First day in Otematata

We discovered last night that we weren’t supposed to be drinking the water straight out of the tap, after I’d already had a least two glasses of it with my various tablets. Found it hard to get to sleep: probably feeling neurotic about the possibility of adding yet another thing to my current state of health (although I seem to be all right) alongside concerns about something going wrong with the catheter bags during the night in someone else’s bed (!) I’m finding I’m having occasional really blue days - today started off that way (not helped by sleeping very badly) but I’ll just have to keep moving forward. How people who have much worse operations to look forward to cope I’m really not sure. I’m having enough trouble with this relatively minor one.
The day started out cloudy again, and not particularly warm, but it became been sunny later and very pleasant. We went out to Benmore Dam, which is just a hop and a skip across from where we're staying, pretty much. Very spectacular, because for the first time in about ten years, they're having to let loose a lot of water - for once there's far too much in the dam.

More details about paddling

The apartment we’ve moved into isn’t quite up to the standard of the previous one, even though by all accounts it’s more luxurious. There’s a lack of kitchen utensils, for instance; a lack of dinner plates (Celia reckons they’re back at the other place and the rest of the set is here); and various other small things that add up to it not being quite what we first thought. That’s okay; we were much better off in the other apartment for the week.
We had nothing much in the house for lunch so we walked in Plaza de Reina (Reina meaning Queen) and pretty much took up the first café/bar we found. It was advertising an English breakfast, but once inside we opted for the Paella, even though our last experience of paella, in Barcelona, was most disappointing. It had been very salty and rather burnt underneath.
We also opted to stay inside out of the sun, because by that time the sun had decided to give it a go, and it had become very hot. Opting to stay inside meant we were (a) able to read Lesson 42 in the Spanish/English course that was left on our counter. It was a lot of fun, and obviously was partly done with tongue in cheek. ‘Your cologne smells like gasoline.’ ‘You remind me of Robert Redford. You have made me feel like a real man.’ ‘Why aren’t these accounts up to date? What, you think I’m some kind of magician? You need to be, or else you’ll be looking for another job.’ ‘I read The Economist. It tends to focus on gay marriages and the legalisation of drugs.’ And so on.
(b) We were also in the firing line kitchen-wise. It was rather like being not in the restaurant but in the kitchen itself, and of course, with the staff all being Spaniards, there was a great deal of full on in-your-face discussion. Fun.
The paella was lovely when it came, and just what the doctor ordered.
From there we caught the tram back down to the beach, which was more crowded than the other day: lots of families, and kids, and couples. We watched a father play with his children (aged from about four to fourteen) for ages: he was creating a circle in the sand and they had to get him out of it or get him down. They never did. Even when his wife joined in, he stayed on his feet - she went down with quite a thump at one point. Celia was tempted to join in, but restrained herself.
We also paddled in the Mediterranean. The first wave was cold, but nothing like Dunedin beaches. And after that you didn’t feel chilled, but just comfortable. We walked along the beach quite a way, Celia’s foot apparently enjoying the change.

The NZ tourist's wife paddles

Celia sampling the not too cold water of the Mediterranean, in a Valencia beach.

The NZ tourist paddles

Mike paddling in the Mediterranean. Notice the rolled up trouser legs, the man bag, and another bag as well containing books to read and various odds and ends.

Camp sites

The variation in camps is enormous. I still haven’t quite figured out the difference between the official Camp and Caravanning Association sites, where we get a little booklet stamped (ten stamps and a free night!) and where we get senior citizen discounts (even Celia) and where it costs virtually nothing for being here, and the sites where we pay twice the price, and where there are signs saying CACA people welcome and where the friendliness is far less. Oh, well, we’ll only be camping a few more days, and so the problem won’t bother me after that.
Some camps you have to pay for showers, some require a key to get into the toilets (!), some have laundry facilities, some have virtually no facilities - like the one the night before last near Chester, where there was one urinal and one WC for the men, one shower and one hand basin. Two WCs for the women, a shower and a hand basin. No hot water for washing up dishes. And other places, like the one here in Kidderminster, has so many showers and toilets and urinals and basins that you have to stop and choose which to use. It’s a bigger site, certainly, but not that much bigger.
And then there’s electric power. Most people can plug into a socket in the middle of the field and get their power from it. There may be a dozen of these units, with four sockets each, scattered around. Here at Kidderminster, we can’t get at one, unfortunately, so this may be the last message you get for a while…
But there is a ping-pong table here, so if you don’t hear from us, that’s probably what we’re doing. And resting.

Echternacht

On Thursday our hostess drove us to Echternacht, a smallish town north-east of Luxembourg city. It’s famous for a couple of things, particularly, the Catholic Abbey and its surrounding university, and the Roman remains. The latter is particularly special: for instance out near the local lake are the foundations of an old Roman villa, still intact (with some restoration as well) and showing the extent of the building as well as the pool in the front of the house. This is almost as long as the main building. I presume it was decorative rather than for swimming purposes (!)
The Romans populated this area pretty thoroughly in the past, and, as I’ll mention in the next post, their ‘leftovers’ are everywhere.
In the town of Echternacht itself we went and visited the Abbey which is primarily known for its association with Willebrod, [sometimes Willebrord] a British bloke who decided that the people of the area needed evangelising - some 1300 years ago. He was so popular that people have been making pilgrimages along the routes he took in his evangelising ever since. The church he built in Echternacht at first, was soon too small, and one of the wealthy Christians of the area donated funds to build a much bigger one. (Willebrod was dead by this time.) This second church was destroyed by fire around the year 1000, if I remember rightly, and so a third (and bigger) church was built. The French Revolution damaged this one to a great extent, and with the ensuing secularisation of the area, the shell of the church was used as a place for tradesmen to work in.
In due course, Christianity (particularly Catholicism) came into its own again, and in the 19th century the church was restored to such an extent that it was virtually a new church. Unfortunately, this church was thoroughly bombed in the Second World War, and so a fifth reincarnation of Willebrod’s church came into existence. This is virtually a new building, with absolutely superb modern stained glass (wonderfully colourful) but little else in the way of decoration. The old crypts are still there and Willebrod’s tomb is in one part of them. A sketch of his effigy on one of the tombs (the one we saw has a kind of stone boxing over the top) shows the effigy not in the usual state of repose, hands folded across the chest and eyes closed, looking as though the work is done. Nope, Willebrod is on his back, but is up on his elbows, eyes open, looking for all the world as though he’s had a rest and ready to go again.
Echternacht is full of cafes and gift shops - in the area we were in - but has lots of charm. We stayed and had lunch - onion soup with soggy croutons in it for mine hostess and me, and some sort of sausage dish for Celia. She’s been very keen to try out the sausages, but hasn’t quite made it generally. There’s such a choice of sausages, it’s hard to know where to start. And of course, they don’t exactly fit into the Weight Watchers’ scheme of things.

Potter Heigham

Yesterday we went to Potter Heigham, which is famous for two things. Firstly, it’s on the Norfolk Broads, so that makes it special to Celia, and secondly, there’s a bridge over the River Thurne at Potter Heigham beside which Celia fell in the water when she was a schoolgirl. (We have a photo of this bridge, but on the laptop, and I can’t upload from there at the moment. However, the link I've just given has a very good picture of the bridge on it.)

Why did she fall in the water? She was on a week’s boating experience with her school, and when you get to the bridge at PH (there are now two of them, in fact) you have to lower the mast on your boat because the bridge isn’t very high above the water. In lowering her mast she knocked herself into the water. Historic.

Potter Heigham isn’t pronounced Potter Heigham, by the way. Try something along the lines of Potterhyam? I put the question mark there because Celia always gives it a kind of upward lift at the end of the word.

It was packed with people having a day out yesterday, (although not so much as Wroxham, which is further along the road). We went for a walk along the bank of the particular arm of the Broads that comes into the village, and walked, and walked – and walked. Our intention was eventually to cross a bridge and walk back on the other side, but the bridge proved to be over yet another arm of the Broads, and there was a considerable body of water between us and the other bank, so we didn’t try to cross it. In the distance we could see the boats sailing through what appeared to be fields, with cows munching away. It’s an odd visual thing because it’s only as you get up close to some of the waterways that you can see they’re there. If it wasn’t for the boats on them you wouldn’t realize they existed.

Our long walk took us past a now disused (and dis-sailed) windmill, one of about half a dozen in the vicinity, past the backs of dozens of little holiday houses (virtually cribs or baches as we’d call them at home) parked right on the bank of the water, past marshes and smelling ditches where the water had become green and stagnant, past odours whose origins we didn’t want to think about, past brambles and stinging nettles and reeds and, best of all, wild blackberries. Which were ready to pick and exceptionally delicious. One of my great regrets in New Zealand is that the blackberry is considered noxious; here it grows where it pleases and passersby can pick as they please.

Most of the holiday homes were for rent, I presume, or were owned by people who came year after year. One of them was up for sale: £120,000 was the asking price. £120,000! The building was in a pleasant spot, but it was also run-down, and would need repairs to the walls, the roof, and probably things we couldn't see. The notice on the window did admit it needed a bit of a sorting out. That didn't apparently stop them asking what seems to me to be a phenomenal amount of money for what would be a crib back home.

The Trip Begins

The day started off with a heavy frost, but fortunately the roads were clear, and we had no real trouble getting out to the airport. The plane went off on time, after we'd said our last lot of goodbyes. A couple of guys who saw us hugging a son and a daughter and a daughter-in-law and a grandson said they wished they had someone to hug them goodbye. I offered, but they seemed to think that was going a bit too far.

By this time the day was beautiful and we had a smooth trip. There was some concern on the part of the hostesses early in the piece about a petrol smell that was obvious around the area we were sitting in. It turned out that a guy accompanying someone who looked like a wrestler (his name was Big Boy, apparently, and one of the hostesses said she was a fan of his), had some petrol on his shoes, and had to go and wash them. Celia noticed that the hostesses had a partly-finished crossword on the bottom of their drinks trolley, and said she had our crossword machine with her. They told us that they were trying to finish the crossword before the pilots, so we offered to have a go, and in due course got it done - after some making some false starts.

Libby picked us up from the airport after we'd left our two big bags at a storage place in the International section, and we drove out to her new flat - they only moved in last weekend. It's a two storey unit, one of about twenty identical attached ones, and it's very nice: lovely big open plan living room/kitchen, three bedrooms upstairs, three toilets (one downstairs in the laundry, one in the bathroom, and one in the en suite next door to that!). There's a garage, and an outside area at the front, but no grass. Although along the back of the units there's a long stretch of (very wet) grass, and a path leading down to the marina. Hundreds of boats moored, almost as far as the eye can see. Beside the pier at the end of the path there were dozens of little sprat-like fish leaping up above the water level and vanishing again. Further along there was a dredge digging great slabs of mud out of the water, and further along still was a curious device that took boats out of dry dock in the boat-builder's yard, on a kind of sling slung from a crane-like machine that slid along a track on wheels. Very cunning.

About four Libby took us to our friend's place, where we stayed the night. She managed to get a bit lost - although she's doing very well in the Auckland traffic - and while her trip there took nearly an hour, her trip home took about ten minutes!