Tuesday and Wednesday disappeared fairly quickly, just like this...
Tuesday morning, up at 04:30. Walk Jack, have some breakfast etc. Drive down to meet MC at his place about 34 miles away. No great problem? Well in temperatures of -5° and patchy fog, it wasn't so much fun. Good job I had my Sat Nav to guide me through it, eh?
So, from Newmarket we head down to Folkestone and the weather doesn't improve so much.
I've never been on the Chunnel before. Easy, innit?
So much easier than flying or a ferry. I was most impressed. Quick too. I'll certainly consider it for the future.
Right, once the other side, we head North following the E40. Again, a pretty straight forward journey on much quieter roads than in the UK. We called off for a bite to eat just into Belgium. What did we have? Full English breakfast! Very nice too.
Onwards and upwards in the Netherlands. Our printed instructions did us very well until the last 10Km or so and then we got completely lost and had to ask for help a couple times.
Arriving at our destination we had a meeting for about an hour and a half and then headed South again.
Getting a bit late in the day now so we had decided to head into Brugge to stay overnight. Again, this is somewhere that I have never been before. I'm steadily ticking off the European countries. Not many to go now.
We stopped at the first (half decent) hotel we found within the city and booked in.
Half an hours wash and brush up, and we met up in the bar. Here I made my first mistake. I asked for some nuts. Now, this barman was a little weird. He gave me a look and said "No nuts. Do you know that nuts are the least healthy snacks." We then got a (very) lengthy description into how blokes grab some nuts out of a bowl and then go for a pee, not washing their hands afterwards and then grabbing more nuts (no, not those ones!). At the end of the evening, the remaining nuts get chucked back in the main bowl/bag ready for re-use. What you end up with is a huge mound of contaminated nuts. Now, I would debate a lot of what he was saying, but I really couldn't be bothered. It wasn't that I especially wanted nuts, I just wanted something to snack on. This I got, in the form of small chunks of cheese. These were served in a small bowl. He got the chunks from a much larger bowl using his bare hands. Yes, you're way ahead of me here aren't you?
Okay. Time to head out into the town (city?). Very pretty place. I do like going round European cities when it's lovely and cold and crisp. This was no exception. Behold, photos...
DInner beckons. Really nice and very reasonably priced at about €60 for the two of us including drinks etc.
Back to the hotel and we made sure not to mention the barman's nuts, as it were.
The morning came soon enough and we headed South back towards Calais. MC knew of a few places to head for shopping. First stop a wine warehouse. I never intended to really buy much, but here I am, 18 bottles of wine and one crate of lager. How did that happen?
Popped to a supermarket too. Gin, cheese, paté, dijon mayonnaise, cakes - not in any particular order. French food is the best though, eh?
Then, to cut a long story short, back home by about 3pm. Two hours at home catching up on a few things (business & pleasure) before going out on duty for 4 hours.
So onto this evening. A very unusual time for me indeed. I'm here all alone and will be for the whole night. I think this has possibly happened just the once before in (almost exactly) nine years. Normally it's me that's away, but tonight it's H's Christmas do at work. For those of you who know it, it's at the Haycock at Peterborough. A nice spot indeed.
She's staying over and sharing a room with a work colleague (female, I hasten to add). So what to do? Well, I've already made a batch of rum truffles and tidied the kitchen & lounge. What else can I do? Oh now there's a thought, I could update my blog!
Just started to re-read this to check for typos etc, but no. Do I really need to? If there are any, you wont mind, will you?
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