Eileen’s Last Days In Europe

Travel requires time and movement. We’ve got the movement, but have we got the time?

 

We woke up on Friday morning to hear the alarming news that Britain had voted to leave Europe; let’s hope they can survive this decision.  I’m finding it sad to think that there are so many people in Britain who have voted to cut ties with their closest allies and create tension and discord with mainland Europe.  Mid-morning, the Austrian campers parked next to us saw our English number plate and asked if we knew the result and when we told them, they too were shocked to think that Britain ‘hated them’ this much.  At this point we pulled out our Australian tea towel and hung it in the window, in case we encountered any Europeans who might be overly angered by the British rejection.

 

First thing on Saturday, we wove our way north through the Black Forest to Baden-Baden and parked in the overnight stellplatz (aires) just 3kms from the city centre near Oos-scheuern.  The bicycles were prepped and off we went to find out if this town was “so good they named it twice”.  There are a lot of classy hotels, a huge and expensive spa and lots of swish shops; Rodney refused to buy me the €4,570 Chopard sunglasses, he didn’t think they would suit me?  It seems to be the sort of town where one wears that sort of thing, not the ones I bought in Boots The Chemist.

 

We followed in the footsteps of Queen Victoria by strolling the Lichtentaler Allee, a riverside promenade, then ate lunch while the sun was shining.  We peeked into the 19th C Kurhaus and Casino, rummaged in an ‘antik’ market in the Trinkhalle and then a monstrous dark cloud appeared behind us and the rain smashed down.  Getting wet in Baden- Baden is easy and you don’t have to pay $500 at a fancy spa.  We managed to remain dry for a while, standing under the awning outside Versace and Missoni, and we waited and waited.  Rodney fell asleep perched on the windowsill of Chopard, causing the old lady sheltering next to him to move to a window further down when he started snoring; my husband can fall asleep anywhere.  I watched the raindrops for nearly an hour and then we decided that it wasn’t letting up anytime soon and we might as well get to the bikes and cycle back to Eileen.  Big storms small problems make, or should I say big storms make problems for your smalls; my underwear was soaked through.

 

 

Sunday was another day of confudlement.  We set off from Germany, after a good chat with a couple from Eastbourne who desperately wanted to talk to us because they adore Eileen’s breed of campervan.  We offered them a good price, but they have only just bought their bigger van and were on their first trip into Europe with it.   We quickly crossed into France and before long into Germany, we dipped back into France and back into Germany.  We followed this by crossing Luxembourg and coming out the other side into Belgium.

All in all, it was a good day’s drive of 370kms, apart from a section between Saarbrucken and Merzig.  We thought the hold-up was an accident where a silver Rolls Royce had somehow driven into the back of a white BMW.  But it turned out, there was still a hold up after the collision.  We crawled for about 40 minutes only to find the police had blocked the motorway and were allowing all vehicles through a gap, one at a time, at 20kmph.  Goodness knows what they were doing, there were cars and police everywhere and a lot of German soccer supporters looking peeved with the obstruction, because they were urgently trying to get to a big international soccer match in Lille.

Across the flatter agricultural areas insects constantly immolated themselves against Eileen’s windscreen; a little disappointing after Rodney had done such a lovely job of cleaning and polishing her, though probably far more ‘disappointing’ to the insects…. In the fields, cows toiled away at what seems to be their only job in life; eating. And we tootled along until we pulled off the motorway to Les Roches in Rochefort.    The rain came down, the sun came out, the rain came down, etc., etc. and we wiled away the rest of the day chilling out and plotting a route to Calais for Monday.  In the evening, Rodney wandered into the town centre to watch the Belgium v Hungary soccer match on a big screen, along with a couple of hundred noisy Belgian fans.  It’s always nice when you find a campsite that is close to a town and not a couple of miles out.  But when the European Champions Soccer Cup is happening, it’s not the best place to be when the home team wins and they continue to celebrate in to the wee small hours.  Ah well, they were happy noisy Belgians, though I bet some of them were sore headed Belgians on Monday morning.

We set off again before 9am after our last cooked breakfast in Eileen.  Having made the decision to sell our beloved Eileen, we feel like we’re on a countdown of the last of this and the last of that, which is making us both a bit glum and not full of fun in our last days of travelling.

It was a grey day when we set off and still grey with a few showers all the way past Namur, Charleroi (yes there were plenty of ghostly white cows), Mons, Lille and St Omer towards Calais.   Apart from the cows, there really wasn’t much to see across the flat land of southern Belgium and into France.  We played spot-the-funny-place-names and made note of: Champion (very appropriate for today in Belgium), Spy, St Denis (is he, Rosie?), Manage, Nimy, Chin and Loos and we’ve ended up in Camping Pommiers Des Trois in Liques.  The sun came out for a while and made me fall asleep in my chair; will that be the last time I sit in my tatty old chair?  Just this one last campsite in Europe and then we’ll be doing our very own Brexit to Dover on Tuesday.

 

This year’s trip came up just short of €200 on motorway tolls and four ferries.  There were plenty of campsite fees, a bit of gas and rather a lot of diesel for Eileen.  Too much rain, a lot of lows and some very good highs.  And finally, this is The End…….again.

Auntie Eileen, who left Rodney an inheritance which paid for our campervan, hence her being named ‘Eileen The Campervan’, would have celebrated her 104^th birthday on Tuesday 28 June 2016.  And here we are sailing from Europe back to England for the very last time on such an auspicious day.  Happy birthday and thank you Eileen, both of you, for so much fun these last five years.

                                                   This was journey’s end, but not the end of journeying