Safe Return Doubtful

The heat of the previous week dropped off a little over the weekend, and there was a pleasant easterly breeze, rather a wind at times. Nick and Lou like it hot, so it was something of a compromise, besides their house and garden are well-shaded. We enjoyed the weekend; socialised over fine food and a few drinks, watched lots of rugby on the Saturday when Lou had sensibly arranged to see her son play drums in a band at a local festival, and adventured to a couple of wooded dog walks. We talked vans mainly, though theirs is currently in the repair shop. 

I left early Monday morning, at 5:45 am, trying and succeeding to get to the Dart Crossing before the madness of the new day. I was in Folkestone even before the shops opened, a brief supermarket visit, a collar for Rua, to collect his Animal Health Certificate, and fill up with fuel. Monitoring fuel prices across the countries I am headed has become one of my less enjoyable but necessary occupations. For a change, at present UK is 10 cents or so below France and Belgium, 20 cents below Netherlands, and 40 cents below Germany. Germany had reduced their duty, but only until 1st July; then it moved up from €1.81 to €2.21 overnight, and on the autobahns €2.61 (a litre). 

At Le Shuttle I got bumped up an hour, but then, as seems very frequent, a train broke down in the tunnel and it was delayed an hour.. so into Calais just after 3 pm, and the first problem of the course.. 

..I had lost power to Starlink. It’s incredible these days what a kerfuffle having no internet causes. After some attempts at solving the Starlink issue, I gave up until later and tried to get some roaming data on my EE sim phone, now pay as you go as I was t the end of a contract and thought it wise to shelve it until January. Their agent seemed helpful on the phone; £2.50 he told me for unlimited data for the day. It seemed too good to be true, and indeed it was. Nothing happened. I carry no paper maps, no I am lost, literally, without GPS. After half an hour of troubleshooting over a second call, I got the problem sorted. The initial guy had been a trainee, he had quoted incorrectly, and forgot to connect me. With an hour’s delay I was away, though only to stop again after a couple of hours as the data they gave me was 100 megabytes, rather than the amount promised, 250. It was only the following day that I got some proper advice, to go onto a cancel at any time monthly contract for 50GB of roaming data for £13 a month. 

My destination for the evening turned out to be about 90 minutes short of where I had hoped, Lokeren in Belgium, close to Antwerp, in the car park of the town’s park. We had a hour’s walk around the park before dinner. At 8 pm it was still 29C, it had been early 30s all day, but the Maxx fan works well, and sleeping was less of a problem then I thought. Rua copes well. He doesn’t mind the driving, less so even than Roja who would rarely sleep even on long trips. Rua sleeps periodically, though I wouldn’t say he enjoys the experience. He doesn’t seem yet to suffer from the heat as much as Roja did. Though the park up seemed okay, there were two other vans there, there was construction going on on the nearby road, for which the work trucks were based there also. Their work began at 5 am, due to the heat, and the noise was impossible to sleep no longer with. 

I used to Delhaize supermarket to stock up with Belgian beers and a few other bits, and after a walk in the morning, we drove on; today needed to be a big driving day. 

We drove 450 miles in about 7 and a half hours, finishing close to the Danish border near the town of Flensburg. We found a rural farm at Wanderup that takes a few vans for €10 euros. The free options were less attractive, and this gave us plenty of fields for a run for Rua for an hour before settling in for the night. It was so cooler here, mid twenties, and quite a pleasant evening. 

We head north through Denmark today, four hours at maximum to Frederickshavn, and have a ferry to Gothenburg in the early hours of Thursday.

My Starlink problem I think is a loose wire in the electric connection. I hadn’t understood that Starlink Mini requires a USBC to PD connection, or in other words, to a 100 or 60 Watt source. I am not sure whether it can be repaired easily, or needs a new connection. As ever, when on the road, getting hold of something like that isn’t easy. My ideas are to call at a couple of campervan repair places today, hoping for advice as to how to get one, rather than that they may stock it, which I think unlikely. Or to order one to pick up from Amazon in Norway, who offer a PostNord collection point rather than a locker scheme; complicated.. 

Today’s title comes courtesy of Franz Kafka. I always like to begin the journal of a course with a suitable quote, and think this piece from the great surrealist is appropriate..

The Departure

‘I gave orders for my horse to be fetched. The servant didn’t understand me. I went to the stables myself, saddled my horse, and got on it. In the distance I could hear a trumpet. I asked him what that meant. He didn’t know, and hadn’t heard it.

At the gate he stopped me and asked: “And where are you going, sir?” “I don’t know,” I said, “away from here, away from here. Only if I keep going away from here, can I reach my destination.”

“So you know your destination?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I told you already, it’s away-from-here, that’s where I’m going.” 

“You don’t have any provisions with you,” he said. “I don’t need any,” I said, “the journey is so long that I will certainly starve if I don’t find something to eat on the way. No provisions can save me.

Luckily, this is a truly enormous journey.”

Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hoffmann