I’ll need to refill that.

The dechetterie at St Eloy les Mines would be closed for lunch by now so we made our way back home for something to eat. Rosemary indicated some more rubbish that needed heaving into the trailer while she made the food.

This afternoon Rosemary had a bank appointment so I went off to the dechetterie where the old woman in charge directed me to the correct bay to unload it.

Back now to my house where I loaded up the trailer yet again. The concrete parking space is now clear of nonsense, some of the rubbish hanging around outside has gone too, and I’ve even thrown away some stuff in the verandah too. Plenty more to go at too, stuff that’s been hanging around for centuries and which probably will never be used..

While I was there, I went to check on the bedroom.

It seems to be unaffected by the rodent infestation so I spent some time in there sorting out some stuff in the wardrobes. There were a few bits and pieces that I wanted to collect that I’d stored in there for safe-keeping and so I rescued them.

The rest of the stuff that’s in there can remain for another day or until I move back down whenever

But I do have to say that it was totally depressing to see the bedroom looking like this.

It took me four long years (not continuously, of course) to convert it from A RUBBLE-STREWN WRECK into wnat you see today, complete with fitted wardrobes and everything, and I was so proud of what i’d managed to build with my own fair hands.

And all in all, I reckon that I had no more than about three months’ use out of it before I was taken ill and rushed to hospital. That was the saddest part of all about this.

As for the attic, that’s had it, I reckon. And so has everything in there, I reckon. There’s little hope of salvaging anything from there although I did bring out a set of plastic drawers.

On the ground floor I did some tidying up – just a little. And there’s plenty more to go at in there too.

All in all, I could spend the rest of my life tidying up in there and still not see the end of it all. No matter what I did, I could never make that place look tidy

The dechetterie would be closed by now so I came on back to Rosemary’s, totally exhausted, with a full trailer behind Caliburn.

We had tea and a good chat, following which I had a shower and washed my clothes. And all of that was just as well too.

Plenty more work to do tomorrow- this little visit is far from over – not by any means. A good night’s sleep is called for so that I can be fighting fit. But there’s little hope of that.

Wednesday 22nd July 2020 – BACK HOME

Yes, I’ve been back home today.

And before anyone suggests that it’s rather a long way for me to drive in my current circumstances, that isn’t actually what I mean.

For a change I was awake quite early, and so there was time to listen to the dictaphone

It was a confusing voyage last night. There were quite a few of us and I’m not quite sure of what we were doing and where we were going but we were all young teenagers, that kind of thing or a few maybe even younger and that’s basically all that I can remember.

While I was typing out all of that I even had a cup of coffee brought to me in bed. And how any years is it since that ever happened?

Having dealt with all of the paperwork I went down to breakfast and then decided (just for a change) to organise myself.

I emptied everything out of the back of Caliburn, tidied him a little, found a pile of rubbish that needed throwing away, and then threw a few gardening tools in the back.

Having made two phone calls, we set off.

First port of call was in St Eloy where I bought some petrol in a container. Second, also in St Eloy, was for some rubber gloves and a pile of rat and mouse poison.

We then disappeared off into the countryside and ended up back at home – my old place in Les Guis.

Time hasn’t been kind to it at all. In the couple of years since I’ve been there nature has totally overwhelmed it and it was something like an Amazon rainforest.

But by now Ingrid had arrived and the three of us set to with a will. I went ahead with Terry’s brush-cutter and cut a swathe through the vegetation, with Rosemary and Ingrid following on behind with the clippers.

And it was really hard work too there. The heat didn’t help very much.

What also didn’t help much was all of the objects hidden in the undergrowth. The brushcutter and its blade looked as if it had fought a war (which it probably had) as I hacked my way through the undergrowth.

All of this in just a couple of years since Terry and I were here last picking up the mini-tractor. It’s hardly a surprise that lost cities are still being discovered in the Amazon rainforest with vegetation growing like this.

By the time that 14:00 arrived, we had reached the house and could go in all of the doors there.

And how sad everything was, with reams and reams of cobwebs, dust and everything all over the place. And we were exhausted too by this point and so called it a day.

As we weresitting around chatting, a neighbour came round to see us and to see how things were and we had a little discussion. But Ingrid went off for her appointment and Rosemary and I came home for a rather late lunch.

Later on, I went back to my house. Those two phone calls that I’d made earlier – one had been to Ingrid and the other had been to someone else.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’ve been slowly replacing the windows in the house and that I bought a matching front door. That needs a new doorframe building but because it has to be in hardwood and not softwood, it’s beyond the capacity of the tools that I have here.

Previously, I’d made “local enquiries” and someone had come up the name of a reliable joiner. It had always been my intention to have a joiner make a doorframe, so I had phoned him up.

Much to my surprise (and yours too) I asked him when he would be free. He replied “I can come at 18:00”.

You can’t put obstacles in the path of willing workmen so I arranged to meet him at the Intermarché in Pionsat. We drove up to the house and he did all the measurements. While I was at it, I mentioned the third window that is yet to be installed. “I’ll do that as well if you like”.

And why not?

So the arrangement is that I’ll drop off the door on him tomorrow and leave him to it. There’s no time schedule – he can do it whenever he’s free. Which won’t be before September because all of the sawmills will be closed for summer holiday.

Having bid my farewell, I drove back to Rosemary’s where she had made tea.

A shower to clean myself up and to wash my clothes was next and then, shame as it is to say it, I crashed right out.

The exercise had clearly affected me and I felt that I had done quite enough for today. I’ll write up my notes in the morning.

Tuesday 21st July 2020 – JUST IN CASE …

… you’re all wondering where I am –

The answer is quite simple. I am in the bosom of friends (yes, I do have friends). And it’s one of the, if not the main, reason why I’m on the road right now.

Having crashed out definitively last night at about 21:30, I vaguely remember waking at about 01:30, finding that I was still lying there on top of the bed, saying “sod it” to myself and going back to sleep again right there.

The next time that I awoke, it was at 05:53 and I was still there on top of the bed.

This time I was awake for good, so I decided that that would be a good time for me to arise (before even the 1st alarm!) and attack the notes, of which there were plenty, from last night.

This was when we’d seen that body on the rocks and we were telling everyone but it didn’t make the slightest bit of difference. In the end someone believed us so we had to negotiate our way back to this clifftop. I was worried now having told someone that either it had gone or I’d imagined it or something, but when we got there sure enough there it was sprawled on the rocks. We got this guy to call for the police and an ambulance but for some unknown reason he had very great difficulty getting through.

Later on i was in LeClerc. It was more like 23:00 but I was shopping for stuff for breakfast. I had to work out where everything is and what I wanted and how to get the best available qualities. In the fresh vegetable stall I bumped into Liz. I was picking loads of carrots with their heads on and putting three in my basket. I was talking to Liz about how I used to plant the heads for fun when I’d cut them off the carrots and even a few of them would grow again. Liz said that she still did that and they always seemed to grow for her. By now we were standing in a garden somewhere and it was beautiful. The wind was blowing and I was watching my wind turbine going round faster and faster and faster but I thought that this was still slow for what it was supposed to be doing. it should be doing much better than this. Then Caliburn turned up driving down the lane to my house

There was still plenty of time after this to go for another walkabout. I found myself in Iceland but it was the strangest kind of Iceland I’ve ever been to. We were in a hotel and had an hour or two to wait before we needed to go to the airport or wherever it was from where we were leaving so they took us into town. I had my backpack my guitar and something else with me. They dropped us off for a walk round and we’d all meet back at the railway station. I walked around, or tried to walk around but I had so much stuff to carry with me and I didn’t even have my suitcase at this time. It was really inconvenient. I was struggling to get around. We ended up having to get back to the station (in Iceland, that has never ever had a public rail network!) to pick up the bus to go back to the hotel. In the end I ended up back there but everyone else was back there already. I thought that this time had gone really quickly and I hadn’t done half of what I needed to do. We all went to get back onto the bus as the bus was ready one of the boys upstairs came down to talk to the travel host who was Matthew Swann. It turned out that a girl had been ill and we were waiting for the ambulance. It turned up and first of all this other girl came down. She was a bit shaky. Then they went upstairs and came down carrying a girl. She was in quite a state and the first girl was saying to the ill one “you’ve got to eat, you’ve got to drink at least every 5 days especially when you’ve been sick” all this kind of thing. They just dumped her in the corner of an ambulance and the ambulace guy said in perfect English “yes she’ll have to be wrapped in another blanket – she can’t be wrapped in that one”. They started to get her out and put her in the ambulance.

But earlier I’d been on another bus as well. I don’t know where I was and I had to work out how I was going to get to Crewe. It was a long complicated journey and I was waiting for the bus to do the first stage and around the corner came the K43 with “Crewe” on it. I got on and the conductor came round to ask for my fare and I couldn’t remember the name of the bus stop. I tried to describe it to him “it’s the one after …” bit I couldn’t think of the name of the one before it either. In the end I asked “is the fare to Crewe all the same? Just give me a ticket to Crewe”.

When I had finished it was breakfast time so I went downstairs to see what was on offer. I had the fresh bread and jam with coffee and juice.

We had been told to wear masks in the dining room, so I remember saying that it would be fun trying to eat, but the lady reassured me, saying that it was only when we were moving around. Sitting down with our food, we didn’t need masks.

It was a pretty quick meal – I wasn’t down there for long and qfter breakfast I came back here and packed everything. By 09:00 I was back on the road.

Not very far though. First call was at LeClerc the other side of the motorway where I stocked up with groceries and the like, and then I made a phone call as I watched an artic lorry to perform a series of complicated manoeuvres.

Second port of call was the LeClerc fuel station where I fuelled up with diesel.

Off on my travels, and the route as far as Evaux-les-Bains was quite as I remembered it. And then a merry, mazy winding way through the hills and the side roads until I ended up at Rosemary’s.

If you think that where I live is quite beautiful, it’s not a patch on where Rosemary lives. Her house is perched on the clifftop overlooking the Gorge de la Sioule, the gash that cleaves the Combrailles in two and which as the River Sioule running through it, along the bottom.

And this is where I’m staying for the next few nights as there are things that I need to be doing before we go back into lockdown.

Lunch was prepared already when I arrived and then afterwards I made another phone call – this time to Ingrid to tell her that I was here. And we made certain arrangements.

A good search of Caliburn to find a very important item finally came good and then we had some organising to do.

All of that took up a good part of the afternoon followed by which we just chatted for a while about nothing in p
particular.

After we’d had our evening meal, Rosemary took me out for a walk around her neighbourhood

While I know the area pretty well to drive through it, just like anywhere else in rural France there are loads of little pathways and trackways that you only know if you are a local. And so disturbing the ponies in a neighbouring field, we disappeared off into the depths of darkest Combrailles

Rural France has never been troubled particularly by an invader who has disrupted the society in quite the same way that The Romans, the Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans did in England and so many of the paths down which we were walking have their roots going back into antiquity and even prehistory.

Very rarely was this this area carved up into great estates and parkland that overwhelmed the traditional “parcelles” of the local peasantry and the patchwork of fields and tracks is all just as it might have been when this area was reclaimed from the climax forest that covered it.

It was actually quite late when we set out for our walk.

It’s July of course at the moment and it stays light usually until quite late. Right now the sun is just disappearing over the brow of the hill. So we didn’t hang around particularly – a nice lap around the paths and tracks and then back down the lane to home.

So now it’s bedtime. Not exactly an exciting or busy day, but I was exhausted after my trip. I wanted to rest because It’s all going to kick off from here, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall seeing in a few weeks time as the story unfolds.

As I said a while back, we are heading for a second lock-down, I’m convinced of that, and there is no time like the present to do certain things. It’s now or never.

EPIC HALL

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