Our journey

Friday, September 10th, 2004

Here’s a map on which I quickly drew the route we took during our holiday. The purple is how we drove (approx.). The blue dots along the way are places where we stayed. The numbers indicate on which day we stayed there.

Day 1: We drove from the Netherlands (Utrecht) to Luxemburg. I can’t recall the name of the town we camped in because we found the campsite by coincidence. The difference between Belgium and Luxemburg are quite enormous by the way. In Belgium all the buildings and roads are in pretty bad shape, but when you enter Luxemburg everything suddenly looks well maintained. It’s like you enter an amusement park or something. The food’s pretty good there too and pretty cheap.

Day 2: It had rained in Luxemburg all night and morning, so we were covered in mud. The tent was a complete disaster, and we couldn’t dry it before we stashed it away. The car already looked like it had been caught in a mudstream. That’s when we decided to go south towards warmer, sunnier places. So we took off in the general direction of Lyon. About halfway there, the sun started shining. A bit above Lyon on the map, we started looking for a campsite. Instead we ended up in a vineyard. Better ask directions. After a long long search, we ended up in Neuville Se Sur, where we decided to stay for two days. The weather was good and the campsite was four stars. Not a lot of beatiful woman though. :( At the local disco we decided to introduce some culture-shock, so we requested “Machine Head – Davidian” and started headbanging. That drew some pretty confused looks and a lot of fun. We met some french guys (Fred and another guy who’s name it can’t remember) who were locals. They invited us to their house for some beers. We had a pretty good time.

Day 4: After deciding to move even further south we set our sights on Montpellier, at the advice of Fred and his friend. Once in Montpellier we looked for a campsite, but couldn’t find one. So we decided to go further to the coast to a place called Le Grande Motte. Le Grand Motte, it turns out, is a small village which was built specifically for tourisme. There are no normal citizens there, no houses, nothing.. just hotels (lots and lots of hotels), campsites and tourists. We stayed there for two days and visited the beach. We also searched for this club that was supposedly pretty good, but after about an hour walking we discovered that it was closed. We were pretty pissed.

Day 6: In the mood for another country we set our sights on Germany. We plotted our course on the map and were underway. Once at the French-German border, we were pulled over and we had to pay road-taxes. This was weird, because they don’t do that in Germany. Turns out we mistook Switserland for Germany. Hey, easy mistake! The’re, like, right next to eachother. (The map was of France and only showed a very small ammount of Switserland without the country name, which partly explains our mistake). We deciced to travel all the way through Der Schweiss and entered Germany at the very south border. Locals told us that there weren’t any campsites there, so we took a hotel in a small city called Bad Sackingen instead.

Day 7: The next day we made our destination Mannheim. When we left Bad Sackingen, we couldn’t find the highway, so that took some time. Since there aren’t any speedlimits on the German highway, we got to Mannheim pretty fast once we got on the highway. Mannheim looked pretty boring though and since it was still early we drove to Frankfurt instead. There we went to the local *german accent* “tourist information center” and they booked us a hotel. After a little searching we found the hotel and settled in.

We asked some punker if he knew any good metal-clubs, and he directed us to one. It turns out, by the way, that every punker and alternatively dressed person in Frankfurt are usually considered the outcast of society. So when we asked some random stranger what time it was, he said “Is that all?” expecting us to beg him for a cigarette or something. Tough luck man, we’re rich. ;-)

We found the metal-club, which was called ‘The Cave’. It was a slow night, and there weren’t a lot of people there. Of course it was a weekday, so everybody had to work. The next day it would be the weekend and Marcus (a local we met in The Cave) told us it would be more crowded in the weekend. So we stayed another day. And he was right. Beer, good music and lots of woman. The best day of our vacation yet.

Day 9: After two days in Frankfurt we went back to the Netherlands. Still one day left in our vacation, we dropped all our stuff off at home and then went to Wouter’s place in Utrecht. There we ended our vacation boozing in the Stairway, a local pub annex hardrock cafe. The strangest thing was that we saw more beautiful women in the Netherlands in one day than we had seen during our entire vacation. Home sweet home. :)

Day 10: When we woke up in the morning we suddenly realised we had to wash the car (it was a rental) before returning it. It was already 12:30 and the car had to be returned by 14:00. We hurried to the carwash and wouter worked up a nice sweat while cleaning the car. Pretty shitty way to close of the vacation, but what can you do?

After returning the car I packed up all my stuff and went to the trainstation. There I missed both trains going in the direction of Barneveld (where I live), so I located myself a BurgerKing and got a Double Whopper with Cheese. Sitting in the sun I ate my burger, drank a beer, enjoyed the sun and waited a whole hour for the next train. Oh well, I wasn’t in a hurry or anything.

When I got home the first thing I did was take a nice hot long shower and put on some fresh clothes. All in all we had a pretty nice vacation.