The trip from Kristiansand in Norway to Hirtshals in Denmark on the 27th July on Fjordline’s catamaran only took two and a half hours and was uneventful. We reached the camping site near Haderslev, Denmark after about four hours and we were glad we hadn’t booked a holiday there like so many of the other campers with fixed sites as the rural odours of the countryside were a bit much!
We continued early the next day to Lubeck to spend a few days with friends. Katrin one of our friends surprised us with a trip down the Kiel canal (of great interest for years to Maurice) on a paddle steamer complete with a wonderful lunch. It was a long day as there was only one loch in working condition so we went around and around in circles in Kiel harbour for three hours before we could continue into the loch and down the canal to Rendsburg. We got back to Lubeck about 10pm and after starting out at 6.45am. It made for a long but very enjoyable day and the weather was good, about 30 degrees and the sun was shining.
We detoured on the 31st July to Dollern (east of Hamburg) on the way down to Holland to have lunch with friends and then continued to Mander where we spent the night before driving on to see the towns of Gouda and Delft and then on to Hoek von Holland to catch the ferry on the 1st August to Harwich. There seemed to be an inordinate amount of traffic in Holland especially around the spaghetti junctions near Utrecht and Rotterdam.
We arrived into Harwich and went straight to Hitchin where we spent a couple of days getting minor things fixed at the caravan company where we bought our motorhome.
Over the next few days we caught up with Maurice’s niece in London and our friends in the Chilterns and had a nice day out on the Thames on our friend’s boat. The weather was kind to us and we had a mostly sunny day.
We had wanted to visit Bath to see the Roman Baths in particular. The two hour trip took us nearly four hours with many delays on the highways and we then drove around looking for a parking spot (none to be had) and somehow also managed to get into the pedestrian area with thousands of tourists wandering around. We decided to head away when we eventually found our way out of town and continued on to Stroud to meet up with a friend we made in Bali. We were not so disappointed as we decided to go back to Bath another day. We spent a couple of hours chatting with our friend and then headed for the campsite between Cheltenham and Gloucester.
We were going to continue up to the Lakes district however the weather turned foul so we decided to stay put and instead visit
that area for a few days.
Five pounds (56p to the dollar) got us a day ticket to visit both Gloucester and Cheltenham and the bus stop was directly outside the camping site. We spent most of the day in the Gloucester visiting the Cathedral with it’s magnificent architecture and sculptures inside and out. It was to date the most beautiful cathedral we had visited. We went past the house where Beatrix Potter of the Tales of Gloucester fame lived. She was one of my favourite storytellers as a child and still is.
The sunshine was warm as we walked to the renovated docks area which had a very good shopping centre and many cafes and one with particularly good coffee. From there we caught the bus to Cheltenham and walked around the pretty town doing a bit of shopping. There were no such amazing landmarks there but interesting buildings and lovely gardens and a very impressive Municipal building with scores of beautiful hanging baskets and an ornate fountain in front of it.
Cheltenham had a distinctive English feel about it, different from many other towns in England now with it’s multi cultural population.
On Tuesday we decided to travel the hour back to Bath and this time we found a park and ride just ten minutes by bus from the centre of town. The Roman Baths had the only hot spring in the UK so we hurried there before the masses arrived. We were early enough and were
amazed at the amount of excavation and restoration done in that area which is in the middle of town. There is apparently much more to excavate however the foundations of the buildings above the ruins have to be made stable before they can attempt any further work.
Bath had such interesting architecture and was larger than I thought with many impressive Georgian buildings and rows of townhouses, many churches, monuments and beautifully sculptured gardens. The river meanders around the town and the hills surrounding it made for an interesting looking landscape.
We had to try a “Bath Bun” so went to an establishment called “Sally Lunn’s Historic eating house and museum” which is over 300years old.
The round slightly sweet toasted bread bun with jam and clotted cream was delicious.
There were thousands of tourists in town who all dispersed quickly when it started to rain rather heavily. This continued
throughout the day interspersed with bouts of sunshine. We visited the house where Jane Austin lived and where she wrote her many novels.
The lush crops were about to be or had been harvested in the various counties we visited with bales of hay lying in the fields and a procession of tractors with trailer loads of hay being transported around the countryside. It made for a beautiful patchwork of green, yellow and brown landscape everywhere.
We saw huge fields of hops around herefordshire, most hidden behind tall hedges.
We left our good campsite of “Briarfields” near Cheltenham and wound our way along the backroads and across undulating fields
to near Chedsworth to see the best example of the ruins of a vast Roman Villa which was discovered by a gamekeeper who found
small mosaic tiles while out ferreting in 1864. The site lay buried since 360AD but has since been protected as a heritage site.
We headed to North Wales throught the Cotswolds and the counties of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Wiltshire to spend night
at a rural campsite 10minutes from the ferry terminal at Holyhead. We had an early start (before 6am) so as to get to the
terminal for a 8.55am sailing to Dublin. Once at the ferry terminal and after the usual check in and passport checks there was always more than an hour’s wait so I used this time to write the blog and sort photos.
The Welsh sound like the Swedes on steroids. Most of their signs are unpronouncable and luckily most have English subtitles.
We saw a lovely sign on a deliver van with the stores name “Wing Ho” and underneath “All the Chinese you need to know” Very clever!
We arrived into Dublin port after the two and a half hour crossing and Ireland gave us it’s usual welcome with some heavy rain although travelling on the highways there was very easy with very little traffic as we made our way across to Ballivor in County Meath to visit friends. I cooked an Indonesian meal for thirty people one night and it was nice to have a large kitchen to prepare the meal.
Everyone we spoke to said that up to the time we arrived the weather had been good but it rapidly changed into Autumn weather with heavy winds, rain and it got cold enough to have to wear several layers and
raincoats again. It didn’t matter much as we were visiting friends and family for the two weeks we were there. We helped celebrate three birthdays, two in Dublin and one in Wexford as well as having our routine health check ups. Maurice had managed to break a tooth when he nearly knocked himself out and cut his head back in Tallinn so he had that repaired as well.
Good as new we drove down for the night to another of Maurice’s cousins who has a house surrounded by fields and cows near Avoca in County Wicklow. It is a beautiful part of the country with rolling hills and quaint villages. She took us to “Kilmacurragh” the National Botanic gardens in Wicklow where many exotic trees and plants from the Himalayas and South America had been planted by the Acton family in the 18th century.
Unfortunately most of the family and their gardeners died during the first world war and after changing hands a few times was given to the National gardens in 1996. It was very overgrown and it took nearly four years to clear the site and find many of the exotic trees and shrubs in the garden. There was also a Japanese cedar tree which looked like a clump of trees and which had an amazing root structure around which we walked. It was like something out of “Lord of the Rings”.
The following morning after breakfast we drove the hour down via
Kilmuckrigde to visit our friend from Ballivor who had rented a holiday cottage by the seaside there with some of her family. In the afternoon we drove an hour to Wexford where we spent a few days visiting old and new friends.
We stayed at the campsite on the Irish sea and were rocked at night by the very strong winds. We went back to Kilmuckridge to spend the night with our friends and then headed for Rosslare on the 29th August after saying our goodbyes to friends in Wexford to take the
overnight ferry to Roscoff on the southern French coast.