We thought it was time for an insight into the Travelling Dilberrys caravan of life i.e. the actual vehicle which has been our home now for over 11 weeks. This blog was due anyway, but a series of unfortunate events in the last few days has brought the subject to top of mind. It all started with a wonky awning, and whilst it hasn’t ended yet, it will do so in the next few days with any luck, but with a reasonable bill for a number of other totally unrelated parts of the motorhome. Or to be more precise, the “camping car”, which is what motorhomes are most often known as in Europe. (They are certainly not known as mobile homes which is a great relief when arriving at some camping grounds when there is a tariff sheet on display which suggests our overnight cost will be something like €80-100….rather than the usual €10-30….until you realise that “mobile homes” are not motorhomes like we are in, but removable houses which exist in little compounds in most campgrounds.)

Anyway, what’s happened lately? As mentioned, the awning that comes out from the side of the van had got a bit skewed and wasn’t locking into place, which is a potential issue as you can’t drive away with it like that. This is apparently a fairly common complaint and we NOW know is dealt with by having one person wind it in, and the other pull slightly on one side to ensure it winds it straight and locks in. At the time however, we (OK, insert the word “Andrew” in place of “we” there) tried to fix the problem with a screwdriver. Not a good idea! Not because the screwdriver itself did any harm, but the person on the end of it did! We ALSO now know that it is not a good idea to stand one foot on one of our Tesco outdoor chairs and the other on the back bumper of the van. Two discoveries here: firstly a supermarket outdoor chair CAN fold completely inside out (and then be reversed back into shape later), and secondly, the back right taillight housing unit on an Adria Coral 650SP is held on with only glue and just ONE screw! How ridiculous is that?

It is now currently held on however with about 200 metres of gaffer tape, and will remain so until we can get a replacement unit installed with a bit more permanency than the original. Fortunately, it’s only the housing and not the actual lights themselves as that would be REALLY expensive! But…..speaking of the actual lights themselves, there is the small problem of the back LEFT unit, which someone (not us I hasten to add) mysteriously and anonymously managed to crack at some stage recently, presumably in a carpark somewhere. It’s not too bad, but probably wouldn’t pass a warrant in NZ…..not sure about in the UK, when the “MOT” is next due.

The day after the bumper incident, we (Pauline) opened one of the cupboards in the bathroom. You know how the airline crews always warn you about taking care when opening the overhead lockers because items may have moved in flight blah, blah, blah? Well, the same warning should apply to camping car cupboards. A bottle of perfume tumbled out, dropped straight into the little basin and smashed a hole straight through it! Makes the basin a long way short of watertight, that’s for sure! Fortunately, and I know you’re all concerned about this, the perfume was unscathed! We’d already noticed that a previous owner of the van had used something to clean the basin which had discoloured it a bit and had also made it somewhat brittle – now we know just how brittle it was!

So replacement part number two is needed: a bathroom basin unit for a 2004 Adria Coral. Fingers crossed for our visits tomorrow (well, just one visit hopefully, not visits….) to local French Adria dealers that we may find both parts in stock and able to be installed fairly smartly.

Then there’s the minor things….
~ the kitchen window blind which will go up but not down again
~ the cover off the electrical socket on the outside which some Lithuanian vandal thought they’d quite like. They did leave half the hinge behind though, so I’m not sure how useful the bit they did break off is to them
~ the hole in the front windscreen blind which (yes, me again) I put in it in Sweden back in July when I thought it would be cool to have our New Zealand flag on display whilst the blind was up. Another idea which turned out to be not so smart in hindsight: how was I to know that when I accidentally let the corner of the flag slip a little, the eyelet in that corner would wind in with the blind, which then became utterly immovable in either direction? And how was I to know that the only way to get it out – using a combination of brute force, an egg slice and yes, you guessed it, a screwdriver – would leave holes in the blind when I eventually did get it to unroll as designed?
~ the additional racing stripes added to the side of the van the other day when the trees along the side of the driveway at a campsite at Gourdes in the South of France proved NOT to be the type that bend gracefully out of the way and just wipe any excess dust off your vehicle, but more the type that are competely unyielding and are designed to remove paint rather than dust! Hopefully a cut and polish will minimise that one….time will tell.
~ when you open the side door, and want it to stay open, you can click it into place with a catch on the door that clicks into a holder on the outside wall. That worked perfectly well – once! The first time we used it and then wanted to close the door again, one of us (me, quite probably….OK, yes it was me!) pulled the door as it is designed to be pulled, and with it came not only the catch as expected, but the holder and the two screws as well! That was on day 1 – today is day 80 and I still haven’t fixed that one. I have however invented a little string thing that keeps the door open perfectly well!
~ last but not least, the side hatch which leads into what we call “under the house” which is the large storage locker under the bed but accessible from outside where we keep our suitcases, our supplies of bottled water, wine, toilet paper, the outdoor table and chairs, the 25m electrical cord, an empty gas cylinder, pegs, a clothes rack, the toolkit (complete with screwdrivers as you’ll have noted), the water hose, a sign which you use to reserve your spot when you leave a campsite (that one is on long term loan from the most expensive camp in Scandinavia – it was the least they could do after charging us like wounded bulls to stay in their camp). Anyway…the hatch. This is how it works….it stays open on its catch perfectly well for hours on end when no human is nearby, but as soon as one of us sticks our head in the locker to get something out – whammo! Down comes the hatch, with considerable weight and force, right onto your head!

So enough of all that….these are all minor things really when viewed in the context of 15,292km so far across 20 European countries – the campervan actually performs really well: it has the most comfortable bed, heaps of storage so we have a nook or a cranny for everything, a compact but perfectly adequate bathroom (albeit with a self draining basin at present), very reliable and smooth running mechanics, it uses next to no oil, we get 25 miles to the gallon of diesel, it comes complete with an efficient driver and a gourmet cook both of whom can, but rarely do, understudy each other, and it’s our home! We like it very much, and will miss it come the end of January!

Oh, and one other thing it comes with….the new female in my life, Karen. Karen is the Australian voice of our TomTom GPS system, which is an iPad app that has proved to be almost brilliant. She has very accurately and politely taken us across thousands of kilometres of Europe with next to no navigational incidents , but why only almost brilliant? Well, for starters, she doesn’t always allow for the fact that motorhomes are generally wider and higher than cars – the other day she insisted we should take a street in Paris despite me explaining very clearly to her, more than once, that our 2.6m high vehicle was NOT going to fit under a 1.9m barrier. She also has an annoying habit of picking up our walking motion on GPS and saying, always very loudly for everyone to hear, just as we enter McDonalds with the iPads under our arms to check emails etc., something like “turn around in 200m on Rue d’Embarrassment, and take the next left”. Shows how accurate the GPS is though! And in Bruxelles on a Friday evening, she took us to what was supposed to be a camp in what turned out to be the heart the CBD, but turned out to be, we think, the HQ offices of the Belgian Camping Association. That last one isn’t Karen’s fault though….like any computer, it’s “garbage in, garbage out”.

Best of all though, is her uniquely Australian way of pronouncing addresses and placenames, especially French ones. Rue de l’Eglise doesn’t come out as “rue de lay gleeze” but “roo de leg lies”; Fontainebleau was “fon-tain-a-blow”; Lyon of course is “Lion”; Nice wasn’t “niece” but “nice”; and luckily when we were in Tuscany last week, she didn’t ask us to travel through the town of Fucécchio….

Enough for now, once again it’s high time I went to bed before a big day of tracking down spare parts for camper vans tomorrow. This blog post was supposed to be accompanied by a few photos of our home on wheels, but as is often the case here, Internet uploads are dreadfully slow, so the pictures will have to be posted another time.

All the best – from Andrew, Pauline and Karen

It seems an age since the last blog post, but the time has just flown. At that time, we were in Germany on our way to Paris to collect Pauline’s sister Patricia who has joined us for 4 weeks….we achieved that pick up OK, and it’s been all go since! In brief, we’ve clocked up nine countries for Patricia in just under two weeks: France of course, plus Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Liechtenstein, Italy, and now tonight we are overnighting in a car park very close to the top of the hill that dominates the very small republic of San Marino. We’ve been having a great time together in the camper van with the putting up and taking down each day of the second bed now down to a fine art.

And our travels haven’t just involved scenery either – there’s been a bit of culture as well! Take last weekend for example….Friday night saw us at the Oberammergau Passion Play Theatre enjoying an excellent performance of Shakespeare’s “Antonius und Cleopatra” (despite the very obvious language barrier of the entire thing being in German); on Saturday night we had a night in watching (again) “The King’s Speech” on the iPad; and on Sunday night we were in a magnificent old Baroque hall in Salzburg enjoying a 18th Century style meal while being entertained by a quintet of musicians and two opera singers, brilliantly performing a variety of Mozart pieces. On the way to that last one, we stopped in at the Mozarthaus where the composer lived for a few years in the 1780s, and also had a look at his birthplace across the river in the old Salzburg town.

And then, to round things off nicely, on Monday morning we got all touristy and with our new found friends Dave and Tash from Hawkes Bay (our neighbours in the camping ground) we took a four hour coach ride around Salzburg and out to nearby Mondsee, to see most of the locations where they filmed “The Sound of Music” – it was a fun tour despite the incredibly irritating voice of the guide and we learned a lot of information, useless and otherwise, about the movie and also about the real Von Trapp family story too.

But that’s not what this blog was intended to be about – we want to tell you about three small German towns, or villages, which we’ve visited in the last three weeks or so. Firstly Colditz in what used to be East Germany, about halfway between Dresden and Liepzig; then Ediger on the Mosel, and lastly one already mentioned above….Oberammergau in Bavaria. We have stayed in a number of other German locations, notably Neckargemund which is just up the Neckar River from Heidelberg, but the three mentioned are very typical of “village Germany” – being unchanged in many respects from the way they were hundreds of years ago yet still so appealing to visit today.

When the last blog was started, we were freedom camping in Colditz, not too far from the famous castle which most notably was a POW Camp in WW2, but has a much longer history than that, having been built hundreds of years ago as a home for a member of the nobility, burnt down, rebuilt, used as a hospital, a mental asylum, a normal prison and so on. All of this before becoming what it is today which is a very interesting museum, partly about the castle itself, and partly an Escape Museum retelling the stories from 1939-1945. Colditz town is also very interesting – a seeming jumble of winding cobblestone streets surrounding not only the castle and the church on the hill, but also a small market square down below. We had a good wander around on a quiet Sunday morning before climbing the steps up to the church where the normal service (again entirely in German of course) was supplemented by a visit from a youth orchestra from a Leipzig Academy who played some magnificent pieces of music on authentic medieval instruments. They were really good and their concert was outstanding – just a pity that, despite posters up all over town announcing the event, the orchestra outnumbered the congregation 3 to 1. After church we visited the Castle, then had lunch in the only place open in town because Germany like a lot of European countries is essentially shut on Sundays. Our visit was short, but so worthwhile, and we can now add the small town of Colditz to our list of good places to visit, which is a positive way of thinking about the place rather than seeing it solely and somewhat negatively as the site of a well known POW Camp.

A day or so later, after a couple of abortive attempts to find a place to stay in the winegrowing Mosel region to the west of the Rhine, we were at the stage of driving along looking for the “next rest area or parking place – anywhere will do!” when around the corner we came to find the truly delightful village of Ediger. It is on the banks of the Mosel (the river flowed past just 5m or so from our back bumper after we found an almost free park – just €4.50 – for the night); and it consists of some extremely old houses on a handful of the narrowest cobblestone lanes you can imagine surrounded by an almost intact fortification wall built in the 1560s, all sandwiched between a few shops and restaurants on the main street which runs alongside the river and some of Germany’s steepest vineyards on the hill above the village. It was such a photogenic place – vines, 16th century towers and walls, a church of the same vintage, Tudor style houses, cobblestones, barges on the river – the camera was in action quite a bit that’s for sure! If there’s ever a competition for “Brilliant Little Villages of the World” then we will be nominating Ediger and we confidently expect it to win!

But then of course there’s the third place on our list – the almost as delightful small town (about 5000 inhabitants) of Oberammergau in the Bavarian alpine region. We called in there for coffee and a quick look at the place Mum and Dad (Moffat) had visited in 1980 to see the Passion Play, and were so taken by it that we ended up staying for two nights! This time there were a variety of reasons, not just the postcard scenes of the streets of the town and of the towering mountains all around, nor the undoubted talent of the performers we enjoyed seeing at the theatre, nor the theatre itself which is a fantastic building where the audience is inside but the stage is open to the air so part of the stage set, therefore, is the Bavarian night sky as the sun sets. And it wasn’t only the history of the Passion Play which, for those who haven’t heard about it, is when almost everyone in town takes part every 10 years, in the staging of the Easter story. Not that the history isn’t very important – in 1633, when the Black Plague was rampant across Europe the villagers of Oberammergau prayed for a miracle to be spared, and when for the most part they were, they made a commitment to stage the play every 10 years. The first one was produced in 1634, and then they’ve done it in every year ending in “0” since (apart from just two: 1770 and 1940), plus in 1934 and 1984 to mark 300 years and 350 years since they started putting the Play on. It’s a huge undertaking attracting an enormous audience from all around the world – most of the villagers are involved including our taxi driver (Us:” “What part did you have?” – Him [very proudly]: “Crowd!”) and they put the play on 5 times a week for nearly 5 months!

No, the highlight of the visit to Oberammergau (especially perhaps for Patricia who really pushed the envelope and overcame a few fears) was our scaling of Mount Kofel which overlooks the village, and stands some 500m above it, at 1342m. It’s a reasonably easy track winding back and forth through the trees on the hillside for most of the way but the last 30 minutes or so is up some pretty steep rock faces, with a steel rope set into them to assist. And to add to the fun it started pouring with rain when we were almost at the top which made the last few metres quite interesting, as was the descent! But at the top where there is a large statue consisting of a cross with Jesus on it – big enough that it can easily be seen from the town below – the view is magnificent and all the effort made to get there becomes so worthwhile.

So our tour of three German villages ends with a tale of an intrepid Alpine climb, and three proud mountaineers who made it to the top! Thanks for staying interested this long (I’ll assume you have done so) – if you’d like to see a few photos of these places click on the link here

Oh, and one other visit in Bavaria…to see Neuchwanstein Castle which is the delight of jigsaw and calendar makers everywhere for its picturesque fairy-tale castle beauty (and of course was also the castle in the movie “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”). After all the effort to get there we were a little disappointed to find its charm was 80% covered in scaffolding and mesh as they near the end of a restoration programme that started in 2001. And as if that wasn’t enough, we also found out that it isn’t even an authentic medieval castle – some mad Bavarian aristocrat had it built in the 1860s because he wanted to own “a medieval castle”. Obviously the real one that was already on the site, albeit needing a bit of repair but torn down to make room for his fake one, wasn’t good enough!

Let’s start with a few facts…. [as at Saturday 28 July when this was written]
:: Total countries visited: 27 on tour, 13 in the camper van
:: Total days on tour: 127 to date
:: Photos taken so far: 6,490 (that’s only about 50 photos a day….)
:: Kilometres travelled to date in the camper van: 9,083km in 47 days
:: Diesel purchased: 1,034 litres. (Best price NZ$2.00/litre in Lithuania, worst price NZ$2.82/litre in Norway)
:: Total days since I last wore long trousers: 71 (and then only because we went out for dinner)

Now, our recent travels…..but first, I need to go back to my youth. I remember three things from the 70s (actually, I remember a lot more than that, but here are three that are relevant to this blog entry):
1. a huge slogan painted in white paint on the south facing brick wall of a two storey flat in Cumberland Street, North Dunedin when that part of the one-way system still ran north, which read “FREE LATVIA!”
2. the National Geographic Atlas, a constant source of wonder to me as a youngster (and it still is today) which had, on maps from the late 1940s until after 1992, some wording in red letters on the maps of the Baltic area, alongside the three Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which read, from memory, something like this: “Annexation by the USSR of these countries not recognised by the USA”
3. the TV show “Colditz”

The last item I mention only because right now, we are free camping in the village of Colditz with the famous castle just over there….right above us. Tomorrow morning we will pay it a visit which we are looking forward to with some interest. We will also go to the local church and see if we understand the proceedings just as easily in German as we would in English, this time without having a 10 year old Lawren snoring her head off beside us as she did once in a Berlin “kirche” many years ago.

The first two items, however, were the lead-in to a quick trip through the Baltic States in our camper van, nicknamed “Whirlwind” for this part of the tour due to the fact that we spent just over 5 days there, and in that time were in 5 separate countries from Finland to Poland. We didn’t know a lot about this part of the world, so to visit albeit briefly and learn more was too good an opportunity to miss. Whilst the visits were quick they were a very important part of our travels so far, and we made the most of every moment.

The student graffiti artists will be pleased to know their message got through eventually and Latvia is now free, and these days maps can be published with the three countries showing as the proud independent nations that they are, and always have been really, despite being the frequent pawns in other powers’ political machinations. Interesting that we saw a Millennium monument in Klaipeda in Lithuania – but not one which celebrates the same Millennium as we recognised in 2000 but instead it commemorates 1000 years of the existence of their own country in 2009. Lithuania was once the largest country in Europe – they’ve been important, and they’ve been around a long time, so occupations by the Soviets are really just inconvenient blemishes in a much bigger picture.

So, in the spirit of whirlwind tours here’s a quick summary of a week in the Baltics…..
Tallinn, Estonia: our arrival port on the ferry from Helsinki, and a wonderful city. It is such a mixture of architecture from the 11th Century to the 21st, encompassing all styles including of course the mid-20th Century “Soviet Concrete Functional”. We stayed in a facility that had buildings of that nature, namely the 1980 Olympic Yachting base, although they weren’t too bad, having been built for an international audience that might actually care about their surroundings. The much more interesting parts of the city though are not the Soviet ‘gifts’ nor the ultra modern shopping and transport centres and the new hotels springing up everywhere to accommodate the thousands of tourists who now visit – buildings that wouldn’t look out of place in any capital city anywhere – but of course, the beautiful Old Town. The churches, the restaurants, the shops, the old city wall, the winding and narrow cobblestoned streets – it is all just so amazing, and makes Tallinn a place you could wander around for days if not weeks, just soaking it all in.
By complete contrast, we also enjoyed a tour of part of one of those USSR style buildings – Estonia’s first skyscraper – the 23 floor Viru Hotel built in 1972. This is the famous “KGB Hotel” so named because the KGB through their stooge tourist agency Intourist had the place built and were the only occupants of the 23rd floor which is where they housed all their surveillance equipment for snooping on guests who were of interest to them. That pretty much included everyone so 68 rooms in the hotel are now known to have had microphones and cameras hidden in them in all sorts of ingenious ways. The Hotel is now quite normal, but last year they opened a Museum on the 23rd floor which pretty much exhibits the rooms as the KGB hurriedly left them in 1992 when the Baltic States gained their independence (again). Old reel to reel tape recorders, microphones inside curtain rods, telephone bugs – it’s all there and it’s almost funny, if it wasn’t so true. And, in keeping with the humorous side, you’ll see in the photos attached that the recording room was behind a locked door….but not one with no marking on it which you’d think would be normal when you’re trying to be inconspicuous. No, this one had signs in Russian and Estonian announcing “THERE IS NOTHING HERE”.
Riga, Latvia: within the EU, borders are no longer relevant so often the only evidence you’re entering a new country will be the weedy rusting remains of a former border control post beside the road. However, we knew we’d reached Latvia because the road narrowed considerably, and also became extremely rough and potholed. The opposite happened when we left Latvia….so Estonia and Lithuania have relatively good roads, but the Latvian ones in-between are generally speaking, rubbish! However, for 99% of our overnight stay in Riga, we had a perfectly good time – again, Riga is that wonderful mixture of the old and the new, and is desperately trying to create an image for itself that is uniquely Latvian, rather than being another example of “former Soviet”. It has good reason to do so – after all, just like its neighbours Latvia is a very old and proud country, and the Soviet influence is really quite short term, historically speaking. Note that I use the term Soviet rather than Russian because the two are quite different, and have had quite separate influences over time. We took the city tour by bus and canal boat which was a great way to see the place, especially as the tour came with an audio commentary narrated by a woman in heavily accented English – an accent that would have gone down very well for one of the bad guys in Get Smart, or maybe a villian in a James Bond movie! We also did some supermarket shopping which was an eye-opener….not only are the bad old days of queuing for staple items such as bread well and truly over but, again like its neighbours, Latvia has huge supermarkets stocked with every conceivable item (except disinfectant!) and is an extremely cheap place to shop. Especially after 3 weeks in Scandinavia, of course.
Oh, and the other 1% of our stay?? Our GPS system wanted us to turn left on our way out of the city, which we did without noticing the overhead sign that showed the lane was straight ahead only. Just around the corner however we were pulled up by two cops and eventually received a “protokol” which is apparently Latvian for “ticket” and were fined €30 on the spot. Interesting story though: initially the fine was 20 Lats (about €28) but through the not inconsiderable language barrier it appeared that the fine had to be paid at a Bank, only this was Saturday afternoon. So I spoke on the cop’s cellphone to the Inspector who had a good command of English and agreed the fine could be paid in Euros instead (we’d spent the last of our Lats) and paid in cash on the spot. So naturally the cops grabbed the cash and bunged it in the glovebox and were ready to call it quits at that point! “Hold on, where’s my Protokol” came a voice from….oh yes, me! Another lengthy exchange where neither party made any progress until eventually Inspector English was called again, and to my surprise he was totally on my side and said in a stern inspector-like voice “Let me speak to the policeman again!” – the end result was a ticket was issued which I can’t read, and the cops left with €30 that they personally can’t spend!
Klaipeda, Lithuania: not the capital this time but instead a coastal city of around 180,000 people which had a very nice old town (where we enjoyed both a good walk around and a nice lunch including the traditional potato dumplings) and a newer part of town with modern shopping areas alongside row after row after row of identical Soviet housing complexes. The emphasis here though wasn’t so much on the city but on some of its people as we were visiting friends from Dunedin who have lived for many years in Lithuania where they are developing a Church and, among other things, have an involvement with an orphanage there – and we were able to assist in a small way with their Sunday activities with the kids. We’re not able to go into too much detail but suffice to say it was a rewarding and extremely worthwhile visit. And that evening our friends let us take them out to dinner so we went just north of the city to a truly delightful beach resort town named Palanga, and enjoyed a lovely evening at the “Piano BARbeque” where the wine was great, the food was excellent and the live piano and sax music was outstanding!

So that’s it – our flying trip through the Baltic States. Not always the most comfortable of places to be – for me at least I found it hard to shake off the feeling of having been there before after being in the USSR in the bad old Communist days – but for all that, some really interesting places to see and things to do, and above all, some wonderful people to meet. In some parts of Europe, the Estonians/Latvians/Lithuanians have a bad name for a variety of reasons but all the bad guys must be in those other parts rather than at home as almost everyone we met during our visit was charming and keen to make our visit an enjoyable experience. In the end, even the cop in Riga wasn’t too bad!

Have a look at a few photos in the Baltic Countries album here. And while you’re at it, there’s a few of the subsequent week in Poland here, if you’re interested.

P.S. So, if you’re old enough to remember, are you now having trouble getting the first few bars of the theme to “Colditz” out of your head?? Me too!