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Published: August 31st 2008
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Hi everyone, we have now pretty much finished the third leg of our tour with our return to London.
From Berlin, we zoomed straight across the industrialised north of Europe stopping for some well earned R & R in Amsterdam. We chilled out wandering the canals for a few days taking in the Rijksmuseum, while soaking up the atmosphere of the Red Light district and bingeing on street servings of fries doused in mayonnaise :-)
We stayed at one of our more unique camping ground stops, which was quite central, but resembled more of a university quad and student union buildings than a camping ground. Thankfully with our trusty van we managed to avoid having to pitch up in with the hundreds of tents crammed onto the site for the summer holiday break.
Having reached Amsterdam our minds started to turn towards the next leg of our journey, and in the time remaining to us we decided to do a quick tour of Scotland while we still had the use of Bert the Bedford.
We are pleased to report that, yes Bert did make it all the way around Europe as well as taking us through a
scenic tour of the Scottish highlands - notching up 12500 miles travelled in the process. However by the time we were done his electrics were in a fairly bad state, with the fuse box in particular having been bodged numerous times with lengths of copper wire to keep the lights, indicators and windscreen wipers working. However, he did complete the journey, finally limping down to London with top gear (OD) missing in action due to another electrical fault - this took a while at only 50 mph...
In our travels in Scotland, we headed first to Edinburgh and with fabulously bad timing managed to arrive in the middle of both the Edinburgh festival and the Fringe festival! Thankfully living in a van does have some advantages when you are looking for accommodation but the streets of Edinburgh were packed with festival goers during our time there (also a Bank holiday weekend).
It was however a welcome return to an English speaking country and in particular aplace where we could be 100% certain of what foods we were buying at the supermarket. Edinburgh was also a great shopping stop for us, to pick up some camping supplies for the
African leg of our trip as it has a huge number of trekking and outdoor stores to supply the local tourism/trekking industry.
After a brief stop in Edinburgh wading through the crowds of people we decided to head for the sparsely populated highlands. Our first stop was Stirling castle, the site of many bloody confrontations between the Scots and English over the years. The castle is formed by concentric rings of buildings radiating out from the medieval centre finishing with low battlements designed to deflect cannon fire. Further up the road we stopped in on Loch Ness to do a bit of monster hunting. Unfortunately, the only thing we spotted was periodic showers of rain and drizzle but we did get a feel for the magnitude of the Loch particularly after visiting the local Nessie Museum.
Our last stop in Scotland was a tour of the Isle of Skye which during our time there continued the theme of drizzle and rain. This wasn't all bad as although visibility was cut a bit we had some tremendous views of the local waterfalls in full flood. We spent a couple of days meandering through the heather and hills of the
Isle before reluctantly having to head back south to find a new home for Bert before we fly out.
We did manage to break up the rather long drive with a quick stop at Hadrian's Wall, which didn't really seem large enough to us to repel the hordes of angry Scottish raiders it was originally designed for by the Romans. It seemed more useful in keeping the cows in their paddocks who were the local guardians of the wall.
We deliberately decided to spend as much time as we had available in Scotland with Bert, rather than hanging around trying to sell him privately. This worked out well for us, especially considering the scarcity and price of accommodation available in Edinburgh and Skye with multiple festivals and a Bank holiday weekend...
On our return to London we looked up the trader who sold us Bert and effectively 'handed Bert in' at a bit of a discount, now allowing us to concentrate on a logistics and resuppling before heading off next week on the fourth leg of our travels.
We are currently revelling in the low 20 degree temperatures and drizzle present in London as we are
about to fly out to Egypt and 30 degree plus temperatures.
We have enjoyed our grand tour of Europe immensely but definitely feel that it is time to move on from the castles, churches and palaces to something a bit more exotic. We also, for our own good need to get away from the cheese, wine and pate which has made it rather difficult to fit into the clothes we bought in India :-(
That's it from us for now, our next post will be from Egypt - probably in a couple of weeks.
S&S
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