Dortmund

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First entry here in Dortmund, Germany! We've travelled around 1000 miles on the road already and are well into the swing of things. Driving on the right has been pretty easy for us all to adjust to, though navigating on a map with only the largest roads in Europe on has proven tricky!

After cramming all our junk in the car, our first stop on day 1 was in Paris via the Dover-Calais ferry connection. Arriving around 7.30pm, we had time only to plan the next day's activities. We were delayed entering Paris due to strikes but spent the morning in a lovely little cafe in the suburb we were camped in. Our whistle-stop tour of Paris included the Arc de Triomph, the Champ D'elysees (no idea on the spelling!), some of the famous streets in St Germain and the Notre Dame. After an evening at a french restaurant (goats cheese salad), we retired for the night back at the campsite.

We left Paris on Matt's birthday with a view to travelling to Ghent, Belgium, but got hopelessly lost between France and Belgium, and instead resigned ourselves to a campsite in the South-East corner of Belgium) actually in the province of Luxembourg) where it absolutely thundered with rain through the night and we had pasta in tomato sauce for the second time already!

Having breezed through Belgium, we crossed the border to Germany and made our way to Dortmund where Matt would have to catch a flight back to the UK for an interview with Deutschebank (oh the irony). We made it to the terraced campsite in glorious sunshine overlooking a pretty river. After taking a walk along the river and enjoying a drink in an overlooking pub, we headed back to the tent for a barbecue.

The next day we took a longer walk around the small town we were camped at, just outside of Dortmund and later took Matt to the airport to catch his flight before heading into Dortmund to look for an internet Cafe from which I now write.

Tomorrow we will pick Matt up and carry on to Berlin where we hope to spend a couple of nights relying heavily on Matt's fluent German! I hope to write again before we leave Berlin.

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Comments

[Miggie]

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I guess that pasta in tomato sauce sounds somewhat tame compared to crocodile and ostrich - are you sure there isn't some native European wildlife that you can devour? Brown bear or badger or similars? (As a last resort you could always put hedgehog in your tomato sauce with your pasta).