Brit Abroad

Monday 15th August

This trip has been planned for a long time – long before I booked the ferry from Denmark to Iceland 6 months ago. But there’s planning and there’s planning. I’ve done endless planning for necessary stuff – insurances, breakdown cover, making sure I have the right documents, buying maps, a campsite for the night before the ferry and one for in the Faroe Islands. That seems like quite a lot of planning to me but what I hadn’t thought much about was the week before the ferry leaves. The week where I need to drive close to 1000 miles through 5 countries to get to the port of Hirtshals.

I’d had a look on a map before I left but I’d not decided on a route. I left that until 0630 on Thursday morning sitting in the loading queue at Dover. I typed “current location” to “Hirtshals” into google maps and wrote down the main towns and cities along that route onto the back of an envelope. Route plan done.

To decide where I’d spend each night there is a book called Camperstops Europe which lists all the motorhome stopping points in Europe. It’s a long story (involving being let down by someone, having someone else in Norway Amazon Prime’ing me one, the road to my house being resurfaced, borrowing a French version and realising how I really did need the full book and then a last minute dash to Guildford Waterstones) but I now have a copy in my van (and one in my house..). That meant that when I started to get tired on the drive, I would look in the book, find a nearby stop and spend the night there. So far it’s worked well, I’ve had a couple of free stopovers in campervan areas and a couple on campsites.

So that’s the route done, overnight stops sorted, the one thing that has really let me down is my lack of languages. I left the ferry and thought I’d drive for an hour or so before stopping at a French supermarket to get some goodies for lunch. An hour or so later though and I’d left France, finding myself in Belgium and I’ll be honest – I don’t know a word of Flemish. Being in a supermarket and not even being able to say please and thank you in the same language as the cashier is just embarrassing.

By the evening I’d made it to Holland where I at least know some very very basic Dutch, although wanting to talk to the other campervan where I spent the night and only being able to say Please, Thank you, and Bubbles didn’t get me very far. When you travel with someone else it doesn’t seem to matter too much but one thing I enjoy about travelling is the people I get to meet and language is a real barrier - relying on other people speaking English doesn’t always work.

Germany was a little better - my AS Level German meant I could book into a campsite, ask how my neighbours were and understand what I was eating. I could have done with remembering the difference between entrance and exit in a multistorey car park though and being able to read a sign in a service station to work out where you need to put the money to raise the barrier to get into the toilets would have been useful. One place where I spent the night I went out on my bike and had stopped to say hello to some goats in a garden when 2 young girls from the house came to say hello. I told one of them I couldn’t speak German and she offered me some cherries they’d been picking. Her sister then said something to me – to which the first one, who was only about 7, replied “she speaks English”. She then shouted “Come here Molly” to the apparently bilingual goat who came running over.

And now onto Denmark for a few days before my ferry on Saturday – I’ve got my European phrase book out desperately trying to learn some basic words at the same time as making a real effort to learn some more Icelandic so that I don’t feel quite as clueless as I do now.