Header picture - Holidays in Germany
6 July - And Hogwarts it is! -
School acceptances are out today - and Katie has got in to her chosen school, which we're all delighted about.
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8 July - Two thieves broke into a psychiatric centre in Stavanger last night and couldn't get out again. When the police arrived to let them out, they denied having done it. The police say: "we're really looking forward to hearing this explanation". See report (in Norwegian, sorry) in Stavanger newspaper.
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10 July - the blog goes on holiday -
At last, we're back on the German lakes. This time, for several weeks (though Tim's off to play a concert in Barth on Tuesday).
We're based in Neustrelitz, a pleasant little lakeside market town (photo here).
12 July - Barth is a strange place.
I've played there twice before - most recently in July 2013 — and always come away thinking the same thing.
The concert went fine, with a large audience and an invitation to come back.
We also had a pleasant day out and a wonderful dinner sitting in the sunshine in the town square, watching the town's youth practising their skateboard skills around the fountain.
To give an impression of the town itself I tried in a bout of artistic fervour to capture it reflected in three different high-street shop windows —
which also shows what the shops themselves are like. It's all perfectly genuine: this really is an accurate impression of Barth's main (only) shopping street.
(Click photo, right, for picture sequence).
Instead of flowers or other such impractical stuff I was presented with a bar of "organ chocolate" at the end of the concert
(there is a proper fee, of course — we have to live as well!)
It was — strange. According to the label it was coffee and mint flavoured, but in fact it had a hint of paraffin and catsand. Like the organ itself it needed a bit of tuning.
During the day we picked up one or two things in Barth's shops. A bottle of mouthwash, for instance. On closer examination this turned out to be lime and sardine flavour.
But we did bring home an electric iron. New, unused, and seemingly priced in the 1960s.
There used to be a TV series, I recall, called the Twilight Zone.
I think the series was set in Barth.
It was a grand day out.
Beth also had a grand day out.
She's visiting the area we lived between 1991 and 2001 and climbed one of the mountains overlooking Åndalsnes.
Click left for a few pictures.
15 July - We're not just exploring on water. This evening we had a 5-mile walk through a bit of the adjacent forest (it goes on for dozens of miles). The forest was full of wildlife, ranging from many families of red deer to birds of prey and a profusion of butterflies. And we kept ourselves going by eating wild raspberries. An information sign at one point gave the names of the head foresters since the 1300s, but also mentioned a catastrophic fire during WWII and the use of the forest as a tank-practice range by the Red Army until 1990, so it is impressive that the forest now looks so established and healthy again. 4 photos here.
16 July - "Time goes wonderfully slowly in Mecklenburg Vorpommern" (the name of the state in which we are staying). That's been the opening sentence in several books and descriptions of the area; almost as though they're copying from each other, or as if there really is nothing else to say about the place. The local newspaper does nothing to contradict this impression. The lead story on the first page shows an old lady in her front room fingering a large plant: "it's never had so many flowers before". For us, it was back on the water.
17 July - On an impulse we visited nearby Wesenberg today. We keep driving past it and although it doesn't look much from the road, we thought it was time we had a proper look. It turned out to be a little town that has everything. A castle from 1282, an attractive organ from 1717, interesting and pleasant architecture (with broad streets prescribed by law because — like many of these towns around here — it kept burning down during the 17th century), tying up places for holidaymakers' cabin cruisers (naturally, the town is on the banks of a lake as well as on the River Havel) and most important of all, a street cafe that provided wonderful ice creams. A thorougly likeable place (photos here).
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19 July - What seems to be our regular series on driving styles in western Norway takes us today a little further north — close to Soltun college, for those of our readers who've been there with us. The police had to stop a car that was driving erratically; often straying over the line onto the wrong side of the road to the anxiety of other drivers. The car turned out to be driven by an elderly man, with his wife as "co-driver" in the passenger seat. "She kept telling me off for being too close in towards the side, so I had to keep driving further out into the middle of the road", he explained. The police gave the man a lecture on concentrating on his driving and told the wife to shut up and let her husband get on with it. (original story in Harstad Tidende - in Norwegian).
24 July -
We've not made daily reports because other people's holidays are never especially interesting.
A shopping trip to Poland was a brief contrast to peaceful days pottering around Germany and especially around the glorious lakes and rivers
(small selection of photos, left).
One of the attractions here is that the whole place is more or less deserted —
but there is a certain amount of "traffic" of various sorts.
Because much of the area is motor-free, people use all kinds of locomotion as well as the usual canues and kayaks (photo, above right).
27 July - I (Tim) am back in Norway for a few days to do some work and — subject to a break in the rain — to cut the lawn. For technical reasons (all flights out of Berlin were full) I flew to Stavanger from (of all places) Esbjerg in Denmark, which is a lovely airport. The car park (the first 24 hours is free) is directly outside the airport door. You go inside and the check-in lady (there is only one) greets you like a long-lost friend, takes your baggage ("oh, no, it doesn't matter about the weight: we get all sorts here") and suggests you take one of the seats. There are half a dozen of them, just inside the door. There is actually a cafe at the airport. This has a thermos can of coffee (help yourself) and half-a-dozen individual plates of sandwiches with cling film over them, in a glass-fronted fridge. Looking at the departures board, three of the forthcoming flights are going to "Noble Sam Turner" (but I noticed that those three departures were dated the following day) and one to each of "Pacific Osprey", "Sea Fox 5" and "Crossway Eagle". I assume these to be oil rigs (especially as there are four helicopters parked outside the window) and Google seems to agree. The only airport destinations are Billund and Stavanger — the former a little puzzling because it's only 25 miles away (you pass the motorway exit ten minutes or so before arriving at Esbjerg airport). It's all just like the north of Norway; feels very much like home.
29 July - And so while Tracy and Katie are enjoying warm sunny Germany (trip to Rostock yesterday, which was apparently very beautiful - (photos here), Tim has lit the fire and put on a woolly jumper at home. Photo from Alta today.
30 July - record breaking - This weekend has seen two new records being set. The first is that Bergen has broken its own rainfall record for July, raining not only record amounts but also 27 out of 31 days (and Bergen is known throughout Norway as the place where it rarely stops raining anyway). The second sees the breaking of a 13-year-old Norwegian record in Hardanger: in morello cherry-stone spitting. (If you're interested, the new record of 16 yards beats the 2003 record by a little over 13 inches). "The winner is just at the doping test at the moment" said the enthuiastic festival organiser afterwards to the NRK news.
Tracy and Katie explored the culinary delights of Neubrandenburg.