Jeff: Three days five countries

So we managed to get off the ferry and then we quickly realised my mobile was not switching to roaming, despite all the setting being in place. I switched contracts a couple of months before we came out for the reason that we could have it roaming for more than 3 months so we were annoyed it wouldn’t work. We pulled into the first supermarket we found were we continued to play with the settings until we ended up phoning the company to get it resolved (we started the roaming services on Rich’s phone in order to make the call). They had to apply some settings and told us the normal IT bumph of turn it off and on again and in less than 5 minutes it should work. While this was going on I went and found a French baguette which turned out to be out breakfast and lunch as we headed north.

We were soon out of France and into Belgium and continued north towards Eindhoven but because of the traffic (with it being a Friday afternoon) it took longer than planned and we didn’t get to the planned stop until around 4pm. The stop was in the Hoogstaten district which was a chocolate box type of region with cute houses and lovely places and the stop itself was in a lovely park/forest. We decided to go for a walk and within this park you can walk into a small section of the Netherlands, which of course we did. The park had some of the longest names for its footpaths/locations which we stood no chance of saying! We did enjoy the short walk and managed to see a couple of deer in the field along with some lovely looking horses. It hit a high of 30 degrees during our drive today and the heat hasn’t really let up so its been a bit of a shock to the system. We then headed back to Jeff for dinner and an early night as we had been up since about 5.30 and we knew we were in for a warm night, as the predicted low was due to be 19 degrees, the fan in the van worked well but it was still warm.

The next morning Rich thought it would be a good idea to go for our first run when we got up in the morning, I really wasn’t sold on the idea, especially as it was already in the mid 20s but I went along with it anyway and I survived it. We then both enjoyed cold showers before heading off north. We drove for 3 hours 45 crossing the rest of Belgium and the Netherlands to get into Germany where we planned to stay for the night in a town near Osnabruck. As we were driving to the stop we saw a pick your own strawberry place so once we parked up we got on the bikes and cycled there to pick some lovely strawberries. We did struggle with the process as it was very complicated but we were quickly shown by the workers were we could pick and we quickly picked just under a kilo for 4 euros and put them in our bag before cycling to the supermarket for some supplies and back to the van.

We chilled for the evening and got up early the next morning for a run. This run wasn’t as successful as the last one as we were trying to follow the cherry trail that is a loop around the area but we got a little lost and ended up running a portion of it in the wrong direction (and this bit was all uphill – which is my most hated type of running!). Once back at the van we did a load of washing in my new little washing machine (mostly to test it out) and then packed up the van and continued north towards Hamburg.

We stopped about an hour south of Hamburg in the middle of some farms and woods for the evening which had a stunning view and sunset.