Life on the Road...

Hello, its Maciek here. I thought I’d write a blog seeing as Melanie has been hogging the writing recently. I’m going to write about life on the road, the not so cool things.

The Language



Ausfahrt...what does that mean??



I thought that it wouldn’t be easy but I knew that most German people below the age of 40 can speak some English so I thought that if I tried a little German and they could see me struggling they would just offer their English but that doesn’t happen, you just stand there pointing your finger and waving your hand until they guess correctly what you’re after. I guess they might not know that I can speak English but I do try to throw in some evidence of that. Also maybe their English is not very strong so they are reluctant to use it. Anyhow it does make it hard to communicate especially now that we are at a camp site, we would like to speak to fellow campers but we can’t really go further than hello. Amelia finds it quite difficult aswell, especially on the playground. She would love to make friends but the kids speak German to her and she just goes very quiet, we are trying to tell her to just respond in English so they don’t think she is ignoring them. Noah is not having any difficulty with the language mainly because he doesn’t listen to English or German, although he has turned his usual cry of NO to NEIN.

The Driving

Driving on the wrong side of the road and sitting on the wrong side of the car is very unusual.  It’s hard to know how wide the car is and with the European roads being made for horse and cart in some of the old towns I thought I was going to side swipe everything. Luckily the only things I have side swiped have been a couple of curbs. Having someone to follow does make things a lot easier but when there’s no-one in front, you do have to concentrate very hard especially when turning left. Carparks with no markings are another matter, it’s ok now that I have been driving a couple of weeks but initially I was constantly on the wrong side and causing commotion. Then there’s

Random stop for lunch

the high speed autobahns. I, with my 1.6 L Peugoet, would try to stay in the right (slow) lane on about 125km and cars would just fly passed me and that was ok, until I came up to a slower car and had to overtake. I thought I gave myself plenty of room but each time I got into the fast lane to overtake, the car behind me would be up my ass in a flash and I would be holding up the fast lane until the Peugoet could speed up enough to get back into the slow lane, by this time it would be doing around 140km. And all this with a screaming Noah in the back.

Moving Day

Our stay in Soest was a bit surreal, we didn’t really know what was going on, but we did

Perfect fit??

settle in eventually and then it was time to move. Packing everything and getting it into the car is a nightmare, then when you get to the new place everything is different and it’s a shock. We are not staying at 5 star hotels. These places claim to be 3 stars but everything on the internet looks a lot bigger and nicer. So settling in takes a bit of time, where we’re going to put the 7 pieces of luggage we have, how we’re going to set up the porta-cot, where can we sit when the kids go to bed etc. By the time you have it sorted it’s time to pack up and move again but I think we will get used to that, well we will have to. (What a whinger having to move from one gorgeous place to another!)

 NOAH

So far he has smashed four glasses; broken the car dvd player; fell into a bunch of sting

ing nettles; got bitten in the finger by something; caused me to fall off a ladder on a very high playground causing some serious damage to my shin; fondled every bin he has seen and screamed his lungs out everytime we have been in the car for longer than one hour! He has been the great leveller in this trip so far. He is such hard work that we have seriously conside

red is this all worth it. Amelia has been great and is really enjoying the trip but keeping Noah safe has been the biggest hurdle so far.

Anyhow this “Life on the road” blog will continue, I know Melanie has a lot to add to it so we’ll update it from time to time……

For now it’s ‘Pfirti’.

Maciek