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I stopped at Nieuw-Haamstede to go for a short walk across the dunes and along the long deserted winswept damp beach.
Two more long land bridges with mechanical floodgates in them. Again nothing to see through the drizzle. Keeping as close to the coast as I could took me past the biggest industrial site I've ever seen. Ranks of new cars and vans.. Chemical factories. A naval shipyard. More factories. Must have been 10 miles of it. Then another long tunnel.
On the other side the landscape changed from industrial to agricultural. Does anyone want photos of fields full of wet cabbages? I hope not, because you're not getting them.
Somewhere, unknown to me, I passed into Belgium and soon reached the massive strip-resort of Knokke-Heist. It had a huge promenade and beach, of a type I'd not seen since France and Spain. It was better than those though, as it lacked any people in it. Certainly no sunbathers. Belgium doesn't have much coastline and Knokke merged into the next resort town, and then the next one, and most of the coast seemed to be lined with big appartment blocks and hotels. The monotony was broken by a huge container port, which in hindsight was Zeebrugge. At De Haan the rain stopped and I actually took a handful of pictures. I skirted round the edge of Ostende, through some more smaller strip-resorts and then I was in France.
Sorry Belgium. Your resorts might be very nice, but I'd decided to spend my last night in France instead.
At 6.30pm I got to Dunkerque, and realised I was only 44km from Calais. Dunkerque actually looked quite a nice place, and on a nice day would be well worth a visit. But not today.
I got to the ticket office at Calais at 7.15, bought a ticket for the delayed 7.30 crossing, was in the queue at 7.30. The French armed police quizzed me for over five minutes over where I'd been and what I'd been doing, but maybe just because they were bored. Or mybe because they actually found it more interesting than people who were stocking up on cheap booze and cigs. THe ferry set sail at 8pm and arrived in Dover an hour and a half later at 8.30pm. I was also flagged down by the Dover border patrol, but they lost interest after 5 seconds.
Another couple of hours and I was home. HOME.
Very strange. Didn't feel very homely with half my stuff packed away in boxes, other people's stuff left behind, and the bathroom needing emergency cleaning with rubber gloves before it could be used. Spent a couple of hours doing as much unpacking and cleaning as I could be bothered to, and crashed out at 1am utterly exhausted.
THE END.
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My drinking cup had become extremely biohazardous so I threw it away. I'd been sterilising it every other day recently but it still keeps going mouldy. It survived through the summer without any problem. I guess the temperature inside the car then was hot enough to sterilise it, but now it's damp and wet and I'd rather not risk it. Managed to avoid any illness all this trip, and getting food poisoning so close to the end would be stupid.
A big accident on the motorway near Amsterdam caused one of only three serious traffic jams I've been stuck in since leaving home. This meant I didn't get to Haarlem until after 3pm. It's a really nice town, and I was considering stopping there, but after an hour of walking around in the pouring rain I lost the enthusiasm for it.
Noordwijk aan Zee was a big resort with lots of big hotels, a long promenade, and a handful of surfers. I carried on to Den Haag, but it was now rush hour so I bypassed the city centre where I guess most of the old buildings are and just followed the coast instead. It also had a big beach, with possibly the biggest waves I've seen and hundreds of surfers out in the water.
I got to the Hook of Holland but there wasn't much to see except mist. A little further on I passed a big modern hotel with a bistro and decided to stop. I walked up to the desk, but it didn't look much like a reception. There were two burly security guards behind the desk. "Is this the reception?" I asked. "Reception. Yes". "Do you have a room available?". Unusually for the Dutch, neither of these two guys spoke much English, so they asked me to wait whilst they called a colleague. 10 minutes later a third burly guy with "SECURITY" on his back turned up. He pointed out into the car park and said something like "Go 2nd floor, call 206 rooms". I decided to get back in my car and go somewhere else.
After driving round some canalled and cobbled residential streets at 30kph I found the Hotel Delta on the outskirts of Rotterdam. A bit pricey, but it was getting dark and I really didn't want to go into the city. Had a very nice mushroom omelette for tea.
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Brussels definitely isn't 'on the edge' but a friend of mine was playing a gig there with the band The Eden House. I'd missed their recent London show so decided to take a bit of a detour and catch them on the continent. I'd reserved a room in the Hotel Bloom in advance, as it was right next to the venue and had underground parking. I arrived about 12.30 and at 2pm I got a text from Amandine suggesting we meet up. We wandered aimlessly for a few hours catching up on life, as we hadn't had a proper chat in years. Neither of us had a map so we didn't really know where the interesting bits of Brussels were, and we failed to find them. Ended up having a drink back at my hotel bar as all the cafes werer shut, which was odd for a Saturday afternoon. But then Bank in London is much the same at weekends.
Amandine went off to meet the band for the soundcheck, and I went off to find some food. Which turned out to be a pizza.
At 9pm I walked all of 30 yards to the venue and got there just as the support band, Sophya, were starting. They were quite good. The Eden House were better. Spent the rest of the night backstage with the band, as I didn't know anyone else in the club. At 5am walked Amandine and the other singer Evi back to their hotel. The venue had also been hosting a massive chav party that ended at the same time, and the bouncers had been concerned for our safety leaving the club. I'd already learnt that you can get abuse in Belgium, from Belgians, just by having long hair.
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I wandered aimlessly, popping in bars and restaurants and coffee shops. The cheapest pool table was in the hotel so I spent some time on that. I tried working on some photos but without a desk it made my wrists hurt after half an hour so I gave up and played a lot of Civilisation IV instead.
After 8 days of travel since the last break it was quite nice just to enjoy a day off.
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On the road it was grey and wet again. The coast consisted of a 30km long land bridge, then another slightly shorter one. Den Helder seemed a nice town. I took a few pics of the canal and a submarine in the nautical museum. From there the coast south was a long natural sand dune defence wall with little resorts sprinkled along it.
Got to Amsterdam at 2.30. The Crown Hotel is in the heart of the red light disctrict and therefore no street parking. I pulled up on the pavement opposite the hotel, next to a Merc, but the owner of the house came out and told me to move. So I pulled up on the pavement 100 yards away blocking the door to a restaurant instead. After checking in, 10 minutes later a guy turned up, took some cash off me and drove my car away to an unknown, allegedly secure, location elsewhere in the city. I got a receipt.
The hotel is a bit of a dive. No en suite. No TV. No Internet access. No desks in the rooms. But it has a pool table.
Leaving the hotel I was heckled by a group of Brits hanging around the doorstep. "Hey, Marilyn Manson!". I decided to go back and stand in front of them. He then resorted to pulling goofy faces and talking to me really slowly, like to an idiot. "What job do you do?" asked his drunk mate, stuffing his face with pizza. "I haven't got one". I replied. Wasn't really the right crowd to claim to being a photographer to. I walked off, but heard him say behind me "Bloody f-in scroungers. Worse than the f-in pakis." So I went back. "What are you gonna f-in do when you get back home?"
"Look for an f-in job" I replied.
"What sort of f-in job could you do? Who would give you an f-in job?".
"I spent the last 13 years trying to help find the cause of Alzheimers. I'm hoping to get back to it. So f you." This time I walked off for good. Extremely angry. Not had any abuse since leaving the Baltics, and it's twice as annoying when its from Brits, abroad. All the groups of loud blokes in the streets were English. I got milder abuse off a couple of them too later in the day. Amsterdam could be such a nice place if it wasn't for the drunken scum of England spoiling it.
I'm officially on holiday for a few days now. Wandered aimlessly around. Got some food. Went in some bars. Took some photos, but not main because of the rain. Knackered my toes again bending down to tie a shoelace. Ended the evening beating a group of Americans7:1 at pool. I threw the last match cos they were so determined to keep playing until they'd beaten me, and I wanted to go to bed.
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Bremerhaven had some big modern architecture by the quayside, but in the rain it didn't seem worth stopping for. I got the ferry across the river as it left in 5 minutes and was probably quicker than driving round.
The scenery was absolutely identical to yesterday. I hoped the city of Wilhelmshaven would break up the monotony, but driving right through the heart of it just showed it to be a modern, dreary, place.
At Bensersiel I finally succumbed to impatience and had a change of tactic. Instead of picking a point on the satnav 20km away and asking for the shortest route, I picked one 140km away and went for the quickest route. This took me onto the autobahn, and a little way down it I passed into the Netherlands. This was a complete shock to me. I'd looked at the map a dozen times and convinced myself the German/Dutch border was 100 miles further on. But in hindsight, that was actually the border between two regions within the Netherlands. Oh well, it doesn't actually matter to me except now I have a guidebook and a phrasebook. Except they were both in the boot of the car.
First impressions of Holland (can I still call it that?) are that it's even flatter than North Germany, but you can't see as far because it has even more rain and mist in it. The first town I passed through (Delfzjil) reminded me a lot of Harlow.
Move along now, there's nothing to see here. Even without the rain and mist that would have still been true. To be fair a couple of the villages I passed through might have been quite nice on a sunny day, and probably more interesting that their German equivalents, but not in the pouring rain.
I kept moving along. At 7pm I got to Harlingen, which is the biggest place I've seen so far and very nice with a network of canals and big sailing ships. The Hotel Centraal was in a convenient location. Couldn't decipher the menu at the nearest cafe, but found a pizzeria not much further away.
Covered 315 miles today, which is a new record and not bad considering only a short stretch was on motorways. But that's what happens if you've no incentive to stop anywhere except for petrol.
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In a light drizzle I almost immediately crossed into Germany, 8,000 miles after leaving it. There was a shop just over the border (a signpost) that accepted Kroners so I used most of them up buying cigarettes.
The Germans attempt to camouflage their wind turbines by painting the bottom 5 metres (about 10%) green. Then they paint the blades red so planes won't fly into them. Presumably it doesn't matter if the odd cow gets a broken nose. Can cows get broken noses?
They only let you overtake at half the speed limit. So effectively unless you're stuck behind something slower than a tractor, tough, you have to stay stuck behind it. They also give you different speed limits for cars and for tanks (and the maximum speed that tanks are allowed to overtake at) even though I have yet to see a tank on any of the roads.
Most of the day was spent driving alongside a grassed over sea defence wall on my right with fields on my left. There were occasional small towns and villages and they were all uniformly uninteresting.
I passed through a couple of really big resorts, that were quite busy considering the time of year. The first (St Peter Ording) I couldn't fathom as it wasn't particularly close to the sea, had no scenery, no old buildings and was actually split into about 4 disparate sections.
The second, Busum, was more of a small town that had become a resort, ie it had streets with normal houses as well. I climbed the sea wall to see why there was a resort there, but was none the wiser. OK, the tide was out (a long way), but it had no beach, just a grassy bank covered in deckchairs for rent.
I also detoured to a 'panoramic viewpoint' near Marne. After climbing the sea wall I found a large brown field stretching to the horizon (and the sea), in the middle of which was a sign advertising the fun of walking barefoot in the mud and a solitary shower to wash your feet afterwards.
I debated all day whether I wanted to go to Hamburg or not. In the end I decided not to. Maybe after such a dreary day it's a crime not to go somewhere so historic and allegedly pretty. But it would have taken a whole day to explore (meaning a two-night stopover), it would probably be raining tomorrow, and I wanted to rest my foot and not do too much walking. So instead I got a 20 minute car ferry across the river cutting 120km off my journey.
I arrived at Cuxhaven at 6.30, as the light was beginning to fade. By the time I'd found a hotel (The Donner) it was too dark to look around except for food, but I didn't see much of interest to explore anyway. The restaurants were heavy on the Fische and the Fleische but I found an Italian and had gnocchi, just for a change.
Almost no photos. Partly the weather, partly the lack of anything interesting or pretty along the way. Definitely one of the top 5 dreariest days of the trip.
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I was going to tell the hostel people about the TV as they'd been so friendly to me when I checked in, but the only person on duty in the morning didn't speak English so I just left instead. It was only a crack in the surroundings after all - it still worked.
Most of the scenery switched between long isthmuses with water on both sides (huge inland lagoons), or grassed over sand dunes, or a wall of sand on my right and flat moorland on the left. The road was almost completely straight.
I took one car ferry, that was loading cars just as I arrived and a 10 minute crossing. I took some photos of a wind farm on the other side. There's turbines almost all over Denmark, it's rare that you can't see at least half a dozen, but these were actually in the sea and I could get right up close to them.
Sondervig was hosting the International Sand Sculpture Festival which was quite interesting. The exhibits were a bit rain damaged, but in surprisingly good condition considering they'd been up since June.
I detoured to the "Panoramic viewpoint" at Blabjerg. At a whopping 64m above sea level it was the highest point from horizon to horizon. Despite this, you couldn't actually see much from the top as the trees got in the way.
I really shouldn't have gone to the cash machine this morning as I realised I still had far too many Kroner in my wallet, and I was running out of Denmark to spend them in. I could have easily kept going into Germany, but stopped at 4.30pm near the border at the town of Tonder, in the Tonderhus hotel. Tonder is a very nice little town with many narrow cobbled streets and old buildings.
I was too hungry to wait for the restaurants to open so got a take-away pizza instead.
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The road to the Northern tip of Denmark passed through 3 significant towns, Saeby, Frederikshaven, and Skagen. Each one had a lot of hotels and one street of quaint brightly painted houses. Frederikshaven was the biggest and also had a naval base and a big shopping street, but there wasn't much to delay me in either.
Just short of Skagen I turned off to see "Den Tilsandede Kirke". No idea why really - just felt the need to see something. I turned out to be a well kept squat white church in the middle of nowhere. Didn't look particularly old - it was only it's isolation that made it unusual.
The extreme tip of Denmark is a sandbank that you can walk along, so I took pictures of the shore and birds on a rock instead. Walking 18km to get to the extreme tip of something (like Norway) is an expedition. Walking 300m is just pointless.
Lonstrup was a pretty little seaside vilage, of a type I'd not seen since....France? It had it's heyday in the 1920s-40s, before the beach got eroded away. Very windy and the sea was quite wild.
Only 3km further along I spotted a lighthouse. Nothing unusual about that, but it was poking out from behind a huge sand dune which looked intriguing. I realised I'd missed the turning to it so went back. There was a car park at the base of the dune, so I got out and climbed up it. It was the biggest dune I'd seen since the world famous one at Arcachon, France. Not quite as big, but still very impressive. At the top the wind became a real problem as I found myself in the middle of a sandstorm. Within seconds it became hard to see from the sand constantly blowing into my eyes. But was it worth it. The lighthouse (Rubjerg Knude) actually rose up out of the middle of the dune, and must have been built before the dune was there. It looked abandoned, not surprisingly. This is one of my favourite spots I've discovered so far, and I hope the pictures do it justice as it was very hard to take them whilst half-blind.
A little further on at Lokken I saw my first British car in months. Apparently you can drive on the beach here (there's even a speed limit sign) but the tide was almost completely in and I didn't want to risk getting stuck if it was going to come any further. .
There are a lot of Danish flags around - particularly in people's gardens. They seem quite a patriotic nation.
I still had sand in my right eye which was very irritating. Before 5pm I decided to stop at Hanstholm. I was beaten to the reception desk at the first hotel by an entire coachload of wedding guests, so went to the towns only other one (Somandshjem) instead. It turned out to be more of a hostel, right next to the ferry port, and was a lot cheaper even though I had to pay for the much-needed internet access. I've just translated this and it means "Seamen's hotel" which explains why I felt a bit out of place. The cafe next door managed to sell me a cheese and ham sandwhich (minus the ham) and a big plate of chips for my tea.
Had a bit of a panic when, trying to swivel the 25" CRT TV on it's bracket so I could see it from the desk, it fell off on top of me. I managed to break it's fall before it hit the floor, but the bracket was bent and the TV had a big crack in the plastic. I bent the bracket back into shape, secured it with a spanner from the car, and put the TV back. Fortunately it still worked!
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Stopped for pics of a country house surrounded by woodland at Skade. The big city of Arhus had some very nice parks leading up to and away from it, but I bypassed the city centre. At Kalo I saw a sign for a ruined castle so parked up. It was on an island that had a 14th century walkway leading up to it, but the castle itself was red brick and not that exciting. Even though it was only 20 minutes flat walk each way my right foot, which had been OK in the morning, started to throb alarmingly again. I'm starting to think I might have cracked a bone in it a few weeks ago.
At tyhis point I realised that the dotted brown line on the map was a tourist route, so I followed it for a little while. It took me to Molsbjerge, and a stone circle. But not one of the pathetic little rings of rocks I'd so often been disappointed by. A real stone circle with a menhir house in the middle of it. The tourist route actually zigzags much more than following the coast so I decided to only follow it when our paths actually crossed.
Denmark has a lot of farmland, and the farm buildings are very different from other countries I've been to. They're all huge complexes and immaculately maintained. Fresh paint, bright colours, gravel drives lined with rocks. Some of them look really nice.
At Udbyhoj I'd just missed the car ferry, but as it was only a 4 minute crossing it wasn't long until it came back for me. As soon as I drove on (the only car) it set off again.
I was getting a bit bored of FFF&F (featureless flat fields and farmland) and a bit dispirited. I decided that after stopping in the next town, tomorrow I'd decapitate Denmark and cut across to the West coast and down. And maybe spend the time I'd saved resting somewhere. But I checked the map and realised that if I made one last sprint up the next stretch of fast coast road, I could be at the Northern tip of Denmark tomorrow afternoon. So I decided to stick to the plan and kept going.
This took me to another 4 minute ferry crossing and into the town of Hals, where I checked into "Hals Hotel, Restaurant and Bowling", The restaurant looked a bit too posh but I found a pizza place without having to hobble too far. Hals has nothing else of interest in it.
The rooms were in a separate complex, but with no desk half an hour on the laptop was giving me backache so I turned to the TV instead. The highlights were Denmark's Got talent, British Gladiators with Davina McCall, or the God Europe channel. It's ironic that nearly all of the preachers on it are American.
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Trying to get to the tip of the promontary next to Kerteminds I ended up going round in circles on an unpaved farm track. It was 3pm, I'd only travelled 10 miles today, and I could still see Kerteminde. Felt very aimless and suddenly really wanted to be at home. Denmark, North Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium - the flattest most featureless corner of Europe. What happened to saving the best for last?
I drove on, straight through the city of Odense and up to the coastal town of Bogense. At 5pm I stopped for coffee and a cake, but mainly so I could use the loo, and then carried on. Then a non-stop drive to Juelsminde. It only has one hotel, but I decided to get cash and dinner before checking in as I'd only eaten half a packet of peanuts and a small sticky thing since breakfast. Found a pizzeria, and then at 7.45pm discovered the hotel had shut. It was a tiring 25km near-dark drive to the next nearest one on the satnav, a motel at Horsens. I was the only guest there and my first thought on entering the room, which hadn't been redecorated since the fifties, was "Bates Motel". No WiFi, TV was broken, bed was lumpy, but at least it was clean. I'm sure the spiders wiped their feet on the way in. They were big enough.
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With a deadline for this evening I was really sticking to the main roads and not stopping for much. At Nykobing I realised even this way I wasn't going to get round the coast in time so turned back and headed straight for Kerteminde, and the hotel Tornoes.
The hotel was two minutes walk from Charlotte's house - the woman I met whale watching in Norway - and I got there at 6pm. Time for a chat before her two young sons came home, then dinner. Very nice evening. I'm not great with kids, but it actually helps a lot when they don't speak much English as you don't have to worry about what to say to them. You just play with their laser pointers instead. Left at 9.30 and worked on photos in the hotel until very late.
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Nyhavn next. Without a guidebook, I'd just plotted a route between all the places my friend Charlotte recommended for me. Nyhavn is a very pretty little street of brightly coloured restaurants along the bank of a canal. Stopped there for lunch. Following the riverbank north took me past the palace, and further on to the old fortress, which still has an active army barracks within its ancient grassed-over walls. My feet were getting quite sore but I hobbled back to the centre, past Nyhavn and over the bridge to Christiania. In the 70s a group of hippies laid claim to some abandoned land and since then it has been a law-free isolated community. Lots of big signs saying "NO PHOTOS" so I packed the camera away and wandered around for a bit. On a sunny afternoon it was just a really chilled palce. Lots of young people sitting around, drinking, playing backgammon and rolling joints. There was a wide viariety of cannabis openly on sale from little tables scattered around. I bought a pint of cider and sat reading my book and resting my feet for a couple of hours. A very unique place, but it won't be around much longer as the government are planning to finally clamp down on it.
It was a long painful walk back to the hotel, requiring 4 compass and 3 map checks. Didn't leave the hotel again, except to buy some Pringles from the 7/11
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By the time I got back to the car my feet feet were severely hurting again, but I trudged over to the square I'd originally set out looking for. The buildings weren't as pretty as they looked in the guidebook, so I gave up on them pretty quickly.
Before crossing the 8km long bridge to Denmark I decided to try and find a vantage point to photograph it from. I chose the furthest side of it so I'd have the sun behind me, but probably too far away for the pictures to be any good. At this point I sat in my car and read my book. It's a good book and I was struggling to raise the energy to enter a new country, and capital city, and start looking for hotels again. After an hour I started punching up random hotels on the satnav and phoning them. The first four were quite pricey, and had no obvious parking near them. The 5th ("The Square") was equally expensive but next door to an underground car park, so I started up the car and set off. I didn't have enough Swedish money left to cover the toll on the bridge, but was able to pay the other half in Euros.
I had to hand over my car keys at the car park when I reached my destination. I told the guy I trusted him with them because he looked official. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. At least I got a receipt.
The hotel turned out to be directly on the "Radhuspladsen", which is one of the places I was advised to go and see in Copenhagen. I don't have a guidebook for Denmark and gave up worrying about phrasebooks when I entered Finland. After a long soak in the bath I ventured out for food. By now it was dark and first impressions of Denmark are that it's 75% asian. But that's probably because there was a rap band playing on a big stage in the square. There were other stalls set up - the one with the biggest crowd round it was a tent containing a guy with a turntable and a 5 year old asian girl in a yellow dress dancing to ethnic pop music.
The square actually felt more like New York with the explosion of neon everywhere. Old buildings behind them, but adverts for radio stations ("100FM - only God Music") and McDonalds dominating the view. After eating in Burger King (to save money) I fled from it all back to the hotel.
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And then a windmill.
Halmstad is a small city, but by sheer chance I parked next to one of it's highlights - an early 17th century 'castle'. It's normally a museum but was shut on a Sunday. The nearby river was reasonably pretty, with an old sailing ship (well, Gothenburg has one, I guess they wanted one too), and the Picasso Park full of sculptures and fountains.
Bastad is a medieval town but didn't seem to have anything particularly old or interesting in it. It had a very high concentration of hotels and is a popular resort, but the shore is lots of boulders and I'm not quite sure what the attraction is.
The guidebook said there was interesting geology at Hovs Hallar. There was, but not amazingly interesting. Maybe it had all been dismantled to build the hundreds of stone cairns that littered the place. In olden days piling up rocks had a special symbolism. Today people build them because they saw that someone else had. To me, it's no better than graffiti and extremely irritating to see them everywhere. The path back up from the rocks had three big cows on it. One family's picnic was hastily decamped before it got trampled on, and the cows refused to walk around anyone, they just pushed them aside, sending children tumbling.
Angelholm wa squite a boring town so I went straight through it to a pretty resort village of Molle. I tried to drive to the tip of the premontary to se ethe cliffs. But it was a nature reserve with a 40K toll and I couldn't decipher the ticket machines so gave up.
Very nice orange 'castle' at Krapperup with a moat and more grounds that were free for the public to wander around. Denmark is so close here you can see the houses along the shoreline.
Decided to stop at Helsingborg which is a big city and port. Only there was no street parking, and extensive roadwarks so in the end I just went out the other side and down the motorway to Landskrona. The first hotel there was closed, the second wanted 1400K for a night, the third was closed and the 4th didn't exist. By now it was 7pm, I was tired and hungry, it was getting dar and I had a headache. The next nearest hotel on the satnav was 25km away. Turned out to be sandwiched between a motorway service station and a retail park. Technically its in a town called Kavlinge.
Dinner was a Calzone from the petrol station. Does that count as a pizza?
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It was a fairly late start, after noon, and 2pm before I got to Tjoloholms slott. This is a sumptuous English-style stately home in extensive grounds. I got there just in time to join the tour round the building. The pamphlet on the place was only in Swedish. So was the tour. But I donned my blue plastic shoe covers and followed the guide and 4 other Swedish people around 20 odd richly decorated rooms . The guide talked constantly for a whole hour, and I didn't let on til the very end that I hadn't understood a word of it. Wasn't allowed to take photos inside either. All I gleaned was that it was built/owned by a Scottish doctor and it had William Morris wallpaper in the study. The gardens would have been free to walk around.
Next up Varberg. It has a big old fort - the 'Fastning' - which I walked around, and a nice onion-domed wooden pier. The centre of Varberg looked quite nice, but I moved on.
From there to Falkonberg although the land was flat farmland the road had an uninterrupted view of the open sea on my right, with the sun low in the sky. It felt a long time since I'd done a similar drive, possibly not since Western France and Spain.
Falkenberg was also a nice little town, but it was getting dark. At 7.30 I checked into the Grand Hotel, and later had a pizza round the corner. At 11pm a huge queue of drunk young people formed outside the hotel waiting to go into the adjoining nightclub. When I went out for a cig I was told it was free entry to hotel guests, but after much deliberation settled for two half-bottles of red wine in my room whilst working on the laptop instead.
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Disappointing to discover the big open lawn in front of the opera house was actually astroturf.
Then I headed into the old part of the city, but despite wearing two pairs of socks it wasn't long before the cobbled pavements were making my feet hurt again. So I did something I've avoided so far around Europe and went to the shopping mall. I bought 5 more novels, which should keep me going to the end of the year, and a nice bottle of tequila from the supermarket-sized off license.
They'd set up a glass walled squash court in the middle of the shopping centre, so I sat on the tiered seats and watched Pontefract womens squash team beat a team from somewhere in Denmark. That took a couple of hours, then I headed back to the hotel through a very nice park. It was quite interesting to watch a high standard squash match for the first time, but it also made me itch to play badminton again, and made me feel even more unfit than I usually do.
In the evening I went to a bar/restaurant only 50 yrds from the hotel, but it took nearly two hours to get served a two course meal because they were so busy. Fine if you're with friends, but annoying when you're reading a book and just want to eat. Couldn't be bothered going out anywhere else after that.
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Spent most of the day working on photos, and then watched the Bourne Ultimatum on the laptop whilst having a long soak in the bath. Altogether now, everyone say....."Aaaaaaah".
At 8.30 I met up with my friend Patrik, who used to live in London but returned to his home town several years ago. We went out for a Japanese meal. Which was a bit weird. Sticky rice, seaweed, soya chunks and raw egg yolk. Then we went to quite a cool bar for a couple of drinks. Not a late night though, as Patrik had a driving lesson early in the morning and they're very strict on alcohol limits here.
No photos.
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