Bloomin' Marvelous

Keukenhof, ok I suppose.  Fran'll go on about it to be sure, so I'll say what else has been happenning instead.

Drove up the coast of the Netherlands and stayed up near Den Helder after seeing all the flowers.  It's quite windy here and my evening run was much easier on the way back than the way out (by design).  Next we drove over the Afsluitdijk, which is about 30km long with the North Sea on one side and a whopping great inland sea on the other.  Stopped at a monument thing in the middle and had coffee, and were treated to a really good little cafe with all sorts of character and historical pictures etc on the walls/ceiling, well worth a stop.

More coastal meanderings, and a swift in/out of Groningen and then the Autobahn to Bremen.  When you're sat at 90kph or thereabouts and someone tanks past at 180+, you certainly feel the air move...

Before we left home originally I had had a look at some bits of the route we were likely to take and the Bremen to Hamburg motorway was an area to avoid due to roadworks.  So when the satnav told me we had 46mininutes delay just before Bremen, we though a quick detour would sort it.  Oh, no.  A couple of hours later having had a not so scenic tour round the outskirts of Bremen we found a campsite.  It was called "Paradis" somethingorother, which it wasn't, but we were grateful for the stop.

Today, we've been into Hamburg and seen the Minitur Wunderland, which is mainly a trainset, but has all sorts of scenery and other activities going on.  It is brilliant... even though I like this kind of modelling very much and have seen a few of these villages, this one rates very highly up there.  It's massive, but all done at the small matchbox toy kind of scale.  Look it up on the web...  It's done with a very germanic sense of humour too, which is equally entertaining.  I loved it, and if anyone is anywhere near Hamburg I'd recommend looking it up.

Tonight, just leaving a supermarket, we had a strange tk, tk, tk, tk as we drove away.  Only to stop and check to find a handy extra screw embedded in the tyre!  The brand new one that I put on just before we left.  It seems to be holding it's own for now, but we've found out where a repair place is for the morning to have it looked at - first thing to go wrong in a mechanical sense after 6000km's though.  Not bad.  Hopefully not the start of anything either.  Starting the trek into the uncharted North tomorrow, so wish us luck - I can't work out whether the roads will be clear of snow or not?