Thursday, June 14, 2007
Le Pays-Bas…
Always enjoyed that being read out on Eurovision as a youngster. Who am I kidding? I maybe watched it twice…ah, the great Johnny Logan! Anyway…
The Banana Bus sports three stickers up the back end. He (I’m certain my bus is male) proudly proclaims to have been to Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Mind you, there’s also this metal plate on the tailgate and I’m fairly sure the camper hasn’t been there.
How and ever, it must be said that I’d really like to get the van to these “exotic” destinations one day. I’ve never been one for collecting those wee triangular-pennant type stickers for places one’s visited but I reckon if the van’s previous owners HAD filled the windows with them, I’d probably have some strange desire to return there with the bus. As it is, I find myself wondering whether we’d make it to such far flung destinations.
Last year, I investigated the – fiendishly cunning – idea of visiting them as part of a round trip. We’d take the ferry overnight from, of all places, Aberdeen into Sweden (or maybe it was Bergen in Norway). Then, having negotiated the upper reaches of Scandinavia, we would drop down into St. Petersburg before motoring into Poland and Germany before hitting the aforementioned “low countries” en route to La Belle France and finally homeward.
Wouldn’t you just know it? The ferry company only withdrew the Aberdeen – Scandinavia service. The cads. The alternative, I think, is to head for Scandinavia via Hull or some other such equally glamorous ferry port. I know for a fact – without even checking Multimap – that Hull is the best part of 8 hours away from us by car. Gail’s big sister and her family (she of the Pedlars Plates) live in East Lincolnshire, not too far from the Humber. Goodness only knows how long the bus might take to make that trip. The more sedate four or five hours to Aberdeen, whilst hillier, certainly involves far fewer miles and takes into account that all-important fuel economy: i.e. it being pants, we don’t want to drive too many unnecessary miles!
If it turns out that the only way to do it is indeed to head south to the wilds of Beautiful South territory then that’s what we’ll have to do. “Have to do” hah! Of course, one simply must takes one’s van off to the continent. Why it’s virtually compulsory. Not this year though…we’re off to Ireland again.
I was going to leave it there and say “of which more later” and all that but I feel I can’t stop without mentioning one of the main reasons for heading back to the Emerald Isle: we had the most fantastic scones and coffee in a café on the site of the signalman’s hut for the first ever transatlantic telegraph cable in Valentia Island, Co. Kerry. It only opens for 4 days a week, 3 months of the year…we’ll just have to time it right.
Ridiculous? Moi?
Always enjoyed that being read out on Eurovision as a youngster. Who am I kidding? I maybe watched it twice…ah, the great Johnny Logan! Anyway…
The Banana Bus sports three stickers up the back end. He (I’m certain my bus is male) proudly proclaims to have been to Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Mind you, there’s also this metal plate on the tailgate and I’m fairly sure the camper hasn’t been there.
How and ever, it must be said that I’d really like to get the van to these “exotic” destinations one day. I’ve never been one for collecting those wee triangular-pennant type stickers for places one’s visited but I reckon if the van’s previous owners HAD filled the windows with them, I’d probably have some strange desire to return there with the bus. As it is, I find myself wondering whether we’d make it to such far flung destinations.
Last year, I investigated the – fiendishly cunning – idea of visiting them as part of a round trip. We’d take the ferry overnight from, of all places, Aberdeen into Sweden (or maybe it was Bergen in Norway). Then, having negotiated the upper reaches of Scandinavia, we would drop down into St. Petersburg before motoring into Poland and Germany before hitting the aforementioned “low countries” en route to La Belle France and finally homeward.
Wouldn’t you just know it? The ferry company only withdrew the Aberdeen – Scandinavia service. The cads. The alternative, I think, is to head for Scandinavia via Hull or some other such equally glamorous ferry port. I know for a fact – without even checking Multimap – that Hull is the best part of 8 hours away from us by car. Gail’s big sister and her family (she of the Pedlars Plates) live in East Lincolnshire, not too far from the Humber. Goodness only knows how long the bus might take to make that trip. The more sedate four or five hours to Aberdeen, whilst hillier, certainly involves far fewer miles and takes into account that all-important fuel economy: i.e. it being pants, we don’t want to drive too many unnecessary miles!
If it turns out that the only way to do it is indeed to head south to the wilds of Beautiful South territory then that’s what we’ll have to do. “Have to do” hah! Of course, one simply must takes one’s van off to the continent. Why it’s virtually compulsory. Not this year though…we’re off to Ireland again.
I was going to leave it there and say “of which more later” and all that but I feel I can’t stop without mentioning one of the main reasons for heading back to the Emerald Isle: we had the most fantastic scones and coffee in a café on the site of the signalman’s hut for the first ever transatlantic telegraph cable in Valentia Island, Co. Kerry. It only opens for 4 days a week, 3 months of the year…we’ll just have to time it right.
Ridiculous? Moi?
Labels: eurovision, ferry, hull, le pays-bas, scandinavia
