McCall Europe Expedition Summer 2015

Southampton, United Kingdom

Tue, 21 Jul 2015 22:00:00 +0100

Le Havre, France

Mon, 20 Jul 2015 23:00:00 +0200

Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez, France

Fri, 17 Jul 2015 21:40:00 +0200

The best laid plans and all that; we’d intended to get up at 7am, leave no later than 9 Friday morning, and be at our new campsite, on the Vendee coast (just below Brittany) by suppertime. As it turned out it was gone 8am when we got up, and by the time we’d breakfasted, packed up and sorted out the bikes on the new carrier it was 11am when we left the delightful lakeside campsite that had been our home since Tuesday. So began the longest leg of our trip, about 900km across France from East to West with many stops at service stations to fill up with GPL (LPG), iced coffee (they have a great line going in little tubs of the stuff at all the stations) and sometimes a jambon et fromage sandwich. Even more frequent were the stops to feed the tolls (trolls?), and we racked up over €100 in toll charges during our time in France. This extravagant amount was bloated by the fact that there were height restrictions at the toll plazas that I wasn’t going to risk Trish’s pop top roof through, so we had to go through the commercial traffic lane and were consequently charged a higher rate! Saying that, I didn’t begrudge the tolls (not until the following Monday, anyway, a whole n’other story), because the Autoroutes were a delight to drive on; only two lanes but so little traffic and no roadworks, compared to Germany and Switzerland. The speed limit is 130kmh about 85mph and although it takes her a while to get there, Trish cruises nicely at that speed. As well as the Tom Tom app on my phone, I also have Google maps running, which shows our blinking GPS dot on a map of the whole of France, so pixel by pixel I could see us gradually moving across the country. As we approached the Atlantic coast the temperature started to drop from the constant 30+ in the Rhone Alps (even at 10pm in the evening it was still 29), to a much more manageable 20+. It was apparent that we wouldn’t get to our new campsite; Les Biches (the hinds, pronounced by Jack in his attempts to read everything he can now; lez bitches), so I called them, estimating our arrival at 9 pm, and they said they would leave our pitch details taped to the door of the office. In fact it was closer to 10pm when we arrived, the pitch instructions were on the office door as promised and within 20 minutes we were set up and in the bar seeking some hot food, but having to make do with two mini Pringle pipes at a rip off price of €5, as hot food had finished at 10pm. The disappointment was somewhat ameliorated by a couple of pints (well half litres) of the very nice Belgian Affligem draft beer. The kids had already sussed the pools etc out and were over the moon with the water slides, Abbie having to be told several times that we wouldn’t be going in the pools until the next day. From my point of view I preferred the last campsite, this one was much more commercial, mostly comprising dozens of mini prefabricated holiday homes made by an O’Hara. Seems an Irish builder had got very rich from this French campsite! The kids loved it though, and the most tiring difficult leg of the journey was behind us, or so I thought, but I wasn’t banking on the protest crazy French farmers……

Jack doing 'shapes' the night we arrived at Les Biches. Just after a 10 hour journey and they were up for a party!

The water entertainment set up gets the thumbs up!

Trish in our spacious touring pitch at Les Biches

Poor Abs, cut hands from falling off her bike, cut toe from the terrace table leg and shiner thanks to a nasty little French boy who got a tongue lashing from me!

Ice creams and soft drinks in Saint Gille Croix de Vie

Abs shiner, should have put my steak on it

Jack sprinkling his cheese, 'Lez Bitches' camp restaurant

Massignieu-de-Rives, France

Tue, 14 Jul 2015 13:00:00 +0200

As journey legs go on this trip, this one was a doddle; just a short two hour hop from Geneva Switzerland to Camping Lac du Lit du Roi in the Rhone Alps, France, nearest big place: Lyon. There was a border post, but the French side was totally unmanned, only the Swiss bothering, hard at work trying to foil international grape smuggling. After the dearth of LPG stations in Switzerland (the last LPG fill up had been in Germany not too far before the Swiss border, but we had to use the French adapter; ‘le dish’ ?!) it was great to be ‘cooking on gas’ again. The French call it GPL and once we cottoned on to that, finding stations was easy, more than 50% offer GPL though cracking jokes about the order of the anagram garners no laughs from service station staff. In fact I’ve stopped trying to be funny in this country, the only reward is a Gallic shrug and a withering contemptuous look; no doubt regarding their opinion; another bumbling British idiot with schoolboy French. We arrived at the campsite 1pm, situated in stunning surroundings; by an aquamarine lake with mountains all around, the temp was well above 30. Once the office re-opened at 1:30pm, (you soon get used to businesses observing breaks, lunchtimes and Sundays in a way that we have long since forgotten, perhaps to our disadvantage), we were offered a choice of pitches, all with delightful views, and after choosing one we were soon in the pool, this innocent seeming location soon to become the scene of my utter humiliation. While most signs on the campsite were translated into English, German and Dutch the one displaying a pair of shorts with a big cross through was only in French. I’d seen it and was puzzled, what could be wrong with shorts? Little did I know until later that swimming shorts are a massive issue in La France. So I played with the kids in the pool in my red Speedo knee length shorts for over an hour and was towelling myself down to leave, a cold beer in mind, the temperature still close to 30 at gone 5pm, when a very fit, very tanned guy in his late fifties with piercing blue eyes appeared from nowhere; ‘Parlez vous Francais?’, I was tempted to reply my usual; ‘Oui, un petit peu’ but something told me that he wasn’t intending to tell me which boulangerie was the best one to buy our morning croissants from, so I simply replied ‘Non’, which in itself is, I suppose, a bit of a giveaway. Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to save me from his ire, however, and he immediately switched into near perfect English remonstrating with me for wearing swimming shorts; ‘shorts de bain’ instead of the ‘slip de bain’ ie lycra swimming trunks. When I dared to ask why, he said that shorts were unhygienic and that this rule applied through the whole of France. Enquiries at the campsite office didn’t get any more of a sympathetic response, especially when I said that I hadn’t worn trunks in over twenty years, another Gallic shrug of the shoulders and directions to the nearest Supermarche that stocked the necessary male swimwear. Googling the subject on my phone that night I could see that it had been a newsworthy item in the UK for some time, with articles in The Economist amongst others, and much discussion on UK camping forums. Apparently, the objection to swim shorts is that they may have been worn all day, and that they have pockets, which may contain all sorts of detritus. More than one person in the articles I read made the point that all this was a bit academic considering that you can’t stop kids weeing in the pool! C’est la vie. It was going to the local Carrefour supermarche in Belley, a ten-minute drive from the campsite that ended in potential disaster. Soon after buying Trish I discovered that instead of having a spare wheel she just had a can of tyre repair gunk, useless for any puncture hole greater than 5mm. Transits usually carry their spares underneath but presumably the LPG tank had left no room for this. There was no way that we were going on a 3k round Europe trip with no spare wheel, despite the RAC European breakdown cover I’d purchased, so many hours were spent trying to source a towbar (she had one of those!) based carrier that could take the sizeable spare wheel I’d purchased off Ebay, and our 3 bikes. Eventually I’d found something called a pole-rak that claimed it could do the job for c £250. It was sold by a one-man band who for some reason (excuses given were: at Grand Prix in Le Mans, and it’s my wife’s birthday) took a month to deliver it. I then discovered two essential components were missing and the assembly instructions, which the guy admitted were out of date, weren’t easy to follow; a magnifying glass being required to study the diagrams. The wheel and bikes were loaded and strapped, the whole thing looked a bit precarious and I could see it bouncing alarmingly in my rear view mirror as we drove along, but it had got us through the UK, Holland, Germany and Switzerland, albeit it was starting to look a little skewed. On return from Belley, however, I noticed that one of the arms the bikes were supported on when we were in transit, was missing. It had obviously fallen off. Carefully retracing our drive to Belley, scouring the road and verges, didn’t yield any results and moving on the next day started to look like a non starter. Our only chance was to try to re-site the spare wheel and then purchase a standard bike carrier in Belley. As I struggled to jam the spare wheel into the gap between the front passenger seat and the new rear facing seat we’d had installed, Jack, always keen to help, suggested trying the gap from the far side, and hey presto the wheel fitted perfectly! Bless that boy. A quick visit to the equivalent of Halfords in Belley, a very helpful English speaking manager and €360 later, we had a solid as a rock, 3 bike Thule towbar mounted carrier installed, and could move on. To celebrate our recaptured mobility the three of us had burgers in the camp restaurant that night, then the kids enjoyed the entertainment provided by the visiting clown, Jack volunteering to assist in the extending ladder act. Friday morning we struck camp much later than planned at 11am on the longest single leg of our trip crossing pretty much the breadth of France from east to west.

Le 'Mini Club' kids club playing in the pool, Camping Lac du Lit du Roi

Pool from the bar terrace, Camping Lac du Lit du Roi

Yet another ice cream?

Water play at Camping du Lac du Lit du Roi

Lac du Lit du Roi

Abbie seems delighted with her shot

Jack supporting the children's entertainer

Transfixed by the clown

Don't try this at home!

Abs helps Dad clean up after brekkie

Geneva, Switzerland

Mon, 13 Jul 2015 17:00:00 +0200

Daunted by the prospect of another long tiring drive I decided we’d leave Horb Am Neckar a day early and sourced, courtesy of booking.com a surprisingly reasonably priced apartment in Geneva for the night of Monday 13th July. It also meant that we spent one night in Switzerland, instead of just driving through it. The journey to Geneva was pretty uneventful, there was a border checkpoint but the Swiss lady officer waved away my offer of our passports after a quick look through the window and a cheery ‘ah die familie’. Apparently their main worry is folk trying to smuggle Swiss grapes out!? All the motorway signs changed from blue to green, we started driving through loads of tunnels and the Alps could be seen in the distance. To drive on the Swiss motorways a ‘vignette’ is required which we’d purchased at a service station in Germany near the border, it costs €40 for 14 months, which seemed cheap later when we kept getting stung with French tolls. A lot of road repairs seemed to taking place, as in Germany, but the delays were thankfully much briefer. It seemed strange to get out at two different service stations in the same country to different languages being spoken. Firstly German, then French. About 5pm-ish we rolled into the very busy city of Geneva, Tom Tom taking us straight to the door of our apartment block, but it was a further hour spent going around in circles before we found a parking spot a couple of streets away. I wasn’t too happy at leaving Trish there, but we had little choice. The apartment was in the Paquis district which was packed with some very colourful characters, including many ‘ladies of the night’ and their minders, except that they were there at all times of day, including 9am the next morning. The ‘surprisingly reasonable price’ was starting to make more sense. It was a challenge trying to answer the kids, ever observant, when Abbie asked ‘why is that lady still standing there’ about a particular woman who she’d noticed was in the same spot when we returned from our evening meal as she was when we were walking to the restaurant. After a lovely Thai meal just up the road from our apartment, paid for with the very colourful Swiss Franc notes, we all turned in for a very comfortable and roomy nights sleep, me with some worries about how Trish would cope through the night, and whether we’d find her on bricks with the bikes and bike rack gone in the morning. I needn’t have worried; at 9:10am (the parking expired at 9am) we found her and the bikes untouched , unticketed and in fine fettle. After re-parking on the Lake front we had a quick croissant for brekkie and went on a short water taxi ride on one of the ‘yellow seagulls’ already paid for by the city tax that Jack & I had to pay, apparently they deem 5 year olds too young & innocent to tax. By 11am were en route to the Rhone Alps.

Rue de Sismondi, Geneva. View from our apt.

Croisant & banana for brekkie, two hungry explorers tucking in by the Lake

On one of the 'Mouettes Genevoises'; yellow Lake taxis

View of the Lake from the water taxi

Post boat trip, Abs relishes an ice cream. Chocolat, what else?

View of the Lake from a lakeside cafe

Horb am Neckar, Germany

Fri, 10 Jul 2015 16:00:00 +0200

If the journey from Hoek Van Holland to Dortmund, Sunday 5th July, was a breeze, the journey from Dortmund to Horb Am Neckar in the Black Forest, can only be described as pretty tedious. What Tom Tom said was no more than a 5 hour journey took 8. Granted we had to detour from Roya’s flat in the ‘burbs to Dortmund Centrum to see a certain Mr Richter. After confidently filling up on LPG in Holland, I’d discovered, while stood on a petrol station forecourt in Duisburg staring at the Autogas nozzle, that the hose connector in Germany was quite different to that in the UK and Holland. They use the ACME (like Tom & Jerry, no pun intended) connector, as opposed to the bayonet used in the UK. A quick Google revealed France had yet another system; somewhat appropriately, given their love of food, named ‘le dish’. Despite not speaking a word of English, and my Germish (as Jack appropriately calls it) comprising mainly copious Dankeschons interspersed with ‘smashing!’ & ‘cheers!’, Mr Richter not only sorted us with the German ACME adapter, but also the French ‘le dish’, plus a full tank of LPG. So after an hours delay we were on our way south, but the German Autobahn turned out to be far removed from the ‘envy of the world’ transport system it’s made out to be. To start with, surprisingly only about 50% of the Autobahn we traveled on was three lane, the other 48% being two lane and about 2% near Frankfurt four lane. Then, despite it being the height of the summer hols, there were constant roadworks, it felt like every 5km, much of it with lanes closed off but no sight of a workman anywhere. I promise never to complain about UK roads again! Finally we reached Horb am Neckar, a picture postcard Schwarzwald town and our campsite, some 150m above it. The campsite is absolutely pristine, the staff very friendly and almost all speak good English. Until tonight (Sun 12th July) we were the only English speaking folk on the site, almost all campers German, the odd Dutch and us. I say until tonight as a couple of Irish kids suddenly appeared playing with Jack & Abs and after an incident in our pop top roof with the little Irish girl getting entangled in the fly paper and screaming her head off, I felt obliged to apologise to her parents and found myself in the midst of about 20 very smart caravans, and equally smart cars,in their own private cordoned off field; a fully fledged Irish traveller community in the midst of the Black Forest. I felt rather like a Red (oops- Native American) Indian in the middle of the wagon circle, many came out of caravans to size up the invaders. Explanation and apology seemed to be accepted graciously, but I've stuck the Parachute Regiment sticker that came with the van, back in the windscreen. I'd removed it to avoid becoming an IS/Al Qaeda target, mind you what am I thinking? Bloody Sunday and all that......... Anyway, and maybe just as well, we’re off tomorrow to Geneva for an unscheduled stop on our way to the Rhone Alps. Journey time was predicted as 10 hours, I didn’t fancy that turning into 15 so we’ve broken it in two with a stay at a surprisingly very reasonably priced apartment 300m from the Lake. Thanks Booking.com! The time here has been fantastic, 30+ deg, swimming, cycling, great meals & beer at the camp restaurant. If German Autobahns aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, who knows what the Swiss roads will be like? Maybe Swiss clocks aren’t the horologist’s dream they’re made out to be either? Auf Wiedersehen Germany, Bonjour Geneva.

The pool at Freizeitpark Camping Schüttehof, Horb am Neckar, Black Forest

Trish, at repose, Freizeitpark Camping Schüttehof

Real 'chicken nuggets', breast meat freshly cooked in golden breadcrumbs

A half litre (or two) of Alpirsbacher Klosterbräu Spezial is well deserved after a hard day by the pool....

Abs emerging from Trish into the glorious day

Jack in matching khaki trousers & 'legionnaires hat'; can't be too careful in this heat!

Horb am Neckar town from a vantage point just below the campsite

The 'Corbar Kids' on a wee bike ride in the Schwarzwald

Yes, these are Highland Cattle, apparently imported to the BlackForest in 1978

Jack the Lad after some mud (well sand) wrestling!

Dortmund, Germany

Sun, 05 Jul 2015 22:00:00 +0200

After a smooth punctual ferry crossing and a much needed shower in the cabin we got cheap after boarding, we had a good drive through Holland to Dortmund. There aren't even any signs to indicate that you've crossed from The Netherlands to Germany; just the speed limit disappearing from the sat nav! 4 enjoyable days spent with Roya & Minu, packed with guided tours of local sights, many parks and an outdoor pool & BBQ. Hospitality at its best :)

Abs in Minu's 'Elsa dress'

Some swinging fun in the 'Phoenix See' park, Dortmund

Jumping into the outdoor pool, Dortmund

A guided tour kindly arranged by our hostess, (or was it brainwashing? :) ), of Westfalen Stadion, the home of Borussia Dortmund

Jack in the press area

Me & kids in the home team changing room

Abs, Minu & Roya

The kids with the club mascot;

Harwich, United Kingdom

Sat, 04 Jul 2015 15:00:00 +0100

Wolverhampton, United Kingdom

Sat, 04 Jul 2015 03:00:00 +0100

Oldmeldrum

Fri, 03 Jul 2015 18:00:00 +0100

Not a great start, set off at 4pm and fought through te Aberdeen rush hour traffic, then remembered I'd left my driving license in my 'other' wallet. Returned home and set off again at 6pm. Drove until 3am through some spectacular storms and crashed out in a services near Birmingham at 3am Sat morning.