re-appearance ??

One one more year. It is now 2017 (as you will know) and the plan is to get to Hungary, in two stages. The first, in Germany from Hitzacker to Hof near the Czech frontier, and the second on to Bratislava and a bit into Hungary. Return to London in between, so plenty of train travel! We are trying to cover more each year, and if possible to finish next year. This is partly because of feeling older - will we last out? - and partly because we are wondering if visa-free travel for UK people may come to an end soon. We have European passports now, and more to the point European Health Insurance Cards (EHIC's), but for how long? Mind you, when it comes to Brexit and our travels in the rest of the EU so far, we have experienced sympathy more than anything else. As we get older the the EHIC will almost certainly matter more as we can expect other travel insurance becoming harder to get and much more expensive.

Anyway, now it is the one month on the first sector. This is being written in Delft on the way to Hitzacker. We booked train tickets for the journey out months ago, at Munich railway station for the sector from Hook of Holland to Hitzacker. No problem then, but I then booked the return journey from Hof sometime later by phone from German railways in London and they could not book us as far as Hook of Holland, but only to Rotterdam. I did not smell a rat at this stage, but went on to enquire of Dutch railways who told me that the railway to Hook from Rotterdam had been closed, to re-do it as part of the Rotterdam tram system. When I remarked about booking the outward journey with DB (German railways) she said they probably were not informed of this until later. Somehow, it seemed a very casual, very Dutch reply. There is now only a bus, and that does not take bikes. We would not have time to cycle from the ferry at the Hook to Rotterdam to make the connection, so we rescheduled to a day earlier from London and for the ferry, and reckoned to spend a night in the Netherlands.

And that is why traveled through Delft.. We left home the previous night after the usual efforts at home to get various other jobs that would have waited a month, done. Some success, but not everything! We took a train to Harwich, had a night on the ferry and then cycled to Delft, a distance of about 22km, and put up our tent in a campsite there. We saw an excellent museum with an exhibition of re-assembled broken pottery excavated an Jingdezhen in China, where anything made for the Emperor he did not like was trashed, and they are now doing archeology to recover it. Then a bit about the connection of Chinese and Delft pottery. Then a two-church crawl and remembering some of the history around William the Silent, as we Poms call him. In between, I had a bit of a bike wreck, in the form of (a) the chain snapping, twice, (b) replacing it with a another and (c) since the new chain continually jumped (as one expects) getting the gear cassette changed at very efficient, somewhat expensive, establishment. Better to have this happen in a town in the Netherlands than in remote parts of central Germany. Better still to spot the trouble before starting the journey .... Oh well.

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The last three paragraphs were written in the Netherlands, in a campsite in Delft. We had been given a limited amount of internet capacity, but just as I finished it, and some of the more to come, the limit came to an end and it will have to wait until I next get internet access. Whenever this gets sent, it will probably be followed by another post.

In Delft, we got my (Tom's) bike repaired, after a chain failure, though only one of these, saw the place, saw interesting stuff in the prinshof museum.  I have little photographic evidence for this, though something about a shoe repairer who seemed to have given up