From Cairo to the Connemara: A Sojournal

 Pt3 - 6 THE NETHERLANDS 13 th – 15 th July   It began happily enough, but our time in the Netherlands was cut short by a rookie lapse in concentration with consequences which would ripple through the rest of the trip. We crossed the border on the A1. From here it was all of two and a half hours to Amsterdam, during which we didn’t see a single wild windmill. What we did see were miles of flat, featureless green pastures and soggy looking waterways. It was love at first sight with Dutch road signs: Let Op  Drempels looks endearingly like it was tapped out blindly by a kid pretending to be a really fast typist. The weather was warm and pleasant enough for camping so we dedicated ourselves to finding somewhere on the public transport network not too far from the city. We signed in to Gaasperplas, a campground just off the A9 on the south-east fringe of Amsterdam. Night would reveal the rich ironies of the name, but in the meantime we pitched the tent and got our...

      Pt3 - 5: NORTHERN GERMANY 7 th July – 13 th July   The weather was resolutely Transylvanian as we left the suburbs of Prague behind and pointed the bullet in the general direction of Berlin. We approached the border north of Teplice through heavy rain. Here, the road climbed steeply into a range of classically conical hills, like the hills kids draw. With the altitude came a scything wind that occasionally had the bullet dancing on the corners. We crossed the frontier at a burg called Windblastedstadt, or something like that, where the stunted and busted trees whipped around in a force 10 maelstrom. We hung a left at Bad Dipsydorf (sic) south of Dresden and ended up overnighting at Machen near Leipzig in the former East Germany. The campground was very peaceful, with a lake and manicured gardens and birds singing in the trees, a welcome relief from the mad turbulence of the journey up. The low cloud burned off soon after we left Machen. Tess drove the...

 PT3 - 4: CZECH REPUBLIC 3 rd July – 7 th July   Back home I wouldn’t think twice about driving 5 – 600 kilometres in a day, even more if necessary. But in Europe? Two hundred and fifty’s about par. Apart from the fact there’s a village every five minutes, there’s the sheer amount of foreign language signage, speed limits changing rapidly and regularly, constantly cycling anticlockwise through  the  mirrors, pedestrians, local traffic, left-hand driving through unfamiliar terrain while trying to follow sketchy directions, sorting your A roads from your B roads from your toll ways, your eintrags from your ausfahrts . Getting out of Vienna was a minor nightmare and I was already mildly stressed when we joined the A22 north to Stockerau.   The further we travelled away from Vienna the more serene the countryside and my mindset changed with it. The plains unfolded endlessly, seemingly pinned to the milky sky by the hundreds of random church spires piercing...

 Pt3 - 3: AUSTRIA 29 th June – 3 rd July   Jürgen presented us with a pair of monogrammed Hacker-Pschorr beer glasses as a souvenir of our stay, a gift he assured us he didn’t bestow on just anyone. We’ll miss the good cheer of Wartaweil, although I left the place with a hangover visible from space. The trip to Salzburg on the autobahn took five hours. Actually, it was more like a race. The expressways here are literally express , with speeds limited only to what your car can do. The bullet hummed along sweetly at a hundred and twenty clicks, disturbed only by the slipstreams of luxury marques whispering past at about mach 2. Big black Mercs with heavily tinted windows regularly loomed up in the rear view mirror then blurred by and were gone in a blink, leaving us to rock back and forth in their wake. There were so many of them you’d be forgiven for thinking there was a mafia convention up ahead. And lo, a miracle occurred as we approached the Austrian frontier – i...

  Pt3 - 2: SOUTHERN GERMANY 23 rd – 28 th June   If it’s Sunday it must be Germany. There was nobody to gestampen our passports as we crossed the Rhine on the autobahn to Freiburg. From there we swung east into the heart of the Black Forest, which lived up to its name. By now the rain had set in again and even though it was only mid-afternoon it was dark enough to flick the headlights on. We wound through steep moody hills covered in dense stands of symmetrically straight pines; you half expected the Big Bad Wolf to chase Red Riding Hood across the road. By the time we arrived at Seerbrugg on the eastern tip of the Schluchsee the showers had developed into a biblical deluge which sounded like rocks on the roof of the silver bullet. We pulled into a carpark on the lake and sat in a cold grey silence watching the water sluice down the windscreen. This is supposed to be summer for christ’s sake! We could have this weather much more cheaply back in bloody Bridgetown and fo...