A rest in London

We have been in London since the 3rd of November and leave to fly to Turkey on the 11th so are tidying up a few things and having a rest while we are here.

First order of business (although the saddess) was to sell Ted. After a few people came round to look he sold and he is now gone as of Friday......

On Friday night we went with Tina and Martin to a fireworks display which was really impressive.

Saturday we went out for typical 'English cooked breakfast' It consisted of eggs, bacon, sausage, beans, bubble, mushrooms and black pudding, as well as coffee and toast. Needless to say I was full for a while after all that!
In the afternoon we settled in with a few drinks to watch All Blacks play England then South Africa play Ireland.

Sunday we went for a drive out in the country somewhere to watch Martin and Tina's nephew play rugby. After the game we headed to Martin's brothers house where Kerry cooked us an amazing roast dinner with yorkshire puddings and all the trimmings.

Today we have been booking some accomodation for Turkey and trying to plan the rest of our Asian leg.
We have A LOT of gear so I am not looking forward to trying to pack up tomorrow and Wednesday......

Belgium round two

From Etretat we did a rather big drive back up to Bruges in Belgium. We decided to come back here for our last 3 days as we really liked Bruges when we were there at the start of our trip and it was only 20km from where we needed to catch the ferry.

We looked around the town and had some frites with mayo (fries) before heading out to the place where we slept last time by a small boat club lake.
Mish and Hannah were also on there way up to catch a ferry from Rotterdam and so came and meet us in Bruges.

The next day the 4 of us went back into Bruges and spent the day looking around (Mish and Hannah hadnt been before). Bruges has lots of lovely lace, chocolate and christmas shops and you can drink cheap (from the supermarket) but delicious (because its Belgian) beer in the main square so both the boys and girls had no problems keeping themselves entertained for the day.

Back at the lake we made pizzas for tea and had a great night consisting of lots of laughs about our travels in Mish and Hannahs van (with lighting, heating, seating and running water!)

The next day Mish and Hannah set off to Holland to catch up with Markus and Anna and we went into Bruges town again. This time we went for a walk further out of the main tourist area. We walked round some windmills and on the way back stopped at a second hand shop where I picked up a really nice scarf.
After our last feed of frites we headed to Oostende where we to catch the ferry early the next day.

Our ferry crossing was supposed to be 3 hours, but due to bad weather and busy shipping lanes it took 5 hours.
We drove straight back to Tina and Martins as we were ready for a well deserved shower and rest. Unfortunately we took the long way as we forgot to take our sat nav off 'avoid toll roads' (so expensive in Europe) and we ended up going right into London city and back out to avoid a £2 bridge that leads straight to where we wanted to be!

France #3

We crossed the border back into France with no set agenda at first. We saw in the distance a statue of what looked to be a giant boar, so headed in that direction to find out what it was. Turns out it was a statue of a giant boar! It is the provences icon and a sculptor with too much time on his hands made it out of steel. It was put in position on the 08.08.08 after a large parade through the town...... it was weird, there was an information office just for information on the boar!

We looked through a few towns around the Adennes area for the next couple of days including Rocroi a town with star shaped fortification walls which was cool.

From there we made a dash to the other side of France as we had decided to spend a few days looking around the D-Day beaches.
Our first stop was Bayeux, the town that was said to be a good base for looking around. It was a lovely town with what I would rate as one of the most beautiful churches we have seen on our trip (we have seen a lot of churches). It is also where the largest commonwealth WWII cemetery is located and also has a museum of the Battle of Normandie.
We picked up some really good information from the tourist office and made a plan.

Our first stop was La Pointe du Hoc an outcrop of land with steep cliffs around. This area was heavily bombed from sea and air during the war and has not been touched since. The ground is covered in massive craters and the destroyed bunkers are still a mess of concrete rubble and twisted reinforcing steel. It was a really moving site.

The next day we woke at 'Omaha Beach' and had a walk down the beach at sunrise. The beach is now just a beach, but there are some info boards with photos of the beach in war time and it is crazy. It must have taken years to clean up after the war.

We then went back to Bayeux in time for the Battle of Normandie museum to open and we spent the next 3 hours there. There was so much information it was hard to take it all in but there was a really good video presentation which gave an overall view I could understand!
After a walk around the commonwealth cemetary we went to the public library and had a long session on the internet booking flights, planning our Asian leg and putting Ted up for sale on GumTree :(

The next morning we woke on the coast with a lovely view of the sunrise over Port Winston, another WWII site we were going to see.
We were parked by 'Batterie de Longues-sur-mer' and went to explore. There are 4 bunkers here and this is the only site on the coast still to have original guns. The guns were pretty huge and impressive, however they were quite badly damaged from the naval bombing.

From there we drove the short distance to Port Winston. This is a floating port which was invented by Winston Churchill. It was made in England then towed over to France so the Allies quickly had a way to offload 6000 tonne of supplies and machinery daily. Not much of the Port is left now, but some of the floating parts are still out in the sea.

Our next stop was 'Site Hillman' a series of 18 underground bunkers connected by trenches. Unfortunately you cant go very far into any of the bunkers but you can go down and see a bit of each one.

Mont Canisy was our last stop on our D-day beach trip. It was not under care of the British or American's as most of the other sites are. You could tell. We were able to go right inside any bunkers or trenches that we wanted. While this was quite cool it also meant there was no information about the site at all, so we dont know anything other than the short blurb in the brochure we had.

We pulled over for tea and sleep when we saw a ridiculous number of campers parked up by a marina. We went out for a bit of a walk and saw that there were even more campers parked there than we thought. It was absolutely ridiculous, there must have been 60 odd campers there.

From our scenic wonders book we chose Etretat as our next stop. It is a town with some large rock formations on the coast. It was really quite scenic and we walked to the top of the cliff for a nice coastal view. It also had lots of signs to say you weren't allowed to take pebbles from the beach and we thought this was weird but soon realised why when we saw that the peebles were lovely coloured and polished looking. I could see why you would want to take one.

Luxembourg

Our first stop in the tiny country of Luxembourg was Luxembourg City. It is built on the edge of a valley so has amazing views right in the middle of town! We looked around the historic town but as it was Sunday most of the shops were closed. Luxembourg had a castle of which there is a few ruins left that all the other countries used to fight over. This means it was heavily fortified and had 'casemates' or underground passageways built. There was origianlly about 23km of passageways and we went and had a look through those that were still open. They were roughly dug tunels with stairs leading up and down all over the show. Not sure how you remembered your way around back in the day. I got confused and I had a map and signs as well as artificial lighting!! There were lots of little windows for firing wepons out of and a couple of canons still left too.

Luxembourg also has low tax on petrol and cigarettes so there were HEAPS of people buying up large from all the surrounding countries. We sat at a motorway services for a couple of hours as we couldnt believe how many people were going into the petrol station and coming out with bags full of cigarettes.

From there we drove north east back to the German border to Echternach a small town that had a 6km walking track through forest to the next town. Unfortunately the weather was again bad so we had to cancel but we did go for a walk around a small lake before leaving for France.

The language in Luxembourg is weird, some people speak German, others French, others Flemish sounding then they also have their own language.....so hard to know what to say to people when you greet them!