We took the Eurotunnel from Folkestone to Calais…then, shock horror…drove through France, to reach Belgium! Fiona managed a couple of hasty photos of the Belgium signpost…then we were on to our first non_french destination- Ypres, or Wipers, if you prefer…
We arrived at our first campsite…luckily Andrew had reserved a spot, it was getting rather busy, due to (we later found out) a huge motoring rally which was hitting town..The pitch was quite roomy, and there was a very handy pathway to the town. First stop was the Menin Gate, quite a stunning monument, both in its size, and the endless list of names on it….all those souls lost during WW1, without a “proper” grave…and all those wreaths, stating “we will never forget” and nor should we.
The photo below is of the Menin Gate, click on the photo for further images taken around Ypres.
Menin Gate
Feeling the need for some Euros, we went on an ATM hunt….eventually finding an ING bank, which allowed us €200..woohoo…time for some drinks! In fact, we opted to eat in town..and what a great decision that was! Andrew chose the “scampi in garlic butter”….NOT yer normal deep fried scampi we find in any pub in the UK…no, these were the most succulent king prawns, in a wonderful garlic butter…A has died and gone to heaven! I had a steak, which was also very good, but it wasn’t quite as outstanding as the scampi. After a few drinks and coffee, we were ready to hit the streets and wander more.
Next day, we saw some more of Ypres, including a few hours spent at the In Flanders Field Museum in the town centre. Well, I admit, I had to escape to the Ladies for a few minutes, to wipe my tears….it was the bit where chlorine gas had been deployed, and the accounts of soldiers almost ripping the skin from their faces, in agony…..man’s inhumanity to man….just horrendous…I returned to the exhibits, and continued. Wow, what a museum that was! Well worth the entrance fee…so much has gone into showing what the Belgian people went through…
Home to camp for dinner, then out to experience The Last Post at Menin Gate….a ceremony carried out every single evening at 8pm…a kind gent from Arkansas invited me to stand in front, so I could see things better…(short arse moment) and we got chatting..he too has a Motorhome…a 40 footer! He asked if we tow a car behind our Moho…different world! The ceremony was very moving, with the Last Post, and a few people walking through to lay wreathes, to add to the many, many already there. The crowd is asked for silence, and no applause. Soon, its over and we disperse. Drinks in the main square..which will soon be filled with the Rally stands, and exhibits.
We’re off on our holidays again, with differences….a whole 4 weeks available to us, and we’re going via the Channel Tunnel instead of car ferry. (Quite a bargain, thanks to Tesco Clubcard deals) We spent the first night at Canterbury Park and Ride, here they have a Motorhome Aire..other councils, please note! Having been very impressed by the cathedrals at Winchester, and more recently York, we were keen to see how Canterbury compared. Well, we don’t know, as a.) the exterior was largely covered by scaffolding, and b.) having arrived late afternoon, the £12.50 entrance fee didn’t seem good value..we’d only have about 30 minutes for a whistlestop tour. Unlike the aforementioned cathedrals, you can’t wander round the outside here…only a glimpse without paying the entrance fee…so Chaucer’s tales etc. will have to wait for another visit. Instead, we had a lovely meal at Cote Brasserie, and did some people watching. We had a few drinks at the local (to the Park and Ride) pub in the evening, before our Eurotunnel trip next day. Here is the best (free ) view of what is acclaimed as a beautiful building.
The best view of Canterbury Cathedral you get without shelling out the £12 or so.
Another nice sunny day in Fareham, these two have been very lucky again with the weather. This time Steve and Laura have their marriage made legal, and Laura gets the marriage certificate to prove it. Although they were dressed a little more casually than at the main event, they both looked good and were both far less stressed than at their wedding back in May.
Matt and Ritchie were there as formal witnesses for the marriage, with Tom and Kira, Fiona and me there to share the joy.
Click on the photo below to see a selection of the photos I took at the event:
now its really legally binding…Congratulations to a lovely couple.
Ah, the New Forest. Created sometime between 1066 and 1087 on the orders of William the Conqueror. 36 parishes were destroyed in its creation and many people left homeless and destitute just so that William and his pals could enjoy this extensive yet private hunting ground.
The New Forest extends to around 200 sq miles and it’s not just trees; there are numerous glades, ancient woodlands, open moors, heathlands and boggy streams, and it is criss-crossed with roads, walking trails and unpaved cycling paths. There is an abundance of wild life freely wandering the forest including horses, cattle, deer, donkeys and pigs. The forest is home to a wide variety of birdlife including buzzards, cuckoo, wood-peckers, swallows and swifts.
For our May break this year we decided to take the ‘van to the forest and stay at Long Meadow campsite which is just outside Brockenhurst. From Long Meadow it’s a 20 minutes cycle ride on forest trails and minor roads into Brockenhurst, although it’s probably much quicker along the busy A337.
Long Meadow campsite was pretty much empty, out of its 100 pitches less than 20 were occupied so we were able to park far away from everyone else is our usual sociable way. The weekend started off very hot and sunny and this continued into Monday afternoon. Rain was forecast for 3pm on Monday and it delivered in spades bang on cue, chucking it down in torrents. After an hour or so, the rain stopped as suddenly as it had started leaving us with a bright and sunny late afternoon and evening but had soaked our picnic furniture so no BBQ that evening.
Cycling in the forest was easy going on unpaved tracks, no hills, just a few slopes, very few people around and next to no traffic, even on the roads. It’s the sort of countryside you can cycle on all day without getting bored or too tired.
Brockenhurst is a nice village with a number of small shops and tea rooms. There is a butcher, a baker, a green-grocer, but don’t use the Tesco Express where they charge 29p per onion!. Fruit and veg is much cheaper in the green-grocer on Brookley road.
Click on the photo below to see a selection of the photos we took while out and about in the New Forest.
A shaded glade in the New Forest, somewhere near Brockenhurst
The Big Day finally arrived, Steve and Laura married on Saturday 5th May!
In the week leading up to the day, we had the pleasure of meeting more of Laura’s family at a get together at the ‘Nook’ restaurant in Hook village. Laura’s brother Doug, his wife Kate and their lovely boys Clyde and Ellis, and Laura’s sister Carolyn, and her delightful daughter, Gracie and ourselves all enjoyed an evening of chatter and good food.
At the Nook at Hook
We also had a reunion with Elizabeth. On the eve of the wedding, we were also able to introduce some of Steve’s family to more of Laura’s. So many names to remember….
Anyway, back to Saturday, which provided us with some glorious weather, so may family and friends getting together to celebrate with Steve and Laura.
It’s fair to say that the plan for the day went a little off course, but everyone rallied round, and enjoyed the day, The catering was excellent, and drinks were flowing. Doug’s speech included some video messages from people who couldn’t attend the day, which was a lovely touch.
Fiona and I are very proud of Steve and Laura, and we are delighted to welcome Laura into our family, and to have this firm connection with Laura’s family and friends too.
Click on the photo below to see the pictures I took on the day
New Year 2018 and my younger brother Richard payed us a visit and helped polish off a load of home brew and then impressed us with a damn good impression of John Wills with both eyes firmly closed:
He’s awake in this one
Click on the link to see the other photos taken during Richard’s visit.
York is a long journey north for us. We have visited the area once before when we attended Richard & Ann’s wedding back in the early 80’s, but we have never been back. I’ve always wanted to visit the York railway museum and crawl around the old railway locomotives, but it was always too far to go. Now that we have more time on our hands we decided finally to bite the bullet and head off up north. We booked our campsites, 2 nights outside Burton, followed by 4 nights at an ‘adults only‘ campsite just outside York. We waited with anticipation for the dates to arrive.
On the morning of our planned departure we awoke to a snow covered landscape.
It was freezing cold and we were worried about driving in the snow; we waited until the roads had cleared and then headed off.
The countryside was snow covered all the way but presented no problems. The ‘Conkers’ campsite roads were iced over, but we managed OK.
We spent 2 nights at Conkers which is in the National Forest, our stay was really just a stop-over on the long trek up to York, but gave us a day to hike around the forest trails.
The snow had all but disappeared and the sun was shining when we set off for York on Tuesday morning.
Fiona had her foot down all the way so we arrived in York much earlier than anticipated. A short stop at the large Asda on York’s Monks Cross retail park to replenish our food and then on to York Caravan park to settle in.
York Caravan park is nice with level pitches and large heated private bathrooms. It is an adult-only site so no noisy kids. There is a bus stop right outside for a 10 minute bus-ride to the centre of York, we became regular users of the 10:30 bus into York and the 16:38 back out again.
The Minster and City of York
We knew that the Minster was going to be well worth a visit as we’d done our homework and read-up on its history. We’ve visited Winchester cathedral a few times so thought we knew what was in store for us.
The city streets leading to the Minster were wonderfully Medieval, very reminiscent of towns in Normandy. We meandered in the general direction of the Minster, which was hidden behind streets of Colombage style houses while all the time anticipating shouts of ‘gardez l’eau‘; thankfully no such shouts came. We explored the old narrow streets with names such as ‘The Shambles’, ‘Swinegate’ and many other roads ending with ‘gate’. In old germanic/viking ‘gate’ meant road so these were road names and not gate names.
Wow, the Minster was so much more stunning in than we’d expected. We decided very quickly to splash out on tickets, go in for a visit and join in one of the Minster tours.
The Occidental or western end of the Cathedral.
Just think, this marvellous creation of Man was completed in 1472; it really is stunning. It’s 520 ft long and 222 ft wide, the height of the nave is 99ft and the towers extend to 196 and 225 ft. Unbelievable, and all built without the aid of a computer, JCB, bulldozers, machine tools etc, and apparently without an overall design, though I do find that bit hard to believe.
York is a really lovely city, nice and compact so easy to get around, plenty to see, and with fascinating history. There were a good number of independent small cafes and coffee shops so finding lunch or a snack was easy. During the week it seems to be a ‘gentle’ place but it really came alive at the weekend with an influx of hen-parties and stag do’s. With its numerous old pubs it looked like a great place for a night out.
Sightseeing around York
Rather than plod around York on foot seeking out the interesting parts we treated ourselves to a 24 hour sightseeing bus pass each and toured the city in an open topped bus. The weather was cold but dry and we got a much better view from the top of a double-decker bus than we would have walking the streets. So much so that we went around the city twice before getting off the bus. The following day we leapt back on the bus for another final tour before our bus passes expired.
This is Micklegate Bar where in 1460, the head of Richard the 3rd Duke of York was stuck on a pike for all to see.
Below are some of the photos we took of York.
National Railway Museum
This is what I really came here for; it’s billed as the best railway museum in the world and its admission is free. There was a lot to see there, steam locomotives, royal trains, Mallard among numerous other engines. The ‘Mallard’ simulator was a bit of a let down, good job we managed to get concession tickets for it, the rest of it was marvellous. There were many restored locomotives and a few restored royal coaches, even a few diesel engines too. The station hall and great hall exhibits were superb, however, the warehouse was stuffed with railway artefacts including dining crockery, silver tea sets, seats, models of trains and ships, clothing – uniforms and tons more leftovers from a bygone age. I could have crawled around the warehouse exhibits all day long.
The Evening Star, loco number 92220,the last steam loco built for BR; it’s hard to believe they were still making steam locos in 1960.
Here is a gallery of photos we took as we wandered around the exhibition halls, click on them for a better view.
Jorvik Viking Centre
We hum’d and ha’d about visiting the Jorvik Viking centre before heading over there on the Saturday afternoon only to find a long queue outside so decided to give it a miss. The following morning after getting off the bus we went straight over to Coppergate and found there was no queue at all so we bought the tickets and went in. The exhibition has two distinct parts. The first is a ride (at walking pace) through reconstructed Viking streets featuring huts, pigsties, animal pens, a fish market and shops, all with ‘authentic’ smells, and populated by Viking mannequins. The ride lasts about 15 minutes is accompanied by an informative sound track explaining each of the exhibits.
The second part of the exhibition is a museum showing some of 40,000 or so artefacts discovered when Coppergate was excavated back in the ’80’s, as well as some exhibits on loan from other museums.
Burton water
Our holiday is now over and we are heading back south. We’ll break our journey with one night at the Conkers campsite which is a handful of miles from Burton on Trent.
It’s a long drive from home to York, 279 miles in total according to google broken down as 116 from York to Conkers and a further 163 miles to home. Fiona has lost her fear of driving the van so she drove from Conkers to York and then drove all the way home.
Before we set off from Conkers, we fill the motorhome fresh water tank with Burton water which I will use in my home brewing once I get home. Burton water doesn’t contain anywhere near the amount of calcium or magnesium as our own domestic supply and should be far better for making lighter beers. Let’s wait and see.
Sore back
Before setting off on holiday I manage to hurt myself probably by twisting or stretching before a run or while cycling. This left me with an awful pain in my right hand side, just below my ribs, at and around my kidneys. Having already been told not to ruin the holiday by rushing off to A&E I decided to grin and bear it. However, it was so painful that I had to visit my doctor on my return home. Thankfully, it was my ribs and nothing to do with my kidneys. With the right drugs and free prescription, the pain will go away in time.
Previously, I had sorted out my home printer to use a RaspberryPI as a print server and so offer shared printing services on my home wi-fi. However, my printer is a Canon MP630 which is a printer and scanner.
I have a need to scan some old photographs but do not want to mess around disconnecting the MP630 from the RPi and reconnecting it to my main computer. I need to turn my RPi into a network printer and scanner controller that can be built as an embedded system using Buildroot. With this as my main requirement, I ‘googled’ ‘network scanner linux’ software and in the search result was the name ‘saned‘ .
A bit of investigation followed; could sane be easily configured in Buildroot? what supporting files did I need to create?. There is a ‘sane-backends’ directory in the Buildroot ‘package’ directory, so after 30 minutes or so of reading I decided to give it a try. The steps needed were:
enable ‘sane-backends‘ in the root system configuration to be used by Buildroot to create the root file system
create an overlay file saned.conf which determines who can access the network scanner
create a startup file in /etc/init.d called S91scanner which starts/stops/restarts the sane network daemon to automatically start the network daemon at startup.
define the sane network port in a /etc/services overlay file
then tell Buildroot to build me a new root file system.
move the image to a micro-SD card and boot the RPi
On any client system install something like xsane which is a scanner front end.
Amazing, I was able to scan photographs in remotely on the scanner, and then print them from the remote printer/scanner using the RaspberryPi 0W as the print & scan server.
It’s been a while since I managed to get out for a good blast on the bike, the weather has been wet and windy but finally winter looks like it is behind us so its time to get the bike out of the shed and get those muscles working again.
Rather than use the Defy I decided to service and get out on the CX, which has the wheels and tyres more suited to wet and muddy roads.
Giant TCX-2 in its younger days
For each of my rides so far this year I have chosen to take the usual route to Hedge End, Lower Upham, Owslebury and home via Bishops Waltham. It’s a round-trip of 35 miles or so and gets me up the tail end of the South Downs with its lovely views and nice quiet small roads. The elevation gain over the ride is around 600 metres, there are a few good and exhausting climbs within the first 20 miles or so.
My latest foray out was a disaster. I had made the simplest schoolboy mistake of:
Not eating enough lunch before setting off.
Took no food with me
Took no money with me.
20 miles of so from home I pretty much ran out of energy but kept going. It was getting cold and the light was fading. Cycling the last few miles along the Botley road I started to have problems with my eyesight, I really couldn’t see properly and was feeling very weak. I had plenty of water with me, but nothing at all to eat. All I could do to keep going was to try and remember what was in the fridge at home and plan a monumental scoff up as soon as I arrived home.
I’d probably consumed around 150 calories for breakfast. When I arrived home, my Garmin indicated that I had burnt over 1800 calories on the ride. I was absolutely starving, my lack of fuel adversely affected my average speed. I was really angry with myself.
Other than that I was quite pleasant for the first hour or so. I spotted a few Buzzards, a woodpecker and plenty of pheasants.
My latest obsession has been with gas for our BBQ. We have already sorted out a refillable gas system for the van, but wanted to improve on the gas BBQ. We have a super little Weber Q1200 gas grill that we cook on outside when we are out camping, we cook outside because we don’t want the smell of cooking in the van. The Weber is really excellent, however, it uses the small disposable 450g butane & propane gas bottles. The bottles retail at around £7-8 each, and can occassionally can be found for £24 for a box of 6. These bottles are disposable and each one will last a maximum of 3 hours so when we go away for a few weeks we take 5 or 6 gas bottles with us.
The small gas bottles are handy and can be easily stored in the van’s external drawer, but the need to cart around several is a pain. Rather than keep buying disposable canisters and adding to landfill, I started to look around at refillable alternatives. We needed a refillable gas bottle that ideally could fit in the van’s rear boot which is only about 12″ high, and we have to be able to refill the gas in the UK and abroad. These factors rule out anything Calor have to offer as Calor is only available in the UK. There are a few refillable bottles available such as those from Gaslow or Safefill, but they are expensive (between £130-150) and it is difficult finding anywhere that allows you to refill one.
That only really leaves Campingaz, but Campingaz charges rip off prices in the UK. At go-outdoors, a new 907 bottle (2.7kg) full of gas will set you back an eye-watering £40 for an empty bottle and then an additional £34.99 for the gas, a total of £74.99 for the initial outlay. Prices are slightly lower in France, £33 for a new empty bottle and £22 for a refill.
I will not pay £40 for an empty bottle, and I will not pay £34.99 for 5 litres of gas. That works out at £7 per litre whereas autogas is currently around 68p per litre on Shell’s Titchfield forecourt.
I started looking on ebay and gumtree for cast offs, bottles that people had finished with and were selling and found one straight away down in Gosport, 6 miles from home. At the end of the auction period I had ‘won’ the bottle, duly paid my £11.40 and went and collected my half full bottle, or is it half empty? One decent condition bottle with 1.3Kg of gas for £11.40. Amazing.
I converted the Weber to use a refillable gas bottle, connected it all up and gave it a try. Then the thought crossed my head ‘what if we run out of campingaz?’, so I started looking for a cheap spare bottle. A few days later an advert for 2 gas bottles and sundry bits not 6 miles away popped up so I picked up another 2 bottles, one of them full to the brim.
We have a bottle and a half of gas, and one empty bottle. The 907 cylinder holds about 6 times the volume of gas as the small bottles so should give us around 15-18 hours of cooking time. When we go on holiday to France later this year we’ll use what is left in the partially filled bottle and exchange it and the empty one for full bottles at the lower French prices.
The price of bottled gas is extortionate, particularly with the campingaz bottles. I do not intend to run the BBQ at home on campingaz at these prices so looked for a Calor bottle on ebay.
I managed to pick up an empty Calor 7Kg butane bottle for £5 so avoiding Calor’s £40 hard-to-get-refunded initial deposit. I’ll exchange it for a full one sometime in the spring when the BBQ’ing season starts, but £5 for a perfectly good cylinder that I could return to Calor and receive £7.50 in return is a fair deal. A refill for this cylinder will cost me £24 for 7kg of butane, that’s less than half the price per kilo charged for campingaz.
It’s going to be one long summer of BBQ’s, I just hope the rain stops soon.
Update for April, Fiona decided that she wanted a gas BBQ for home so went out and bought a Weber Q2200. Now we have to find a Calor propane bottle with the 27mm push-on connector.
