Road Trip Europe stage 2
Anyone that has done any writing of any sort will know that losing what you have written can be very frustrating. But, having written all of this twice has made me realise just how good this trip is and how much fun we really are having. I had hoped to have this one out before New Zealand Christmas Day, and I would have if I had saved it correctly, so it’s a few days late but MERRY CHRISTMAS to everyone from Lisbon, Portugal. Here is how we got here. We spent two nights in Cesky Krumlov. It’s a medieval walled city in the south of the Czech Republic. It is unique in that the river wraps almost completely around the old town. It’s that feature that has preserved the old town from development over the centuries and it really is a pretty example of an old town with walls and an impressive palace and castle to round off the trifecta. We could have toured inside the palace, but it would have been the same things from a different owner I’m afraid. We were also not alone at Cesky Krumlov the day we toured around. We had the company of at least a dozen busloads of tourists from around the world and the surrounding hotels were all full each night, even with subzero temperatures to deal with. We went for a day trip to Austria the next day. We visited a city called Linz which is on the Danube River (this river runs from Germany through 10 countries, more than any other European river!) and visited the science park ARS Electronica Centre. It’s a museum of the future, sort of like MOTAT but smaller and only for new technology. It’s all about collaboration when it comes to science and technology and Austria is an amazing country for this. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Hungary and Slovakia to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west. Talk about rowdy neighbors. When we return to Europe we will be exploring the eastern end of Austria. We’re looking forward to that. Our next stop was our much-anticipated visit to my cousin Nicola and her family, David and Noemie. The last time I visited David and Nicola, they were living free and easy in a Munich apartment with VIP passes to all the local night clubs. What a difference Noemie has made and now they are living in an amazing, quiet, child friendly village west of Munich. This village really is right out of a story book. It has a forest to pass through that comes out at a picture-perfect village complete with church and clock tower with a river running right along the edge. They live in a house that is so old no one really knows when it was first built. Thankfully it’s been renovated since the 1400’s and is now a modern comfortable home that made it hard for us to leave. (oh, did I mention they have 2 cats…. miss you Blackie) We parked the car outside their house. The car was in a spot that meant a lot of locals drove past it in and out of the village. Let’s face it, it’s an awesome looking adventure car! It looks set for anything and having some fire wood strapped to the roof just says ‘TAKE ME OUT NOW’ David and Nicola became the talk of the village and everyone wanted to know what the story behind the ‘Sehr schones Abenteuer Fahrzeug’ was. During the days before Christmas the village has many functions with different activities at different houses. It was a great insight into a completely different way of looking at Christmas. I feel like in New Zealand, it’s all about one event, Christmas day. Through most of central Europe, Christmas is a near month long event that involves a lot of talking to family, friends and neighbors and drinking hot wine in the town square. Pre-Christian involvement, the mid-winter celebrations were all about getting people out of the home to re connect with the rest of the village. What we started in Berlin with Katja and continued in Munich with David and Nicola was refreshing and fun. We felt so Christmassy we had an early Christmas dinner, Kiwi style. We had a homemade mince n cheese pie with pavlova and whipped cream for desert. It’s about as kiwi as it gets I can tell you and the mince n cheese took me back that’s for sure, thanks Christine! The Christmas spirit didn’t stop there! Nicola started to make us a special Christmas tree for the car and kindly had one of her friends in the village, Natasha, finished it for her. It’s great and now hangs from the rear-view mirror (when I don’t need to see the sat nav) and reminds us that Christmas is coming even though it doesn’t feel like it. While we were staying with David and Nicola we were treated to the best tourist attractions that southern Germany has to offer. We went to the most amazing castle that inspired Walt Disney to build the famous Disney Castle in California. The real thing is way better (having seen both). It was built by King Ludwig II when he ruled over Bavaria. It’s a bit of a sad story in the end as he never lived in the new castle and died under strange circumstances not leaving an heir or Queen. The new home was never completely finished and although it looks complete on the outside, it has only one finished room and one kitchen. Ludwig stayed one night only and this is how it now remains. We did tour through the castle his dad, King Maximilian I rebuilt and lived in for many years. Incredibly both these castles are still owned by the family and remained untouched during both European wars last century and really look like they will go another few 100 years. We also went to the highest peak in Germany. What a trip! It really is testament to the engineering skills of the Germans. We first went on a cog train through more than 5kms of tunnel to a ski area that is located right on a glacier in a basin just below this peak. When I say ‘ski area’, don’t forget we arrived by train… it was large! Chair lifts everywhere, cafés and restaurants… We were then bundled into a very large gondola that took us to the very top of the mountain. This was not a wide flat top, rather a pointed rocky peak that had 2 large restaurants, 1 for the German side, 1 for the Austrian side (as this is also the border between the countries), weather stations and of course an ice skating rink (what else do you need at the top of your country’s highest peak) The first tourist building was completed in the late 1800’s when we in New Zealand were still struggling to build basic infrastructure. Wow We left David and Nicola’s place complete with treats from Natasha (you’re on this trip now Natasha) and headed to Liechtenstein. This country is only 25kms long! Its squeezed between Germany and Switzerland and is basically a private country that has a government with an actively involved prince... It’s really a complete blow out to read about these little places. They are largely a throw back to when the Holy Roman Empire broke up and several areas were granted ‘principalities’ and a few still remain. The Liechtenstein’s ‘purchased’ the land to gain a seat in the empire. It’s still in the family! All sorts of financial magic is performed in Liechtenstein to make money appear from nowhere and we came across an ATM that dispensed bitcoins in the corner of a gift shop. We drove around after sending a post card and before we knew it, we were in Switzerland. It was a climb up to the border and into the clouds we went. The 2 days we spent in Switzerland were pretty much a white out. The clouds eased up just before dark but in the morning, were a thick blanket which is how it remained until we popped out into France. We went to visit CERN which is right on the border between France and Switzerland. We took the free tour of the Atlas sensor, which is on the large collider. The facility is 27kms around and 100 metres’ underground! They started this carryon in the 1950’s and a city has grown up around the place that’s full of scientists driving small Citroens. It was interesting but not mind blowing. It excites some people more than others and the guy that lead our tour was a scientist that had been working on the same experiment for years and years. I like science, but it’s the same as liking bread. Doesn’t mean I need to like the baking part. For these scientists, what they are looking for is already all around us and they are looking for ways to detect and measure them. Then we could start to use them or do new things because we understand why they do what they do… Like I said, I like the technology it can create more than looking at how they discovered the science of it. Having said all that, it was cool to see the control room where they conducted the experiment that discovered the Higgs Bosun……whatever that is J We headed south through Switzerland and back into France. The next day really were the most amazing driving we have had on the trip. We headed towards Mont Blanc, the highest peak in Europe which is in France. That was when we headed towards Italy and underground. We spent the next hour travelling under and through the alps. When we weren’t in a tunnel we were on a viaduct. At one point, we exited a tunnel onto a viaduct that was 100’s of meters above the valley floor only to enter a tunnel into the next mountain. The scenery was amazing. The roads were also amazing and a feat of engineering. The only problem was all the way down the alps towards the Italian coast we had no stopping on the motorway. We would have loved to get more photos of the dramatic mountains and picturesque valleys. We first glimpsed Monaco when we were 1 bay away high up on the hillside above the country. The entire country is only around 2 square kms big and a lot of that has been reclaimed from the bay. It occupies just 1 bay on the coast and the roads down to the coast are very, very tight and narrow. We had to use both sides for some of the hairpin turns and we were by far the largest car around with most of the other cars on the road ‘micro’ size or small taxis. Even though its only 2 sq. km we managed to drive about 20kms around and around the place. We couldn’t find a parking building that could take our 2.15-meter clearance and street parking was completely out of the question as it is pretty much 100% reserved for residents. So even though we spent an hour or more in the country of Monaco we never managed to have a coffee on the waterfront and send a postcard as planned. We headed to Cannes for the night and the next day we went to yet another small country, Andorra. Andorra first popped up when the local people were gifted the country as a reward for fighting the Moors people in the 1200’s. It slipped through the cracks of change for the next 700 years due to the country’s isolation in a valley high up in the European alps, and has really only seen any change in the last 80 years. The entire country is only a little over 450 sq. km’s in size and is totally dependent on tourism for its income. They come for the skiing and duty free shopping. When we first started walking through the streets of El Pas de la Casa, I said to Christine it was like walking through an airport. Duty free everywhere and people were filling up! The car parks were full of shoppers filling their cars with booze and cigarettes. We didn’t see any sort of limits and some people has a dozen cartons of smokes and boxes of liquor. The ski field looked amazing and is open most of the year. Looks like a good place, skiing, cheap booze and smokes… hehe what more is there? What a fun place Barcelona is! We had 2 days in Barcelona where we stayed in a hostel right in the middle of the tourist area. It was very busy even though it rained most of the time and although we didn’t do too many of the usual tourist activities, we satisfied ourselves that we had seen the sights. Parking was again a problem though we did find a place that we could fit into. We had less than 10mm clearance between the roof tent and the carpark lighting. It was secure however and that’s what’s important. We travelled right across Spain spending two nights on the road before we entered our last European country, Portugal. We have an apartment in the city center that’s walking distance to all Lisbon city has to offer. The apartment was a lot more than we were expecting having booked just a hostel room with shared bathroom, we ended up with our own awesome place! Lisbon is very cheap compared to the rest of Europe and I can buy a coffee from the café 10 meters down the road for 50 eurocents. Hard to imagine we were paying €4.50 in Scandinavia! We are here for the next week at least. We are having some time off for our 10-year anniversary and of course Christmas day today… happy Christmas! Next week we will start to stock up on some of the items we will have trouble finding in Africa, the car needs an oil change and service and we will start the endless paperwork required to travel around Africa by car. The next update may be from the African Continent! Thanks to everyone for reading these blogs. 2016 has really been an amazing year for Christine and me but we feel that the adventure is only just to begin. Let’s face it. It’s easy to travel around Australia, USA and Europe. Things are a lot like home and we can adapt easily and quickly to the challenges and problems we are faced with. Africa is going to be very different. The people do not live the way we do and probably won’t speak any English and the conditions will be different to what we are used to. Everything from buying food, finding a toilet or getting an internet connection will be more challenging. We plan to take 12 months to get around Africa but many people have told us this will not be long enough. We have planned every step of the trip in Africa but we are still approaching the travel week by week for flexibility. Look out for our first blog in Africa. We are looking forward to Morocco.. Here we are in Prague, Czech Republic. It’s quite an amazing place and it ‘feels good’ here. We have been here for the last 3 nights, 1 more to go. Sort of like a holiday from our holiday, although we may have already had one of those... No don’t worry, we are not getting sick of it, we are actually just getting used to it. The trip to Prague was pretty uneventful, but here’s how we did it!
After we returned from Sweden we headed back to Amsterdam and the first stop was a place called the Hobby Hall. No, not to do puzzles and make quilts, but to do some work on the car. I found Hobby Hall with the help of I-Site Amsterdam. It’s a fully equipped workshop with 2 post hoists, welding gear, spray painting booths and general workshop areas and is available to the general public for an hourly rate. Before we headed off to Scandinavia I did the wiring and added an extra battery while Christine arranged the rear of the vehicle at the Hobby Hall. We spent 3 days there! This time we just wanted to unfold the tent and remove the ice and dry it some, and I wanted to redo some of the wiring I put in for the fridge and add a fuse to the inverter wiring. It’s a great place even though it’s a bit out of town. A lot of people don’t have houses with garages or even yards where they can work on cars, hence Hobby Hall, thanks guys! One of the great things about having friends that live in faraway countries is that every so often you can call in for a visit. If they live really far away, its best to call in as much as possible while you can because you never really know when you’re going to be able to just ‘call in’ again. So, due to this, we found ourselves back at Vanessa and Ants place ‘calling in’ hehe.. We really love you two and hope you will have had enough of a break from us before we call in again. It is invaluable to be able to see the locals side of any city, especially a city that has such a tourist presence that Amsterdam has. We saw the tourist attractions but having the time to visit the places that are full of everyday locals as well, is really fun and makes the trip quite different. Thanks for offering us the use of your lovely Amsterdam apartment. We loved staying in your city and all it had to offer. We headed off southish, down through Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany. While we were in Berlin we went to the Berlin wall memorial. It’s hard to understand the wall. They only just saved the little bit they did. The locals wanted it all gone and I don’t blame them. We also had an evening with Katja who we first met on the Appalachian Trail this year. Katja, under the trail name “Spacious” walked from Harpers Ferry, Virginia to the end of the trail at Mt Katahdin. We enjoyed some great catch up time from the days on the trail and Katja showed us around some of the East Berlin she grew up in. Katja knew only the half-walled city as a child but is now justifiably proud of her new city and country. It showed as she toured us around the areas that had changed in her neighborhood after the unification of the east and west Germanys. It was interesting that for her a thing that she remembers above most other things, when the wall came down, was the buildings in West Berlin were bright colors. In her East Berlin, the buildings were raw render or cement and grey. They had never been painted. She said she remembered that lots of the buildings were patched from bomb and bullet holes made during WW2 and remained that way until reunification in the 1980’s when investors developed, and sold, building after building. It was really great to catch up with you Katja and we wish we had more time. We are looking forward to seeing you and staying a bit longer after we have been to Africa. We made a visit to Auschwitz concentration camp which is in Oswiecim, Poland. I was really surprised at how much of the story they told at the camp. We had it taught to us in schools and we have all heard about the Jews that were put to death at the camps but the untold story for me was about the Polish and later what happened to the Germans. The Auschwitz death camp was originally built to exterminate the Polish people and more than one million Polish were killed by the Nazis. It was later in the war that they included the Jews. Altogether an unusual place and although we were two of the crowds that were there, it was strange to see so many people wanting to visit such a place. The other interesting point displayed at the site were stories about what happened to the German people after they lost the war. Of course, we don’t want to remember that either but I was always taught that 2 wrongs don’t make a right… We didn’t do a guided tour. We could have had someone tell us about what happened in gruesome detail but we already knew what happened at this place. It was terrible for this to have happened in modern times, more than just the fact that it happened. More than once I just found myself saying ‘what were they thinking’ to think they could exterminate an entire country of people. It’s amazing to think of nowadays and I hope that modern communications and a good solid media will stop this sort of thing happening again, but hang on… oh it already is in Syria. We then travelled to Slovakia for the night. It was our first taste of Eastern Europe and cheap prices. Hotel prices dropped by around two thirds and food by nearly three quarters. Diesel was down to around one euro a liter. We were paying over two euros per liter in Norway! Straight away we realized that English was not the easy second language that it is in central Europe and Scandinavia. Slovakia (and Czech Republic) are really new countries. Formed in the 80’s out of Czechoslovakia, they had the ‘velvet revolution’ and voted in a democratic government for the first time in generations. As countries go, they are doing really well. Low unemployment and good GDP. It is a very strange thought for me, having grown up on an island nation, that a new country could be formed and new borders be drawn up, and over there could be going to another country! Pretty normal for the Europeans though and they did it here and drew a line through the country. The night we spent in Slovakia, our car was broken in to!! They smashed the right rear window and of course the alarm went off and whoever it was fled without taking anything. They did however leave glass right through my ‘wardrobe’ on the back seat. I heard the thing go off at around 4am and went outside straight away. Hmmm I thought, I might have said ‘bugger’ once or twice. I stayed at the car and cleaned it up and taped some plastic over the hole. Then we were in Prague. We went and checked in to our apartment and then went to the local Toyota dealer who had to order the glass in from Gent, Belgium where they have the Toyota European warehouse. Gent is the same city that Volvo has the main parts warehouse too so I have waited for parts from Gent before. We found some secure parking just on the outskirts of the city to leave the car with a taped-up hole where a window was and waited for the glass to arrive. We only had to wait one extra day than we had planned to stay in Prague but it is a really nice place to wait a while. Prague is very pretty. It has no high-rise buildings, even in the CBD they are around 8 or 9 stories max. In the suburbs and the old city, the buildings are all very ornate and have a lot of elaborate plaster work and statues or verandas with pillars. It’s a complete contrast to what we saw in Germany (so far) and Poland where the buildings were very dull and utilitarian. We did more walking around Prague than any city so far. It was not all flat but it was always nice and interesting. When we arrived at our accommodation we picked up a map and city guide produced by locals. It was how to be like a local and not look like a tourist while seeing all Prague has to offer. Ended up being a good guide. One of the things in the ‘never do’ section was don’t go to the Palladium shopping mall, it’s too busy, they say. We thought it would be an ideal place to get a few supplies like new undies and a new toothbrush. It was like St Lukes mall except it has 4 floors of it. We found what we needed and did a good long mall walk for fitness. Hehe. We also went to the big old castle by walking over the 600-year-old bridge. It’s a silver lining of the communist era that they did look after the big old buildings and castles and the Prague Castle is in really good condition. There is an amazing collection of palaces and government buildings in an amazing setting on a hill looking over the river as it runs through the city. If it wasn’t 0 degrees C we would have stayed longer. We know we are never going to see everything but it would have been nice to see more of Czech Republic, we are going south to Cesky Krumlov but there is so much more... We headed off from Amsterdam somewhat tentatively. Are we ready? Do we have all the things we need?? When you are driving around the world, google has no checklist to follow, and if they did it may be country or car specific. We didn’t know for sure if we were ready but here we are at the first hotel stop and this is only because it is minus lots and snowing outside at the moment and we didn’t want to sleep out in it!
We have a plan, or I should say HAD as it went out the window in the first few days. The plan was to travel first to Sweden and drive up the coast road stopping every few hours to take in the beautiful scenery and relax a little before we push on to the picturesque campsite waiting for us an easy days drive apart… all the way around the world! ha ha ha ha ROFL. In truth, so far is has been far from that. Let me tell you how it’s been to date. We had planned an early morning escape from Vanessa’s place in Amsterdam but with the last-minute shopping and the really important things called ‘mucking around’ we didn’t end up getting away from Amsterdam until around 3 pm. I thought we should have had another go the next day but we pushed on like the troopers we are. We spent our first night at a camping ground that was closed… well they closed that day, and said we could stay as technically they were open till midnight. They promised not to kick us out till the next day. At this point we should have got the idea and did like the birds did and head south. The next day we headed up to Germany and the autobahn. If I didn’t have a roof rack and a 100kg tent on the back I would have given her a bit of welly but I left that to the Audi and BMW drivers that were passing us as if we were stopped! That night we stayed at another camping ground/camper van place and paid by honesty box as the owner was on holiday in Spain (joke, but you might see a pattern) The days are short up here at the moment and the sun set today at 3:10pm so we are arriving to the campground in what feels like the middle of the night. Sunrise is around 7:40 and I am having big problems laying around till that hour as well..! Christine on the other hand is loving the lie in. So, Sweden. We entered the country from Denmark (choosing to pass straight through Copenhagen and Stockholm to get to the north of Sweden as soon as we could.) Sweden is a place I have been associated with all my life. As a child, I can remember the sales reps from Volvo Penta Sweden that used to visit Dad several times a year and then later when I worked for various Volvo companies I visited Sweden myself. I remember it fondly. Clearly I never went too far north and I also mostly did my visits in the summer time. We wanted to come this far north to see the Northern Lights. The best time to see them is during the winter. Well, the BEST time to see them is when its dark and up here during the summer its daylight all day AND night so no point coming to see an event that needs darkness when it won’t get dark. The ‘season’ is from late October onwards (till summer) so we are here November and we still have had no northern lights. Turns out you also need a clear sky (duh…) and this time of year the clear sky is a hard thing to find. So is was going to be a bit hit and miss if we were going to see the northern lights this time or if we will have to wait until we have travelled around Africa. When we were drawing up the plan for this trip, we never included the heading north bit at the start, it was south all the way to Cape Town. It has been fun so far though. In search of the northern lights, we kept making our way north. We went through Lapland, Sweden then headed west into Norway. We followed a route called the Blue Highway (or Bla Vagen) It’s a road that goes from Norway, east to Sweden following the wide river valleys of the Uma River all the way across Sweden. At Umea, you pick up a ferry to Finland then further east to Pudozh, Russia where the route ends. Its called the Blue Highway as in the 1500’s to 1800’s it was used by traders and travelers heading from ‘the west’ and of course they travelled mainly by boat down the rivers and across the many ‘blue’ lakes. The road was completed as a tourist highway in the 1960’s and is now a ‘European Road’ and a popular tourist route. We had a great night staying at a rest area along the route. In Sweden and Norway, freedom camping is legal and allowed pretty much anywhere! We had bought some fire wood and found a rest area with a day shelter that has a fire place. It was nice to have a fire but when the temperature is getting down to minus 10 or lower, the fire doesn’t make too much of a difference. The next day we crossed over to Norway, and then crossed the Arctic Circle 66.33 degrees north. Yahoo!! Driving into the Arctic Circle was something I have wanted to do since we first started to talk about this trip. The conditions for the Northern Lights were not playing the game for us and we decided to head south. We were not in a position to sit it out in a hotel until the weather and the sun flares provided the right conditions for the lights. Never mind! To be honest, we were not prepared for the cold here in the north and were faced with buying more clothing and gear or getting out of the cold. We chose the warmth. We have been in the cold before but this was something really different. The night we spent in the tent above the arctic circle was something else altogether. I filled a water bottle with warm water before bed, sort of like a hot water bottle but not boiling water as I didn’t want to deform the bottle. When I woke up 4 hours after going to bed, the water was frozen. Not solid but I had to break the ice up to drink some. In the morning, it was completely rock hard, as was the 12 litres of water we had in the back of the Ute along with pretty much everything else we had. Some other things that froze were Christine’s hand cream, the drinks not in the fridge, the water from the windscreen washers was freezing on contact with the window, even with the (very expensive) special anti-freeze additive, our iPhones wouldn’t work below -10c, even cooking was hard as the propane wouldn’t flow very strongly. To put the tent away we have to fold it and tuck in the sides. It was not a nice job to do when its frozen solid. I am sure with the right gear and preparation a trip into the frozen north during winter would be fine and comfortable but we did not have the right gear and had made no preparations… (hehe still went tho eh and got the photos to prove it). We are heading to Oslo now and will spend 2 nights there before we head back to Sweden and Denmark. The drive down the west coast of Norway has been excellent. This country really is beautiful and a real match to New Zealand for scenery and natural wonders. Seeing it in a half frozen state is quite something and we really are glad we decided to do this part of the world during the late autumn. We have this awesome vehicle, a 4x4 Toyota Hilux. It’s a go anywhere vehicle and just as well too. The roads here are really well made and very smooth and wide. The problem this time of year in the north of the country is that the surface is just ice. In the towns off the main roads they do not scrape the snow completely off the roads. They let it pack down hard and combine it with some grit for traction and leave it till summer. If they salt the roads, rain can wash it away and black ice can form very quickly so it’s easier to deal with the snow. The people up here are well used to the slippery roads and travel very, very slowly on the ice. We witnessed a lot of cars sliding sideways down the roads and even a bus loaded with people drifting through a roundabout. No one seemed to care too much, normal everyday life here in winter. Our car has a full set of new tyres that are all terrain type, good for mud and snow. Combined with the 4x4 we have had no problems at all with the slippery conditions. Its really starting to feel like home now and is turning out to be a great choice of overland vehicle. When things get a little warmer and we have a camp for a few days I will make a video of how we have set up all our stuff in and on the car and how we make camp each day. Finally, we are on the road! Not without the usual list of issues and problems to solve but it really feels good to be on the move under our own steam.
I guess to put this into perspective, we have had 3 nights in the car… not a really great achievement but all great things start with little things and I am seeing this from where we have had to come from rather than where we are going. So where have we come from lately? We moved out of the holiday park in North Wales from what felt like a month long stay… It wasn’t far off it, 2 weeks at Pontins Prestatyn Sands is a long time. If you ever feel like really knowing how our two weeks was, spend a little time reading the reviews left by other holiday makers on Trip Adviser. I am mixed about our decision to NOT read them before we booked. Had we read them we may not have booked and would have then been up for at least another 300 pounds of cost to stay anywhere else. We would have also missed experiencing a lot of new things, Pub Bingo comes to mind.. We finally received delivery of the car when Michelle got the cash from New Zealand. We think it went through a dozen banks somehow. It left our account straight away but took 4 further business days to reach her in Wales. Maybe the GCSB were looking at it? We then had the car! Straight away we sent it off to Phill at APB Trading. His business services Land Rover and Range Rover 4x4 cars and prepares them for overland trips like the one we are undertaking. We are not too sure exactly what he thought about having a Toyota in his workshop. He remained professional throughout and was happy that our money was the same as the stuff that came from the pockets of the Land Rover drivers. As we didn’t know when we would be receiving the car, neither did he. We were happy that he really did make an effort to complete all the work in less than 1 week and I think he picked up some tools himself to make sure the job was done quickly. While the work was being done at APB, we moved to Birmingham. It’s closer to Phills workshop (and was the cheapest we could find.) It ended up being great accommodation. Room 8A at Manu’s Hostel. Simple but the room was close to the shared toilet and shower and the hostel has its own cat! Cool, a cat! I guess from that point it could have been a bed amongst a pile of rubble for all I cared. I did my usual thing and met the neighbors who were great people so the time passed quickly and we had a little fun as well, thanks Hayden. Birmingham also had all the ‘big box’ stores that we needed to fit out the car with useful things so before long we were ready to hit the road. Our first stop was Stonehenge. It wasn’t too far from where we had been staying. When we arrived, we took the cheap option and walked down the road to see the stones from the poor man’s barricade. It’s the one 10 feet back from the 18 pounds each bussed in people’s barricade. You cannot get too close to them now days. It’s a far cry from when they used to use them for target practice in the 1930’s. Perhaps the best view of the stones was from the car heading to the site… One day they will work out what they are for. We think that they may have been erected by a wealthy person as a folly or a show of wealth! They don’t actually have to mean anything though, do they? At the Adventure and Overland show when we were looking at roof tents, we wondered into a few campsites to look at peoples ‘setup’. One of the people we bumped into was Pete West who has a Land Rover all set up with the tent we wanted installed the way we wanted to have ours done. I just walked up and started to measure the tent and we started chatting. Well, it ends up Pete has a farm not far from Oxford and has taken in travelers like us in the past, so our very first night in the car on this trip was at his place near Oxford. We met at Wantage Market Place and had dinner at the lovely town square then headed to the farm. We had practiced putting the tent up, twice, so we managed to do it in under 10 minutes… The first night was excellent! We were warm even though it was very cold outside, we were comfortable and we slept really well… IT WORKS!! The next morning, we put on all the annex sides and rolled out the awning just to see it all set up. To have the first night at Pete’s place was something special. So, why are we hanging around here then? We said good bye to the UK by spending the day in London. We did a park and ride and went into the city via the tube and did a double decker bus tour. Not normally our style, bus tours, but his one wasn’t too bad. All they did was drive around and around the city adding to the already mega congested streets but we got to see most of the sights. We also did a great river tour (well, 30 minutes floating down the Thames) as well. That night we slept next to the M4 again not too far from Dover and the Channel Tunnel. Do they call it the Chunnel still? We paid extra for the tunnel experience just so we could say we’ve done it. (I am glad the car went through facing the right way!) That same day we drove all the way to The Netherlands and spent the night in a small caravan park. We are now staying at Vanessa’s place in Amsterdam for a week while I finish off a few small additions to the car. Its nice to relax but we are both looking forward to the first trip we will make, Sweden to see the northern lights. We sailed back from the wonderful Shetland to reality and mainland UK again. It was another smooth trip on the boat. We stayed up on deck for the trip out of Lerwick harbor. It was great and reinforced to us that it is a small island and community. The old part of town is a picture postcard medieval town and it still seems unreal that this is where my heritage lies.
We picked up a rental car and headed directly to Stratford upon Avon where we were to attend the Adventure and Overland show. We stayed right at the show grounds in our tent with a load of other adventurers and unlike most of them, we just slept in our tent, not our overland prepared vehicle! The best part of the show was looking at other people’s complete set ups. The exhibitors sadly were not too much help. Most of them had never travelled outside of the UK and when we asked them how the product would perform the best they could offer was about the last trip to the Scottish Highlands. But the crew from Overland Sphere who we were staying with offered some excellent advice and product info so from that respect the show was a winner. One of the worst aspects of the show… only 3 Toyota Hiluxes were at the show! It was all ‘Landies’. We did meet up with the most helpful exhibitor from the show, Phil Bond who has APB Trading. They, like everyone at the show, specialise in Land Rover modification but thankfully will do modifications to any vehicle. We looked and looked and looked. We kept heading back to his display for chats. He offers all the products we needed so armed with his details we packed up and headed to a hotel to decide on the vehicle. We booked into a Days Inn via hotels.com then headed to the location on the map. It was next to the town of Chester. We had a nice surprise to discover that Chester is an amazing town that is full of history from the Roman times, and a nasty surprise that the hotel is located in a ‘service centre’ with the M6 motorway on one side and a compost making plant on the other! Although our room was not on the motorway side, the wind was blowing in the wrong direction and for the first couple of days we had the smell of compost wafting into the place! Man that stuff smells really, really bad! The hotel had no air con, only heating, so on the warmer days we had to leave the place and drive around to stay cool… But that’s why we were there anyway, to drive around and look for a car. A Toyota Hilux, 4x4 double cab diesel to be exact. We used eBay to narrow down the selection. Most of the car dealers use eBay to advertise their vehicles which made things somewhat easy to browse a specific selection. We found a few, and went for a few drives, then found one and was ignored by the dealer, so ended up finding a better one and just like that, we have a car! Buying a car in the UK is not difficult. Buying it correctly for export is. The VAT tax system over here is complicated and the vehicle we bought is classed as a commercial vehicle so subject to VAT. What that means is the previous owner had not paid VAT on the vehicle, and because of that, it’s still owing on it. If the first owner had been a private owner, paid VAT at the time of purchase, it would all be over and we could have bought it including (or exempt of) VAT. It’s like buying a new car in New Zealand for company use and getting a GST refund which is normal, but when you sell it, the exemption status stays with the vehicle, not the company. So the Hilux we bought had not had VAT paid, so it was up to us to sort the VAT side out. No problem when you export the vehicle from the UK though. So all of a sudden we are UK VAT tax experts. This VAT refund will apply to all the major items we put on the vehicle as well, so it’s well worth it for us and will amount to a refund of over $6,000NZD as VAT is 20% here! The car we found was in Wales! You don’t really know you’re in Wales, it’s not like they have a border crossing or anything but you sure know you’re in Wales. The road signs are in English and Welsh. It’s a strange looking language and most of the words look nothing like the English ones at all. Michelle from Mavic Commercial Vehicle Solutions was very helpful (and spoke English) and we were able to wrap the deal up really fast. We had looked at a few Toyotas and knew what we wanted though. We paid the deposit and sent the rest of the money from the New Zealand account. We are now waiting for the VAT refund status to be approved by the tax department before we can take delivery. We needed a place to stay nearby in Wales, and where better than by the seaside! We also needed somewhere very cheap. We found the absolute cheapest place and booked again via hotels.com. THEN we read the reviews on TripAdvisor and tried madly to cancel the booking. We could but we would lose the entire cost of the accommodation! Oh well… so off we went to Pontins, Prestatyn Sands Holiday Park in Prestatyn, Wales. Check in time was 4pm and we got into the queue that was about 50 deep and growing every minute! WTF?? We had managed to book our stay to coincide with the national Morris Dancing championships for 2016. One might imagine that staying with 500+ Morris dancers would be a nice thing. Lots of pretty girls and ladies prancing around, singing and dancing? Well it wasn’t too bad but let me tell you these ladies know how to party and party right into the night they did. The holiday park really did cater for this as well. I have never seen a place like it either. The camp has its own Olympic size pool, a full size English pub with restaurant, 2 large halls with full bar service, a very large arcade next to it with coin games and casino machines all in the same place (yes that’s right, we were playing slots with a 10 year old girl right on the next machine..!!!) a go-cart track and it goes on and on. Each night they would have very boozy functions, and what to do with your kids when the function is on?? Well, have them in the pub with you of course! Give them a few pounds and tell them to play the slots? Wow, it was a real eye opener for us. We managed to witness brawls, drunken people all over the place, very young ‘ladies’ done up to the 9s and more. Sadly, all the dancing was done behind closed doors in the halls so we missed the fun! On the last night they all started to drift back to the rooms at 1am and it was screaming kids (and adults) until 2 or 3am… We managed a sleep in the next morning as they were very slow to rise! Morris Dancing eh.. Who would have thought? North Wales is really a big surprise. It’s a holiday destination because of the coast, but the coast also offered a lot of opportunities for early settlement so it has a lot of history to look at as well. We are actually enjoying the time here that we have been forced to have and although it’s been a cheap place to stay, we are richer from the experience. The day trips have been great and we have seen some amazing places that we will forever remember. Thanks Wales! It wasn’t too easy to get from trains to busses to boats with all the gear and bags we had accumulated in the 6 months of travel. It didn’t help that the baggage handlers had ripped a handle off a bag we had just bought. Luckily it didn’t spill any of our things out on the baggage conveyer at the airport. It did make it harder to carry though. We had arrived in Scotland! I had been to England in 1999 but this was the first time in the UK for Christine, and the first time I had been north of London. We caught a bus from the airport to the train station, a train from Edinburgh to Aberdeen, a boat from Aberdeen to Lerwick, Shetland and then a car to the settlement of Mossbank, our home for the next week. What an awesome trip it was over on the boat! The night before we’d only had about 4 or 5 hours sleep and left for the airport at 5 in the morning so we were quite tired anyway, but the boat was an unexpected luxury. It’s more of a ship than a boat. It’s set up for overnight passage from Scotland to Orkney and Shetland. The crossing was smooth enough, just a nice gentle rocking that put me to sleep at 8 pm and I didn’t wake up until the announcement at 7 am that we were about to arrive in Shetland.
We met my Mum and Dad at the wharf who had arrived in Shetland a day earlier and were going to show us around. Shetland is where Dad’s family come from. Grandad and Grandma were born and raised in Shetland and we still have a lot of family on the islands although a lot have moved away for work and to follow other family members (to places like New Zealand). We stayed with my Dad’s cousins Alastair and Doreen who have a lovely house on what they call a croft on the northern part of the ‘mainland’. A croft is a small holding of land that was intended to provide everything the family could want to survive. Now days they are often combined or leased to farmers who run a commercial quantity of stock like any farm but there are still a few around that are run the old way and provide year-round food for the one extended family. Shetland is the most northern part of the UK and is governed as part of Scotland. They are however quite independent and have a bit of a different culture to the rest of the UK. For a long time, the islanders were very isolated due to the rough north seas and the roaring 60’s (being on the 60 north parallel) The total land area is under 1500 km2 and the total population is less than 24,000 people. The islands have been inhabited for a long time... A very long time. The first people to settle the area did so around 6000 years ago! The more recent history (1000’s to 1500’s) revolves around the settlement of Scandinavian Vikings but it wasn’t until the 15th century that the islands became part of Scotland and a more detailed history can be traced. Like a lot of the British Isles, Shetland has a very rich history and the Shetland islands motto is Með lögum skal land byggja, an Icelandic phrase taken from the Danish 1241 Basic Law, Codex Holmiensis, (and is also mentioned in Njáls saga,) and means "By law shall land be built". One thing that the island is lacking in is trees! In the time we have been here I have only seen a few small stands of trees. This is in part due to the fact that during winter the wind can blow so hard that it often sends salt spray right over the highest part of the island and will kill the hardiest garden, lawn or trees. The trees did die out naturally around the time the climate changed several thousand years ago. Contrary to popular opinion they were not all cut down for timber by the locals, they were already gone when the locals arrived! Back in my grandfather’s day, Shetland only really offered a few choices for work. The sea or the land. My grandfather had 2 big decisions in his early life. The first was who to marry, the second was what to do for work. (Maybe not in that order) It appears he made good choices all round. He found my Grandma and decided to go to sea, not as a fisherman but as a seaman on a cargo vessel. Later he ended up in New Zealand as a captain of a coastal freighter. Now the islanders have a lot of choice for work just like anywhere but a lot of them still move away to start great things that are far from the fishing and crofting. I think everyone will have heard of P&O Shipping Line, started in Shetland. One of the founders of Anchor Butter in New Zealand was a Shetland Islander. My own cousin is a scientist now living in Brisbane and at the forefront of her field and has recently made a breakthrough that could benefit millions of people who have arthritis, gout, type-two diabetes, Alzheimer’s, asthma and Parkinson’s. (Yes, that’s you Avril). One of the largest income earner is still the ocean and fishing with salmon and mussel farming the big industries. The oil industry employs a lot of locals but no refining is done in Shetland. It is piped to shore in Shetland and then loaded onto ships to refinery’s elsewhere. So, anyway, here we are in this faraway place. My relations and cousins from New Zealand have been visiting Shetland ever since my grandad left the place in 1928. I feel quite lucky to be here and to see the places that they lived and worked. We went to see where my grandma was born and grew up. We were able to go to the house that is still much as it was in her day. The house now has power and water connected but otherwise it’s just the same. We could see where the well for water was (and still is) and where the outhouse was next to the shed. It was like a living history lesson from my family. We also visited the house near where my grandfather was born in 1884. This house is STILL in the family and is currently being renovated by Andy who will live in it with his partner Tanya when she finishes her midwife training in Scotland. I don’t know of anyone else that can say they have seen where their family grew up over 100 years ago pretty much as it was then. A slice of the family history that has been waiting for me to discover, it’s been great! Even my old childhood areas in Auckland have been changed so much it’s not recognisable now! We have been to see Eddie and Betsy at Fetlar, Linda and David at Eshaness, Kay, Iain and Frances came to visit us and we had dinner with Caryl and Graham (a 6 course meal cooked by Doreen, great fun night). We went to see Angus and Jessamine for lunch. They live just above the old house that Granddad lived in and the same place Doreen grew up in! We went to Mary-Jean’s shop for a visit, but she had so many people in the store so we had to leave. Andy and Angus came for tea too, so it’s been a busy visit. It was great to talk with Eddie who is a retired seaman. Now days he does a lot of beach combing and has an amazing collection of items that have been washed ashore near his holiday home. I did a bit of beachcombing myself when we went to see Linda and David and I found a real life message in a bottle. Looks like it has come from Canada but it had no contact details for me to reply to the message. Of course seeing the people has been the highlight but Shetland has really surprised us with the beauty and history it has to offer. It has helped that the weather has been a lot warmer than normal meaning we have been able to do some great walks too. A highlight was heading to the top of Ronas Hill which is the highest peak on Shetland. There is even a Neolithic chambered cairn near the summit! Neolithic is as old as! We visited a site that has ‘ruins’ that date back 4000 years! Quite fascinating to see. Today is the last day here on the Island and tonight we head back to Scotland by ferry and pick up a car to drive right down to the midlands to attend the Adventure Overland Show. It’s the official start of the next phase of our holiday where we get mobile and start to travel by car. We are excited and sure are looking forward to being able to organise ourselves again although we will now have to part with some serious cash! I don’t like the idea of seeing the bank balance disappear but that’s what going on holiday is all about I guess. As with every part of this holiday, Shetland has been excellent, especially for me as it has filled in a lot of blank spaces from my family heritage. I’d like to make a special mention to Alistair and Doreen for looking after us while we have been here and providing a car and feeding us really well. Thank you and of course we would like to repay this whenever you are in New Zealand again. Thanks also to Mum and Dad for being here with us and being the tour guides. None of this would have been possible without you both. Thanks again! Iceland. The land of fire and ice!
This trip started off really well. We had what they call 'comfort class' tickets. Like cheap business class! On the Iceland Air plane heading from the USA they only had seats for economy and first class so it was a comfortable 5 hours into Iceland. (The outbound flight was back to normal..☹️) Our first stop was an Airbnb we had booked in the city of Reykjavik. It was an OK location near the city centre but that's where the good points stopped. Sadly the place was not as advertised and we didn't get some of the features we were looking for. I guess the Iceland experience went down hill a bit from then on... The first thing we had to do is find a laundromat (no washing machine at the Airbnb!) we found a place that has a cafe above a coin laundry so hot breakfast as well.. OK, I had heard Iceland was expensive but I really had no idea how much outside my comfort zone it was going to be. The 2 loads of washing cost $27 NZD alone! hmmm OK. Then the breakfast of 2x eggs on toast each and 2 coffees came in... $50!! The entire exercise of washing and breakfast was over $75 NZD. We were completely gobsmacked! Holy shit you're kidding?? Well no! WELCOME TO ICELAND. This was the first of many times we were left completely blown away by the price of things. I don't want to use the term gouging but I really do think that it was happening. A couple of examples are tent sites in large camping grounds where we would pay between $30 and $50NZD plus if you wanted a shower, an extra $6NZD each and the camp grounds were very basic. Food is pretty expensive but we had no idea how much until we went to order pizza. Of course they have Dominos pizza and our 'go to' meal is 2 x medium size pizzas. Well we didn't get them! If we are going to pay $60NZD for a meal, I want to sit down in a restaurant to eat it... Yes that's right...$60NZD for 2 medium size Dominos pizzas! There is a back story. I think everyone remembers the volcano that erupted and closed down the European airspace due to volcanic ash. (No I don't know how to say it's name either..) Since then, people became interested in Iceland and they have had ever increasing tourist numbers and this year they expect to have more than 2 million visitors to the country. That is a lot of beds and mouths to feed. It's creating issues for the locals as you might imagine. Most of the city area (where we initially stayed) is being let out as Airbnb 'hotels' meaning property prices are being driven up by investors and local people can not rent or afford to buy in the city centre anymore. Also all of the fresh food is grown using glass houses with grow lights. They only grow grass and a small amount of organic vegetables in the fields due to the short sunlight hours and cold temperatures and this is a simple supply and demand exercise. The local population is under 350,000 throughout the entire island and it's easy to see the tourists. They are the overweight people with dark hair. Icelandic Air says they are going to increase the tourist numbers so that within the next 3 to 5 years up to 5 million visitors per year will be arriving. It's a bit of a never ending cash cow for the islanders. So, we went off to collect the rental car to see this amazing country. We had to decide where to go as we didn't have enough time to do the full circle of Iceland. We chose the south east area as it had the largest glacier in the country and some hot pools as well. Seeing the big glaciers up close is quite amazing. We have seen a few glaciers in New Zealand but these are the monsters of the world. The only place to see larger glaciers is in Antarctica. We went on a few short walks and did a lot of sightseeing along the ring road. The scenery is beautiful to say the least and it's often hard to capture it by photo although I drove Christine a bit mad by stopping every few miles for photos anyway. Some of the farms were just amazing to look at. Usually at the bottom of a cliff or above a valley they stand out against a deep green background. They are mostly sheep farms but we did see some good looking dairy farms and everyone seemed to have a horse or 2. We understand Iceland is very proud of their houses and they are unique in that they can trot or gallop differently to other horses? Never been on a normal horse so these extra features would have been wasted on me for sure so we didn't do the horse riding tours. We did do a glacier tour. Unlike New Zealand, here we could pretty much get out of the car and step on the ice! No long walk up a valley chasing a retreating glacier here! They are however retreating like all the ice on this warming planet but oh wow, they are totally massive! It was a great experience and we were the last tour group for our tour guide. She is an Iceland local and is off to see the world and wants to ski and rock climb in some of the best places on the planet. I expect she will have to visit New Zealand to tick that list off. When we finished the tour, I joked that seeing as this was her last day she should go for a swim in the small lake at the edge of the ice. I mentioned it to her colleagues too and when they asked 'you too' I joked 'only if you do it as well' OK....mistake! Not a word was spoken as they casually stripped off for their swim. Our guide and 2 others got down to the basics and just like that, in they went! So... I had made a promise and now I had to follow through. The best thing is to not over think things so I did the same and stripped off. I didn't even bother to wade in but just dived right in from the shore. I have been in some cold water before but never this cold. This is Iceland and I am swimming in a glacier lake. That's all kind of crazy right there. I wasn't the last one to get out and our guide did some swim strokes, but it was all over in 60 seconds. I think I gained some respect from the local guides that day even if the other tourists thought we were all completely crazy. We also went to a nice hot pool that day. We really were expecting to find more hot pools than we did. One of the things with Iceland is Icelandic! They speak it and we don't! You might think that as tourism is the number 1 earner for the country, some of the signs would be in English? No. Even the road warning signs that had an alarming big warning triangle that is trying to get our attention is only in Icelandic. As were all the tourist roadside signs! We went to a visitor centre and we were trying to make out the different attractions from the brochure. We asked the attendant what it all meant and he politely offered to sell us an English version. We declined. (Even the 'visitors centre' sign was in Icelandic..) so we think we missed some good hot pools along the way we would have visited had we known they were there. (The hot pools were $35NZD each..) So we have 'done' Iceland. It was nice, beautiful and scenic. The city of Reykjavik is a nice modern, clean and safe city but we felt like we were charged way too much for most of the things we did and bought. Iceland is rated the 4th most expensive country in the world (New Zealand is 7th..) and the tourist services are still basic. I guess it's a credit to the people that they remain the same and can show off the culture the way they do. Anyway, we made new friends and had new experiences and we feel much richer as we depart. I think that's the important thing eh. We headed down to Tennessee and into familiar streets. It was time to visit our friends Dave and Sarah. Dave is the famous hiker Huckleberry that we hiked with in 2000 and who gave me my trail name Cowpie. The last time we stayed at their house in 2000 we were half way through our 1600 miles on the AT and as I recall we sat around for a week and did nothing!! This time we did much the same... haha. It was really great to catch up and we sure did have a lot to talk about. We especially liked the time we spent at the cabin they have in the woods, not too far off the AT. We went for a nice walk on the trail and reminisced about good times 16 years ago. I can say the one thing that has changed with Dave and Sarah is they have new cars... Check out the photos 😀 We did promised them that we would return and we did... Washington, D.C. It is a big country so why not have a Capitol the same. Maybe not completely big as in size, but rather Larger Than Life.. DC has a swagger to it. Young people would say it has 'swag'. I am guessing this has come from hundreds of years of hosting the country's leaders. The movers and shakers! When I think of it that way it's hard to understand why most of the architecture is all in an old Roman/Greek style, you know big pillars and all the old stuff. When they were building this place that design was already 1000s of years old. Could it have something to do with the feeling of permanence to the system they created? It wasn't thousands of years old but they built it to last thousands of years and were showing it in the style of buildings? Don't know but it appears to be something that is on going even with newer buildings (although a few modern buildings are around the place). One thing for sure, they are impressive. It was pretty good to be able to go back to the same place each night after being on the move for months and months. I started to think of the hotel as 'home' which is pretty bad really considering it's a room not much bigger than the king size bed we slept on. Maybe good practice for living out of a car in months to come. The hotel is well positioned next to a subway station, McDonald's and a restaurant row. What more could a visitor want? DC is very different to most places we had visited in the USA. It has had a unique creation being born out of farmland owned by George Washington who had slaves to run it. It is still a city that has an abundance of contrast with the homeless people living right on the doorsteps of the nations most wealthy and influenceable people. When I thought about how much time and money has gone into creating some of the fabulous buildings and monuments here it's a shame that more cannot be done for the down and outs. It's more likely an accurate reflection of a normal free market economy at work. In DC we can very clearly see the very bottom of the structure. We have spent the last 3 months in New England. Generally, full of educated middle class people. We have on occasion had people struggle with our accent but nothing like the folk of Washington, D.C. I think the city's have a slightly different accent to the suburbs and regions. The subway system here is great with the exception that the language spoken by the driver over the PA is an as yet to be deciphered dialect known to him and the city dwellers. We actually thought it was a private joke until we tried to order food and talk to other people on the street and realized that they really didn't understand us at all! I wondered if it was because DC was a place that had people from all over the country and the city accent was a giant mash up? You would think it make it easier! The old part of the city is really a series of buildings dedicated to the founding presidents. They are pretty cool. Even as a visitor, I could understand the pride they feel from these places. Growing up in New Zealand, bring part of the British Commonwealth, all the stuff like this that mattered was in England and it didn't instill a 'national pride' thing in me than the Americans can get visiting these places. We had a look around on national Labor Day so the place was chokka. (We were on the steps of the Lincoln memorial with 1000's of people everywhere and Christine spots Rocky, the kiwi we met in Vermont hiking with his wife Ripper... crazy eh! ) Any president these days tries to do a good enough job to have a building named after them. Only 8 or 9 have! (conflicting info on that..) and I think you really have to be popular with the people and the cCongress as I understand they are the ones with the money! The newest one of these buildings is the Ronald Regain building. It too looks old.... So we had a morning to ourselves to do what we wanted. Well to go to a museum of our choice actually. Christine went to the natural history museum and I went to the national spy museum. A slightly controversial choice as her one was free, mine was not. I can tell you, we both learned some things we didn't know before. Who learned about Iceland and the Cold War? The trip out however was still fun for us both and we went for a wander around before going back to the hotel. The DC subway is a really great system! Backed by by a bus network above ground that takes the same card, getting anywhere is easy. ALL of this made possible because things like Google, hotels.com Trip Adviser and the like are set up to work the best right here in the USA and where best but right in the heart of this place, DC... But really, using google here has been a bit of a revelation. Every building and business is mapped and every street and road is monitored. We used it everywhere we went and often commented to each other how much easier if was to use than in New Zealand or Australia. We are hoping the UK and Europe will be as good! We did lots of things while we were in DC. The only thing we did again and again though was swim in the hotel pool. Most days the temperature was around 30 degrees and above. Not sure on the humidity but it was hot and uncomfortable for most of the day until we jumped into that pool. The hotel was a Marriott but an older one and not for leisure, but more for business customers. It had an entire exhibition hall in the middle of the 2 wings. Having said that, it was Labor Day weekend so it was full of families taking advantage of the special deal that got us to stay too. It was nice, really nice even though we had to dodge food trays and empty champagne bottles in the hallway all weekend. Even hotel staff have time off? Then without warning we had to go. Not just to the next town, city or shelter... but we were leaving the USA. Actually we did have warning but I chose to ignore it. The last thing we chose to do in the USA was go on another hike. This was a small one compared to the last two... Just an hour or 2 along the Potomac tow path with our hiking buddy Lumberjack. It was great for a couple of reasons. Good to be hiking, good to catch up with Lumberjack but it was sad to be leaving the US all the same. We have really enjoyed the US and absolutely plan on returning...soon! We got a lift from the Shaw's hiker hostel people to the trail head. Shaw's were a great place to stay except for the bed... Who would have thought that to have a good hostel you would need good beds. The bed we had will be familiar to those of you that have ever seen a Western movie where the good guy bursts in to the villains room at the hotel while he's in bed with a busty wench, shoot out = dead villain. It's that bed! The old steel frame number on little castor wheels. It squeaks. I could make it squeak by lying down and just breathing.. Shaw's have lots more beds than just this one so I am sure most other people slept well and were able to hike normally that day. Boo hoo lucky them!
So we are now in the 100 mile wilderness. When I think of wilderness I think of someplace in Fiordland. No tracks or roads. In hiking terms it's more like no resupply. The trail has to navigate around several ponds and lakes, so it has some twists and turns. The first few days were like the rest of the trail so far. Hills and mountains. We received our resupply drop at Jo-Mary Road, around 60 miles in. It's a service we paid for provided by Shaw's. It's pretty good, but expensive. We arranged to split the cost with another hiker, Fescue, so it was a little cheaper. The cold soda was a great treat at 9am, so was the warm Budweiser! We then had 4 days food to carry but we had several places to visit along the way this next 40 miles. The great thing was it had stopped raining for the first time in 3 days and we were able to dry out some. When we got in range we texted the owner of a camp called 'Whitehouse Landing'. It's what they call a traditional Maine 'sportsman camp'. We did a bit of a shortish day to stay here. I think 13 or so miles. The 'camp' bit is just what they call a bush get away in these parts. You might have heard of Camp David where Obama has other world leaders for talks. Now they don't sit around a fire pit and retire to a squeaky blowup mattress I can tell you. But Camp Whitehouse Landing was not too bad though. We were picked up by boat after a 15 minute side trail walk. No power or plumbing but it had been around for near on 100 years in one shape or another. The first building on the site was the saw mill owners house, nicknamed the Whitehouse. The mill and land was sold to a paper company around 1910 and last year they felled the trees around the camp. The owners were not too happy to lose a forest of 100 year old trees. I don't blame them. The sunset from our porch was amazing! We stayed with Fescue and Lieut. Dan, so had a nice dinner and drinks with them that night. We also had a pretty good breakfast and then back on the boat for a quite 15 mile day... Our next stop was to be the last 'town' we would stay at. I use the term town loosely though. Abol Bridge was just a camp ground and general store at the base of Mt Katahdin and most AT hikers will stop here for a night or a burger before the big climb. We stayed at the camp ground and shared a bunk room with Fescue. The camp ground water pumps stopped working the next morning. By 7:15 I think everyone in the camp has used the 'bathroom' but still no flush. OMG time to head for the trail I think!! The trails in this part really have reminded us of New Zealand. Largely as we have been following rivers and streams, but also because of the moss. It's a carpet of green over most of the forest floor. We have had to cross a few rivers in these parts too, just like New Zealand! Our friend Fescue crossed a river after us and as is common took off his shoes to cross. As is not common, he threw his shoes to the other bank and wouldn't you know it the one with the socks in hit the only branch on the other side which catapults it into the knee deep river. After a long bare foot chase down the river, it was lost. He found an old boot to use to climb to the top of Mt Katahdin and won't be doing that again... So, it was all leading up to this.. Our final day on the trail. We were pretty nervous for some reason. It had taken a while to get here. We set off at 6:30.. We were up at 5am for like the first time ever! It was a beautiful day! Some clouds and wind but we could see forever. The walk up was not as hard as we were expecting and all the hype we had heard for all those years really was just for the day walkers. Before we knew it, we were looking at the sign 50 metres away. People were everywhere around the sign taking photos and milling around it. We decided to make a bee line for the cairn that marks the summit. Then we were there! One second we were hiking the Appalachian Trail, the next second we were not. We had been dreaming of this moment and we had made it. We both had a few tears up there just sitting and not saying too much. We let it sink in and watched the other hikers that were in the same or similar situations to us. It was a powerful moment for us. We then hugged each other, thanked each other for the totally best holiday one could ever have and made our way to the sign for the photo! This was also a moment I had been worrying about. 7 + months of walking and I had to trust some stranger to take the most important photo of the trip. The start photo at Springer Mountain was taken by some twit that didn't focus properly (it was an old film camera so I guess I can let them off) so I wanted a better photo than the start one. So I told him to keep taking them... Success! At least 1 was good and some are just great! So, it is over! Yes, it's the best trip you can take on your own feet and yes, it can be walked by anyone as long as they are prepared for some pain and discomfort. They also have to be prepared to have the time of their lives and meet some of the best humans living today, AT hikers! Thanks to all our supporters that believed in us and helped us along the way. We owe you! We were so close to Canada we thought it would be silly not to visit. We had the time. We headed to Bangor after we finished the trail and picked up a rental car at the airport. It was just a small airport but all the rental company's had booths. '1 of your cheapest cars please'. Great, they had none so we got an upgrade to the next class for free! I would have been happy if they had given us a car with a V8... Petrol is cheap in the USA and Canada. Although a lot of people now buy what they call compact cars, their is still a lot of big cars and 'trucks' or what we would call utes or pickups on the road. I can tell from the sound of the engine in the pickups that they are petrol not diesel, but at $1.08NZD a liter, who cares!!
So, Canada is a strange place. We cross the boarder and all of a sudden everything is in French. All the road signs, advertising and radio. Had we teleported to Europe without knowing? Quebec is a 100% French speaking city, not even bilingual. I remember that the region had a vote to become independent from the rest of Canada and it was a close thing but didn't pass. The revenge was to talk and act like the French. They are doing well but I didn't see one single Citroen or Renault car anywhere so all in all a fail at being French I think. We went to the Bio-dome in Montreal which was the velodrome built for the 1986 Olympic Games held in Canada. Like a lot of games infrastructure it had no real use after the games so they built a really cool bio dome that held the climates of the Americas. It included rain forests and ice environments. Very well done and a great use for the old stadium. It was cool to see the 1500m gold medal winner was the legend John Walker! They had plaques with all the gold medal winners. We won 2 golds then. 1500m and the men's hockey team. I remember that games... 30 years ago now (old eh) The national animal for Canada is the beaver and although we didn't get to pat a live one they did of course have a pelt we could touch and they are amazing. So soft! They have 2 types of fur. A soft under layer and an outer layer that's thicker. They're an amazing animal and we had walked past a lot of ponds created by beavers. They make the dams in the rivers for protection from predators but in the process they provide so much habitat for other animals and wetland birds. Their goal is to make the pond deep and big enough to not freeze in winter. You would think that fish would be on the diet but they eat only plants and of course trees! We saw a lot of evidence of large trees that have been felled by beaver on the trail and once they used to remove the dams but they provide so much to for the forest animals they just leave them now and if necessary re route the trail. We never did see one in the wild though. Next was the largest city in Canada, Toronto. A really nice looking city! Back to English road signs now and English radio stations too. Both Montreal and Toronto are on the Great Lakes. What an amazing thing they are! Having grown up by the ocean, I had trouble getting around the fact it's fresh water. They look like oceans and disappear over the horizon and we even watched massive container ships sail past...still a lake or river. It's a massive country! The number one thing to do in Toronto is visit Niagara Falls. They really as a wonder of the world! I used to go to Huka Falls in Taupo and look in wonder at the volume of water going over them. Well Niagara Falls makes Huka Falls look like a dripping tap. Some fun facts about the falls... -Niagara Falls is comprised of three waterfalls: American Falls, Bridal Veil Falls and Horseshoe Falls. -The American and Bridal Veil Falls were turned off in 1969 by U.S. Army Engineers to study the effects of erosion. -The water that flows over the Falls is at 25-50% capacity at any given time. -The first person to go over the Falls in a barrel was 63-year-old school teacher Annie Edson Taylor. -During periods of peak flow in the summer and fall, more than 2.6 million liters of water per second pour over Niagara Falls. -Four of the five Great Lakes drain into the Niagara River, (Superior, Michigan, Huron and Erie) before emptying into Lake Ontario. These five Great Lakes make up almost 20% of the world's fresh water supply. -Energy from the Niagara River has been harnessed for hydro-electric power generation as far back as the mid-eighteenth century. -Power generation facilities along the Niagara River supply more than one-quarter of all power used in New York State and Ontario. -50 to 75 percent of the water flowing along the Niagara River is diverted from going over the Falls to hydroelectric power generating stations. Niagara Falls was the birthplace of commercial hydro-electric power. In Niagara USA, Nikola Tesla developed the alternating current system, which allowed for the transmission of power generated along the Niagara River to homes and businesses. In 1895 one of the world's first commercial hydropower plants was constructed right on the banks of the river. It's a grand building and is still standing although it stopped producing power in the 70's. I could have watched the falls all day, there quite mesmerising to watch! Back to the USA over the rainbow bridge. Not named for its sexual preference but because the spray from the falls will make a nice rainbow under the right conditions. Wow, what a difference. On the surface Canada appears to be more prosperous than the USA, well in that boarder area for sure. We followed Lake Erie west to the Cleveland area, staying in the city of Mentor. Interstate highway driving all the way. They are great roads! Conceived in 1958 by president Eisenhower they took 35 years to complete to the original vision stage but are of course still being built. Always lots to look at on the side of the interstate and we often pass outlet stores that are more like large malls in the middle of nowhere. In Ohio they had an interesting group of shops along the interstate with a massive sign advertising fireworks, adult products and liquor. Now what could possibility go wrong with that combination?? From Cleveland I made Christine do some driving. I felt like I was punishing her in some way as she wasn't very happy to all of a sudden learn to drive on the right hand side of the road. As it was the freeway she didn't have to deal with oncoming traffic though, but as usual she took it all in her stride and we cruised into downtown Cincinnati without any problems at all. Cincinnati is a really nice city with some very elegant buildings and a brand new riverfront area and it was a nice break to have a walk around for a while even in the 40 degree heat! We stayed just out of the city and the next day it's back on the road again. It didn't take us long, and it didn't feel like it but before we knew it we were back in the south. People started to sound different, the road safety signs for seat belts now read 'buckle up y'all' and we could no longer buy alcohol in the supermarket. Welcome to the 'Bible Belt'. The southern part of America is very different. On our trip in 2000 we spent most of our time in the south and heading back down on this trip it all comes flooding back. Really, America is like a collection of 48 countries. They have different taxes, laws and cultures. Many are similar to each other but the northern states sure are different to the south. It might take some getting used to being here in the south. Today, we headed to a very southern attraction called Dollywood... It's a theme park owned by Dolly Parton, the country music singer. We went to the water park part which is rated as one of the best in the country. The temperature was in the high 90's again today (high 30's in celsius) so it's good to cool off a bit. We didn't meet Dolly but I think I saw her sister. We didn't choose the best day as it was also forecast for thunder and they cleared the pools as soon as the first clap was heard. I don't think anyone has been hit by lighting when swimming but you never know eh..Being at a water park in our togs made us realise how skinny we are now, or rather how large other people are. No one cared though and it made us feel pretty good about ourselves. From here we are going to visit our friends Dave and Sarah. Dave has featured in these blogs before. He is the famous hiker that gave me my trail name, Cowpie! More on that later. |
it's Our Epic Trip...David & Christine are from New Zealand and are embarking on a trip around the world the slow way, on foot and by personal vehicle. This could get interesting! Archives
June 2018
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