The Comet

Ah the countryside. After 10 weeks of basically being in cities, followed by 5 days of London city madness, we have escaped to the great outdoors courtesy of our bright orange spaceship, Comet.

 

Meet Comet, our house and wheels.

 

 

London was excellent. We went primarily to see bro-in-law Darian do the London marathon, which he did much to our admiration cos by golly it looked hard. So we got to hang out with him and my big sister Jane for longer than nearly ever. We managed to book rooms not only in the same hotel but three doors apart which was quite incredible, and made for a fun time. And as a bonus we also got to see my friend Katrina who I hadn't seen for years, so it was a good sociable time.

 

Run, Forest, run.

 

We charged through the National gallery but passed up the others, had perfect weather for a river side stroll watching the buskers, went shopping unsuccessfully, wandered St James' park, photographed Westminster and Big Ben, remembered the thrills of rushing along the underground, ate delicious Indian food, Mexican, English breakfasts, bad coffee, expensive and disappointing beer, and generally spent shit loads.

 

No Kews here ha ha ha ha ha

 

Best bit may have been our trip to Kew gardens. Another perfect day of sunshine and warmth (very nearly shorts weather) with spring flowers, green green grass and stupendous glasshouses.

 

Springy

 

 

The we bade farewell to busy, crazy, dirty London Town and hit the road. First stop, the New Forest, with lots of wandering wild ponies, lovely villages and streams, and greenness.

 

Then on to Dartmoor, down through Cornwall to Land's End, and up along the coast to Exmoor forest where we are now.

 

One drawback of being in the Comet (that's the van's official name by the way - it's written on the side) is we are on mobile broadband, not wifi, so blogging will be impacted (hence the ages since the last). The campground we are in now has wifi so that explains this post.

 

And I can't be bothered to type more so I'll put on lots of pictures and let them do the work.

 

Some rocks

 

Wildlife

 

The village of.... Beer! Really!

 

St Ives. Didn't meet anyone.

 

Um, a churchyard on the Cornish coast.

 

Lovely, lovely, lovely.

 

It's gotten a bit chilly, no shorts as yet, but we have each been running so those legs can't be too far from being unleashed on the world.

 

Toodle pip.

 

Peeeeep! Half-time.

Well that's it for continental Europe. Ten and a bit weeks of snow, trains, hotels, food, walking, packing, beer, umpteen languages, a gazillion photos, and lots and lots of churches, galleries and beautiful sights.

 

Tomorrow we bus to London for, well, probably more of the same, except swap snow for spring flowers and languages for regional accents.

 

 

We had another excellent and fun dinner tonight of local treats, and we got to talking about the best we had so far. So;

 

Florence: cheesy gnocchi, vegetable soup, braised rabbit, beef casserole, white wine, Red wine, bread. Super, super, yum. Outside, near a church, in a big square. Sunny, cold wind.

 

 

 

Prague: sausages cooked in dark beer, quite caramelised. Stunningly delicious. A special Easter beer and a seasonal dark beer. Warm indoors, snow outside. Funny waiter who explained that in the Czech Republic women drink dark beer to make their breasts bigger.

 

 

 

Altusreid (Germany): home cooked everything. Quinoa salad, beautiful cheeses, organic beer, an Indian feast, spatzle, pretzels, and even beer champagne. Oh my goodness we ate well.

 

(No photos available. Oops. Too busy eating.)

 

 

So yeah, stuffed ourselves silly really.

 

Actually, speaking of stuffing oneself, the BIGGEST meal, and a near contender for top three, was in Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic. Look at it:

 

I feel fat just looking at it. Sausage, potato pancakes, spinach and cream, and giant potato pancake filled with goulash. Oh my god it was good. And pilsner Urquell and local dark beer.

 

So thanks mainland, see you in a month or so.

 

Danke Schon

It's been a (long) while...

This has been started and not finished or posted a few times, and now it has to cover the last couple of weeks or more, so it will be a bit sketchy. I'm sure you'll cope.

 

Don't ask me, I'm not German.

After our brief stay in Nuremberg we made our way down to Munich, where the best bit was seeing my cousin Chris for the first time in a million years and meeting Lyma.

Thank you so much for taking us out twice, it was great to see you both. And the kings pancake was delicious.

 

 

Munich has some great buildings and a fantastic food market. And a huge water park!! Over 10 water slides, outdoor heated pool, outdoor spas, sunlamps, massive indoor pool and much, much more. We felt rather cultured out so an afternoon spent on water slides was excellent fun. Unfortunately I wasn't allowed on the super fastest 72 km/hr one due to not being able to remove my necklace. Stupid rules. Might have saved me an injury though...

 

 

 

We also went to the Hunting and Fishing Museum. It had incredible guns (including a 273cm monster), old fly fishing gear, crossbows, bizarre stuffed animals (see above) and lots and lots of antlers. Pretty fun place.

 

Castle-y. *

Then it was off to Kempten in Bavaria for some home comforts thanks to the wonderful Thomas, Gila, Elke and Franz.

 

We drank delicious beer, ate fabulous food, visited a huge lake that borders Germany, Austria and Switzerland, popped across the border and went cross country skiing, visited castles, experienced the pleasures of a German sauna and generally had an excellent time. And we even eventually got to see the seemingly mythical mountains after days and days of cloud.

 

Skiing in Austria, as you do.

 

 

Jo de cologne.

So next it was up and up and up to Dusseldorf, with a side trip to Cologne. It's a super train ride along the Rhine, we wished we could get off and ride bikes along it. Next time.

 

Dusseldorf had some pretty funky buildings, and Cologne had a massive cathedral, but best of all Dusseldorf had Che and Eva. And Altbier.

 

It's a brilliant method for service they have in Dusseldorf, basically the waiters just bring around trays of beer brewed on site and plonk it in front of you unless you say no. They mark your coaster with the number of drinks and eventually you pay the man and leave. No need to get out of your seat or make any decisions at all. Splendid.

 

 

 

 

And now we are just leaving Amsterdam, where we headed after Dusseldorf. Amsterdam is nuts.

 

 

Quite the beer list.

 

Bikes and canals, a heady mix.

Beautiful, free, busy, old, funky, smelly (in a good way), sexy Amsterdam.

 

"Interesting" does not do it justice.

 

So many bikes, so many people, so many great wonky buildings, so many bars, so much marijuana smoke, so many canals, so many sex shops, so many boats, so much life.

 

Tiring though...

 

Next stop, Rotterdam, then on to Antwerp for some Belgian beer fun. Woohoo!

 

And in other good news it's finally decided to be spring. No more long johns, no more hats. Excellent.

 

And thank you again to all our German family and friends.

 

* editors note: this is a photo of a postcard. It was misty when we were there. Sorry.

 

We have a winner!

After an exhaustive search, accounting for some 60 different beers in 9 countries (although Germany is not finished yet, they can join next section of the search) we found beer heaven in the wee town of Loket, in the west of the Czech Republic. The beer is a from the Svatly Florian brewery, and is a special dark smoked beer that they call Speck Beer. And it is truly, truly delicious.

Speck Beer. Golly.

 

 

Now I'm a bit of a smoked beer fan, so they had an unfair advantage in that respect, but there was some stiff competition from a couple of Italian brews, in particular those from the del Borgo brewery and the brewpub Mostodolce's pilsner, also from the Human Fish IPA which hails from Ljubljana.

 

 

The Speck Beer was a malty, gently bitter, liquid version of smoked bacon. And it was divine.

 

 

But I was impressed with Italian craft brewing and also, as a real surprise, how good Pilsner Urquell is. The beer culture is very different too from NZ and Australia. You see women at lunch together drinking beer, old ladies with pints of dark beer, women running brew pubs. The attitude in the Czech Republic was that most bars only had one or two beers available, and many brew pubs only made two - a light and a dark, with no concern to classifying them. Lots only served Pilsner Urquell, but they served it extremely well.

 

Delicious. At Altstadt brew pub, Nuremberg.

 

 

In general we found too many lagers and not enough ales, so im looking forward to good British ales at a more appropriate temperature for actually having flavour.

 

And I can't wait to get brewing again!