Saturday 25 October 2008

Happy Birthday Bobbit.Hello everyone! We left Zwiesel the day after our last blog (Thurs 16th) and what fun getting out as it had rained all night and the ground was like one big bog (see photos). After much wheel-spinning and splattering of mud later we made it out and went to a garage on the outskirts of town to try and get a new spare tyre. No luck as he has to order in all of his tyres so we went on our way to Nuremberg to try out luck in a bigger city. We finally found the stellplatz we were looking for which was just like a normal small carpark with a few spots for motor homes with overnight parking permitted. Free, but no facilities. It rained for the rest of Thursday but cleared up in the evening and the temperature dropped loads. We only have an electric heater and with no electricity that meant no heat! It was the first real drop in temperature we've experienced with no heating and we've decided we either need to get a gas heater or give up on the free camping now it's so cold. The coldest the temperature got in the van over the three days we were there was 4c. It was so cold at night you could see your breath laid in bed and condensation started to form on the blankets where we were breathing!! On an evening our usual entertainment without electricity is good ole cards and beer drinking but on the Friday night this was done in hat and gloves as it really was that cold! On the Friday we decided to invest in some proper winter jackets as this was something we didn't bring not expecting to be anywhere too cold (!) and the cagoules just aren't enough. It was really nice to see a city as we've been in middle-of-nowhere places or small villages since we left St Johann and it was refreshing to see lots of people and traffic and shops! The good thing about the stellplatz was that it was only 2 miles away from the town centre so we could walk in each day which is unusual not having to work out the public transport. The city has a cool medieval castle and lots of cobbled streets and stuff - quite pretty in the old town and good shops and sausages and beer in the new town. We managed one more night here before moving on to somewhere with electricity so that we could have some heat! So on the Saturday we tried yet another garage in Nuremberg before moving on - the garage seemed very bemused by the size of our tyres - 205/75/16 - as apparently the 75 middle number doesn't exist in Germany. Great. He said he could order some in (from France?) but that they would take several days to arrive. And would no doubt cost a fortune. So we moved on. This also causes a problem as we were planning to get our snow chains in Germany as they are a legal requirement to be carried from mid-November in Germay and Austria, but obviously if they don't have our tyre size then we can't get the right size snow chains either. Grrrr. So our next plan is to skip across the border into France and try our luck there and if there is no luck there then we will see if we can reduce the middle size down to 70 for the two front wheels and get a pair of winter tyres and snow chains in that size. Why so complicated?!?! So we drove on to Rothenburg Ob Der Tauber and got to the stellplatz quite late - around 7pm. This stellplatz was like a very big carpark but with designated motor home spots where you could hook up to electricity and feed 50cent pieces into a meter. The cost for parking was 10euros for 24hours but they also had a motor home service point and loos etc so it wasn't really that bad. Very very cold again but the heater got some use! It's not a bad heater - a little 2kw fan heater so it circulates the warm air around the van and heats it up quite quickly but it's noisy which is a drawback and not one we can leave on all night, it also uses a lot of juice compared to some other heaters. Explored Rothenburg on the Sunday - another great location for the stellplatz - right on the edge of the town just outside the city walls. Rothenburg is the prettiest town we've seen so far. It's all cobbled streets and half-timbered houses and still has the original medieval city wall running the full perimeter of the old town, and towers dotted about everywhere. And it has a Christmas Village!!! Which is quite famous apparently. Kylie got very very very excited. It's the biggest Christmas shop we've ever been in and has loads of displays and so much stuff!!! Spent about 2 hours in there altogether and couldn't resist picking up a few decorations for the van. Another cold and fresh day - its really autumnal here at the moment - bright sunshine, little wind, and very crisp and cold. But the autumn is really beautiful here - all of the colours and the trees and the leaves. Sunday night we walked back into the town to see it at night and it was just as pretty then. Monday morning we had to wait for the windows to de-ice so the temperature must have dropped again in the night. On route to our next stop we found the closest we've come yet to a B&Q! So we stocked up on some electrical bits n bobs and found a cheap oil radiator (37euros). Hallelujah! We needed a few electrical bits as we brought European plug adaptors but didn't bring any English plug adaptors. All of the sockets in the van are obviously English but any electrical appliances we buy over here are obviously with a European plug! Like the new kettle we bought and the radiator. So we (Andy) have had to do a little re-wiring!! Then we got to a little town called Eberbach near Heidelberg, so we've well and truly crossed over to the West side now. The campsite is just on the outskirts of the town centre on the banks of a river so we've got lovely views across the river and into the town. It's also only a five minute walk into the town centre. Found a nice little 'sports bar' that's the closest we've come to a normal 'bar' so far in Germany and it has internet access so hence our catch-up. Met an English guy on the campsite who now lives in north Germany near the Dutch border and retired there 5 years ago. Talked about how lovely a country it is, and how easy and simple life seems to be here (and how cheap the beer is of course). We're treating ourselves to a meal and night out tonight and are looking forward to that as the budget only allows for one or two a month!Hope you are all well and happy anyway, and looking forward to Bonfire Night L (no fireworks for us this year), and Halloween (yes we do get to celebrate that).Catch you all soon xxx :)

Sunday 2 November 2008

Hello!!! Well we had a very nice night out last Saturday - had a meal in the Greek restaurant that was on the campsite and then went into the town for a few more, it's quite cheap round here - we only spent about £40 on a meal for two with drinks and then more drinks in town - the last bar bill was 20 euros (£16) for one beer, 2 large wines, 3 double vodka and cokes, and a double amaretto - not bad eh! It made a nice change to go out but we both suffered a little in the morning. Which is probably why we've had such a conundrum over the clocks here… We were both sure that we'd read somewhere that the clocks don't go back and forward in Germany like the British Summer Time alterations. So we woke up on the Sunday a little worse for wear and could not understand why both of our mobile phones had gone forward one hour when the computer and Andy's watch were saying the correct time. A quick look out of the window to the town clock confirmed that the computer and watch were correct. We could understand the phones going back one hour automatically if they thought we were in England but not forward. This puzzled us all day but eventually we thought nothing more of it after re-setting the phones back to the 'normal time'. Then when we went into Heidelberg in the van we noticed that tom-tom had miraculously shot forward one hour aswell - and were so confused!! A phone-call with Mum on the Wednesday night involved asking the time as in our heads England would now be 2 hours behind and not 1 hour - and the puzzle continued when it was confirmed that England was in fact still only 1 hour behind and not 2 - confused!!!!! Shortly after this phonecall the penny finally dropped and we realised that the clocks had in fact gone back here in Eberbach - the town clock had obviously been altered, the computer and Andy's watch must have gone back automatically and the phones and tom-tom hadn't moved at all they were just showing the original time still! Can't believe it took us four days to realise this!! Ddduuuuuurrrrrrrhhhhhhh!!! He he he, can't believe we've just confessed this to the whole world either…As well as the tyre issues we also ran out of gas last week which presented a new set of problems. We only use gas for the cooker (but can also use it for the fridge and hot water boiler when we don't have electricity) so that wasn't too much of a problem, but the fact that good ole British 'Calor Gas' doesn't exist in the rest of Europe, was! Apparently the fittings are different as well as the pressure as Calor Gas is Butane and the rest of Europe uses Propane (which has it's advantages as it works in very cold temperatures whereas Butane doesn't). So, not really knowing where to go to get it swapped over, and even if it was possible, we asked the friendly English-speaking lady at the campsite. It took a while to get the full picture across that we were wanting to switch to European gas permanently, but eventually we got there and she said that she actually sold the gas on site and would let us look at one bottle to see if it fit in the outside cupboard and how different the fittings were. So we lugged the bottle over to the van and opened up to see what the differences were. The lady's husband soon appeared and started talking pressure differences and adaptors (in German, translated by his wife) and much head-scratching ensued. Well, pretty soon we had drawn a crowd - the Germans really love a good English puzzle and to share their knowledge of all things motor home! Lots of German chattering later and one of them ran off to get a catalogue from his van to show us which adaptors he thought that we could use to solve the problem. He said that we would have to drive to Heidelberg to a specialist motor home shop to get the bits but that it could be done. The campsite lady very kindly looked up the address of this shop for us and also rang them to see if they thought they could help. And the German man gave us his catalogue so that we could show them what we needed. So off we went to Heidelberg, only about a 30 mile journey, and had to trust tom-tom to navigate us through the city centre to the motor home shop. A few wrong turns later (tom tom loves to tell us to turn the wrong way up one-way streets or turn left at traffic lights where there are no-left-turn signs) we finally got there and found someone to have a look. The first reactions were sucking air through teeth and shaking of heads - the master gas man that we were talking to had two issues - first of all we have copper piping all through the van for the gas and apparently he will only fit Propane to steel piping, and the other was the actual fitting from pipe to gas bottle. He said (through a translator) that as a 'master gas man' he wouldn't be able to sign the work off. Anyway, he wouldn't give up on trying to solve it and started wandering back and forth with all kinds of fittings. In the end he managed to get the bottle fitted to the pipe with about 6 inches of adaptors leading the way. The only thing left that we weren't sure about was the pressure - our calor gas worked on 28 millibars and all of the European gas works on 50 millibars but we asked him about it and he said it was fine, checked all our appliances were working properly and the job was done. And all for the mere cost of 62 euros!! Then we had to pay for the gas bottle which was 51 euros but at least we have it now and to get it refilled allegedly costs less than 10 euros, and it's propane so we don't need to worry about it working in the minus zero temperatures.We went back to the campsite in Eberbach that night as it was too late to set off anywhere else and stayed there until the Friday (31st). In the rain. All it really did since we got to Eberbach is rain rain rain! A few dry spells in between but enough to raise the river we were camping next to by about 1 metre which was pretty scary. We saw a lot of flood photos in the local papers aswell so it seems they did have a few problems somewhere locally. Still felt a bit uneasy about waking up one morning bobbing down the river though. And of course it was another grass campsite so turned into a bog which isn't nice for walking about or for moving the van anywhere. So we set off again, in the rain, on Friday to head to France and try our luck there with the tyre problem. We headed to a place called Colmar just over the border as it looked like a fairly big town without being a city, parked up and went to tourist info to get a list of garages in the town. We decided to try the first one which was like a cross between a Halfords and a Kwik Fit and after trying to switch back to French speaking after speaking German for the last month, we eventually managed to tell the man at the counter what size tyre we were looking for. He gave us the same look that we'd been getting from the German garages, a kind of incredulous 'are you ssssuuuuurrrreeee you know what you're talking about…?' kind of a look, and then said no, no way, need a specialist shop for camping car, can't even order them in. At least the German garages said they could order one in! However we did manage to buy two of those aerosol cans that inflate your tyres if you get a puncture enough to travel a little way (thanks for the idea Dad), so we feel a little better for that. We decided not to try anymore garages that day as they would probably say the same and it was getting late and we still had over an hours drive to get to the campsite. By the time we got to the campsite in Masevaux it was dark and absolutely sheeting it down. Thankfully reception was open so we booked in and got absolutely drenched setting the van up with water, electricity etc with an umbrella and a torch - the coldest, wettest set-up we've had yet for sure. We had noticed they had a bar so decided we deserved a couple seeing as it had been such a long day. It turns out that the campsite is run by a Scottish couple - they used to come here a lot in their tents and made friends, back then it was a municipal campsite (owned and ran by the town hall - like our local council) and they were looking for someone to run it and they decided to go for it and moved over here. Then a couple of years later the town hall let the business become their own, so they own the business but just rent the property and land. Sounded great to us! We sat and talked quite a bit to the lady owner, Jenny, and she was so funny with her stories of chasing off gypsies and getting through the local red-tape in order to get her licenses etc. She said it was nice to speak to some British as although she is fluent in French they don't have the same sense of humour. She did mention also that it was snowing here on Thursday which was a little worrying - we need a bit more time to find our snow chains please!We passed a couple more garages on the way in to the town and one really big tyre place, so we're going to have a bike over there one day next week and just see if they can get hold of this darn tyre size. The rain has stopped today and it has warmed up so hopefully we'll get some nice weather as there are supposed to be some good walking and cycling routes around here. And as it is so cheap (60 euros a week) here then we will probably stay two weeks in order to save a bit of money. Then we head back into Germany and move our way along the Southern border then back into Austria for 4 December. We have set a d-day too - if we haven't found work by 19 December then we come home. But I'm sure we'll manage to find something in two weeks.Well, hopefully we'll be able to paste this blog into the website as we were using a German computer in Eberbach and it wouldn't let us do it, we did manage to get a few photos on though, and the travel plan is now updated.Hope you are all well and still keeping up with us. Thanks for all your messages - we love getting them!Catch up soon (hopefully with news of a new tyre and some snow chains…), take care, lots of love xxx :)