5th September: Ten Things of Thankful

I wasn’t sure if I would write this week as we are now on holiday in France, Misky suggested taking notes for later posts and Clark also said this is a tradition in the TToT but I have a lot of thoughts about the journey and decided to write them as a travel piece without numbering the grats (or hypograts)…

I conceived and planned this holiday quite quickly – it had to fit in before a reunion weekend with my school friends of 50+ years ago in October plus an important inspection at work, and even though the time of anticipation was small, there was still that countdown which seems to slow time, but eventually the last day of work came and went, my boss’s parting call “Take care – I still need you in my life!” Take that as you will…

We decided to take the overnight ferry from Hull to Rotterdam again, as we had earlier in the year when we holidayed in the Netherlands. I am always reminded, when finally catching sight of theRiver Humber, of Hull’s great Metaphysical poet, Andrew Marvell, who famously wrote the attempted seduction poem, “To his Coy Mistress” which enchanted my imagination when studying it at school but which I now take, at the age of 71, as a wider reflection on the shortness of life generally, and the need to make the most of it – very metaphysical…
In the poem, Marvel says to his would-be lover, “Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain.” and a muddy tide it is, the waters never other than murky… You can read the full poem here, and a poem in which I introduced the lady’s somewhat indignant riposte, here!
Indeed, when we arrived at the ship and looked over the side of the dock, she appeared to be resting on the mud with the tide still ebbing and as the hours neared the departure time, a strange small ship was loitering on the seaward side of the ship – a ship that I looked up (Oh, the joys of the internet!) and discovered she was the UKD Marlin – a trailing suction hopper dredger! UKD presumably stands for United Kingdom Dredger – who knew? And the UKD Marlin was just itching for us to set sail so she could go about her vital business of hoovering the RORO berth clear of Humber mud!

The Captain of The Pride of Rotterdam had welcomed us aboard with the news that the wind would be rising from the South-west to be gale force seven in the latter part of the crossing, and so we could expect some rolling during the night. Visiting the toilet in our cabin in the wee small hours of the night, I was momentarily spooked by the unexpected movement of the red emergency bell pull. (the check-in lady had kindly upgraded us to a disabled cabin so that Barbara could use her boot-scooter on board and have room to park it in the cabin) Then I realised the movement of the bell-pull was a result of the said rocking and rolling of the ship and returned to my bunk to be rocked in the cradle of the deep until we passed the sheltered waters beyond the Hook of Holland. You may find this video of the spooky bell-pull’s movements oddly relaxing…

The ferry docks at eight in the morning and on that occasion, we had only an hour-and-a-half drive to our destination – a reflection of how compact the Netherlands are, but yesterday, we had a drive of six-and-a-half as measured by the satnav. Of course, that doesn’t allow for holdups or breaks, and the reality was nearer eight-and-a-half hours! First off, it took nearly two-and-a-half hours to leave the port – due to our shooting-ourselves-in-the-foot exercise (Brexit), we are now obliged to use biometric data to pass into Europe which means getting out of your car, entering a booth and loking into a camera as well as placing your fingers on a fingerprint scanner and so we crawled along in a queue of cars, eager to be on our way with a long drive ahead of us. Curses be on Nigel Farage who led the campaign to take us out of Europe and who still gets paid a pension from his stint as a Member of the European Parliament – oh the irony…

Eventually we were on our way and had a choice of three routes, courtesy of Google, with six hours minimum on the table. We decided to take the middle route, figuring that an extra half-hour was neither here nor there – this would have taken us through five countries – imagine that! Netherlands, Belgium, tiny Luxembourg, Germany and finally France. A half hour in, the implacable lady that is the voice of my satnav, stated that delays on our chosen route would result in additional driving and we could save twenty-two minutes by switching to an alternative route – I decided to accept, though without time to stop and inspect the new route since we were on a motorway – it turns out that Google simply took us back to the “mainly through Germany” route so we missed out on our five country marathon – c’est la vie…

Freedom of movement between European nations in the Schengen zone means that crossing into Germany is marked merely by a roadside sign – blink and you could miss it! What I could not miss, was a change in the culture of driving. all the way through the Netherlands, the speed limit had been no more than 100kms per hour (62 miles per hour) but once in Germany, on their famously named “autobahns”, the speed limit sometimes rose to 130kph (80.77mph), which drivers took not as a limit but as a challenge to achieve or exceed. In England, the national speed limit on motorways is 70 mph, although, in practice, the speed where traffic is free-flowing is often nearer 8omph. Not only do drivers in Germany achieve the speed limit but they aggressively tailgate anyone who gets in their way of reaching their goal! The result is, (and we were travelling on a lot of two lane motorways), that you end up with a big difference between the fast outer lane and the nearside lane where lorries and those who want to travel at a more modest speed are, and this makes moving out into the fast lane quite hazardous, calling for bouts of sudden acceleration to match the speed there. This different culture kicked in the moment we crossed into Germany…

To begin with, we were driving under grey skies with even the odd drop of drizzle, but as the day wore on and we progressed South, the skies cleared and the temperatures soared until even driving with the windows open did not relieve the feeling of driving in an oven… The landscapes at the journey’s outset were also rather beige, if not grey, lots of featureless factories arrayed in Dutch neatness, and when finally we hit the countryside, it was flat and uninspiring, but by the afternoon, we reached the Mosel wine-growing area where small vineyards were arrayed on the slopes of volcanic rock. Speaking of rocks, we stopped to stretch our legs at a “Rastplatz” (Rest place) called “Blau Stein” which conjured up an image of beer steins overflowing with foamy lager – something which, considering the heat, would have been most welcome at that moment (if I wasn’t driving) but sadly the most this rest pace had to offer, was somewhere to stop, and toilets. There was, however, a large boulder painted blue and I realised the error of my fevered imagination, not a beer stein, but a Blue Stone lol…

From that point on, the landscapes became more exciting, extensive woods, almost mountains and masses of windmills! There had, of course, been lots of wind-power in evidence in the Netherlands where windmills have been in vital use for centuries, but Germany too, has embraced the wind farm as a way to cut down on CO2 emissions as well as to reduce dependence on Russian oil and gas in the age of global warming and political heat. In England, there are still many objections to on-land wind farms, which I find extraordinary given a year which has seen five heatwaves one after another. I think that all these NIMBYS (Not in My BackYard) should be forcibly relocated to live right next to one of the remaining coal-fired power statioins to see how they feel about windmills then. I feel that when the generation that grew up with the Teletubbies comes to power, they will embrace windmills and feel inexplicably comforted by the sight of them…

Evetually, still with an hour-and-a-half to go, we crested a rise and saw before us the broad sweep of The Rhine valley which moment, put me in mind of Keats’ poem describing Cortez first seeing the Pacific Ocean from “a peak in Darien” and so I felt the need to record the moment with a video…

Finally, at 7.10pm, we arrived at our AirBnB – a maisonette in the garden of out hosts who were most welcoming. The garden is at once familiar, a bramble trained along a fence, rhubarb and blackcurrant bushes and novel – peach and fig trees and a grapevine over a trellis. We disgraced ourselves by locking ourselves out whilst having a last cup of tea (alright, it was me – my fault) but it was only 10pm and we had no choice but to rouse our hosts ( Nous sommes desolais…) and get them to let us in – and so to bed…

So that’s it folks – Day One of our French road trip…

Have a good week y’all…