OK, I have to admit that the opening paragraph is mainly to arouse yet more jealousy in our old friend hesh, who was rather appreciative of the narrative of my trip up to Norway last year. It omits a few significant details, like the fact that it took twelve hours and forty minutes to cover those 870 km. I was also very lost for a period, rough justice for breaking the laws of the land I was within at the time. For some reason, I finished the trip much more tired and stiff than usual, only to find an uncomfortable, albeit expensive, bed at the end.
What was something of a clincher in the planning was that August 1st is the national day here, and from this year has been made a national holiday as well (previously, it depended which Kanton you lived in). Given that that was a Monday, I could take a four-day weekend but only use up one day from my holiday/compensation budget. The biggest problem was whether I'd be able to get away. July is traditionally a holiday period here so many people are off work, especially those with school-age children. I can't quite understand this trend; sure, we always had holidays in summer back home but I'd always put that down to the fact that it was Christmas time! I've always thought of December as holiday time...
Anyway, it looked like I could make it, so I sent a FAX to Mike's hotel in Den Haag and snared a room for the three nights necessary. I also found the hotel in the Guide Michelin and photocopied some possibly helpful maps of Den Haag.
Then the problems started. Without going into the details, I had to cope with a front-end that was booting the wrong version of the software, an experimenter who didn't see my admonition to change his script to use the current rather than former front-end, and a histogramming-memory module that decided to stop handshaking with the time-to-digital converter. And those were just the easy ones! (I should mention at this point that it was also 35+ C in the experiment hall, with humidity in the high infinities and no air circulation at all. Luckily our tech and the experimenters were doing most of the work in the areas and I was able to stay mainly in the air-conditioned control rooms. :-)
The net result was that after starting the change-overs at 0800 Wednesday, I was finally happy about 1200 Thursday that I'd caught most of the operational difficulties (naturally, I'd gone home to sleep Wednesday night, knowing that the experimenters would find unsolved problems as the cyclotron came on-line overnight). So, I made it known that I'd be leaving at 1600 and anything that came to light after that would have to wait until Tuesday morning!!
With some relief, I made a final tour of the four active experiments at 1530, and found no problems <phew!>, though one experiment was still not on-line due to unexpected physical problems overnight (it's hard to line up a spectrometer with a couple of 10-ton concrete blocks in the way!). True to my word, I left at 1600, and came home to check out the bike for the journey.
Checklist: tyres -- have tread; battery -- should be OK; oil -- level is high enough; headlight -- Headlight? I'd found a 100/55 W H4 bulb while I was in Brisbane a few weeks earlier, and figured that might give me an advantage in Swiss traffic (I need to switch to high-beam about once a week or so to wake up sleeping cagers). There was also a 130/90 W job, but I reckoned that might be too blatant for Switzerland... So, after adjusting (one-sixth turn on the adjusters) and oiling the chain all that was left was to change the headlight bulb.
Removal seemed easy -- unplug connector, remove rubber seal, quickly figure out locking system and remove it. Now take out replacement bulb. Bugger! The low-beam filament is rattling around in the envelope instead of being in its place. :-( Oh well, scratch that idea and replace the original. Quick check that all's OK, but low-beam doesn't fire up! Remove the bulb and inspect with the magnifying-glass in my Swiss Army Knife. Yup, the filament has thinned down through evaporation at a certain point and there's a definite break. :-( Since it was almost certainly working when I turned it on in the garage that morning, or I'd have noticed the lack of light, one wonders if it were a coincidence that it failed that day, or that the knocks associated with its removal triggered the failure of an already-weakened filament. What's apparent, though, is that the K-Mart bulb couldn't take the vibration of being transported BNE-ZRH, so it's problematic how long it would have lasted in the bike anyway.
I started to mentally reschedule my trip -- can't think of anywhere close that's open past 1830 on a Thursday, so where's the best place to buy a new bulb as early as possible Friday? Then I remembered that I'd left work early... Hell, it's not even 1700 yet! No problem to scoot back to the nearest Suzuki dealer (the one I didn't buy the bike from...) and snarf a new bulb. Price? CHF 10.60. Strange, the CHF==AUD at present, and that's what I paid for the high-powered lamp in Brissie. So much for the maxim that everything's automatically dearer in der Schweiz!
The only other problem I had with preparation was that I discovered an Australian film showing on one of the German channels just as I wanted to go to bed, and decided to follow it. Scratch a couple of hours' sleep, even though I rescheduled my departure by an hour...
Dead on 0700, I rolled down the street and headed north. No turning off to PSI this morning, as I kept heading on to Koblenz. Idle up the street, turn left past the Swiss guards, over the bridge... There's one guard on my side of the road but he's looking in the other direction so I keep idling past. Suddenly he wakes up! He gives an enormous yell and charges off towards me -- I'd come to a crash stop in about 10 cm. Seems he wasn't very happy. He was even less happy when he found out I was Australian, not Swiss. Still, there was nothing much he could do so the delay was minimal (that's the first time I've been stopped by a German border guard).
Now I'm rolling through Waldshut, looking for the road to Titisee. It was easily found and soon I was climbing uphill on a four-lane divided highway, deliciously twisty but with minimal sight-lines so I kept the speed reasonable. The road soon returned to two-lane, but the twists kept coming. Unfortunately, I got caught behind slow vehicles a couple of times and passing chances are rare. One very steep downhill section past Titisee was blocked by a couple of very slow trucks. As the back-up grew, the speed limits dropped, until at the bottom it was only 50 km/h in a little village. Standing there, looking very sour, was a motorcycle cop and radar car. Sorry guys, everyone's going slow in this little bit of traffic!
Freiburg was also slow, due to detours around roadworks and into 30 km/h neighbourhoods. Eventually I hit the Autobahn heading north, but I only stayed on it for 16 km as I turned westwards across the Rhine again. This was, strictly speaking, illegal, as Australians need a visa to enter France. Fortunately, there was no-one at the border to ask me for one... There was a little locked-up hut on the German side, while on the French side there were speed restrictions and signs guiding cars and trucks in different directions. The car in front of me suddenly shot into the truck parking area, which had me puzzled for a second until I realised the "car" route ran through the old inspection point and around the large truck park, so by cutting through the desolate truck park we saved a few hundred metres.
I cut across to Sélestat and then headed north again on a secondary road. The roads here were often straight with an avenue of trees (oaks?) planted close to the sides. There was a sign announcing several deaths in a short time and it's not hard to see why! I guess half the deaths would be in head-ons, and the rest in collisions with the trees after swerving to miss an oncoming car. Somewhere around Obernai, I missed my road, and ended up heading for Strasbourg instead of Saverne. I finally got myself located again and back onto the road I wanted.
However, as I got to the freeway I wanted to take, I saw the onimous sign péage. Hmm, I pronounced that phonetically and didn't like what it sounded like, so I didn't take the entrance. Sure enough, as I went past I could see a series of booths on the freeway -- looks like it's really a tollway! (I double-checked my map, and it's definitely not identified as a tollway, tho' a guy at work says that road has been a tollway for all its existence). Instead of the tollway, I took the "Routes Nationales" toward Sarreguemines. Around this region, there were lots of slow farm implements on the roads, impeding anything more than a leisurely progress.
I decided I'd better get petrol in Sarreguemines as I'd been on reserve for some time. Looking for a service station got me lost, but eventually I found one. Unfortunately it was attached to some sort of Hypermarché, and didn't seem to have a WC anywhere -- my stomach had been crying out for a WC since about 0705 :-(. It was now 1200, and I'd covered only 315 km in that five hours. I was now totally lost, looking for a road to Saarbrücken. I followed a sign to Forbach, but eventually found myself confronted with a choice between Strasbourg and Paris, neither of which I particularly wanted to visit that day.
Checking the map yet again, I discovered that I could take my present road to St-Avold and then take a road north to intercept the planned route around Saarlouis. I think it was on this section that I came upon something that struck me as a little odd -- a motorway with 90 km/h limit that increased to 110 km/h whenever they put in a passing lane on uphill sections! (I do recall being told many years ago that the speed-limit in France didn't apply whilst you were passing, but that has probably changed by now -- if it were ever true.) This turned out to be reasonably easy to do, and I was soon back in Germany and (briefly) back on an Autobahn. I'd only done a few km when I spotted the welcome sight -- parking with WC! I'd done 69 km in the 65 minutes from Sarreguemines. Ten minutes later, a much happier camper set off again in the direction of Luxembourg.
The road I was on soon stopped being an Autobahn and it was back to secondary roads and all the obstacles they imply. By this time my left wrist and fore-arm were getting rather sore from all the clutch usage in low gears for slow traffic and in villages. :-( Traffic was rather heavy in Luxembourg, especially in the capital itself and I had a few problems finding the road I wanted. I knew I wanted to go to Ettelbruck and was following signs to this town, when suddenly I was confronted with a sign indicating the way to Diekirch. I took the other direction, but quickly realised it was wrong. The map showed that Diekirch is a town beyond Ettelbruck, but on a deviation I hadn't planned to take. This "change of focus" is typical of the signposting in Europe and I was still being caught by it, despite some effort at writing down my route including all the towns I was going through, and the route numbers. It really helps to know the route numbers as they're (usually) on the road signs even if the designated city is unfamiliar. Still, I've occasionally got the right road but the wrong direction...
But anyway. Now I was on the route I wanted, heading for the freeway (I hoped!) at St. Vith in Belgium. Ho-hum, another border, another deserted customs post, but the speed restrictions remain... The roads in Belgium were in general in a worse state of repair than elsewhere -- they even put up signs to warn you about it! So, now I was on the E42, heading for Verviers and my final border crossing, into Holland south of that well-known earthquake centre, Maastricht. Before then, I hit yet more roadworks and we were detoured off the motorway and onto the secondary routes. Came around a corner into a downhill stretch, and there's what looks like race signage along the side of the road. ??? Look to the left and there's more there, too. Suddenly, I realise the road has become rather wide -- wide enough for four lanes but only a centre-line is marked. A glance in my mirrors, and here's a group of motards approaching at high speed down the centre-line. Whap, whap, whap! and they're past me and the cars in front.
I'm starting to think that this is all getting very familiar. It can't be Francorchamps, can it? Down around a steep curve and, yep, this must be Eau Rouge! Somehow, it seems different to TV, but then so was Salzburgring (I'd totally misinterpreted one corner there from the camera angles). Now here's the pits and grandstands -- I don't believe it, there are people with stopwatches! Are those squids actually timing laps? On public roads?? In heavy holiday traffic??? Up the hill past the pits and turn off through an access road. Now my confusion is sorted out; I'd been travelling counter to the race direction, coming onto the track at the top of the long hill out of Eau Rouge, downhill onto a diversion (as I realised on the return trip) past the Old Toll post before Eau Rouge itself, finally turning off at the beginning of pit straight. Wow! I've ridden Spa! And I didn't even realise it for the first ten or fifteen seconds.
We idled up through Francorchamps in the direction of Spa, but the detour soon brought us back to the motorway again. The intersection with E40 was an exercise in deteriorating spaghetti, but I managed to hit all the right exits. Much the same soon after at the E25 interchange, complicated by that signposting thingie again. Following signs to a known staging point (Maastricht, I believe) I sorted myself into the correct lane only to discover, halfway around a fairly sharp curve, that the town name inlaid into my lane was "Visé". Since I was pretty sure I hadn't missed a sign, I stayed in that lane and sure enough, the next sign pointed to Maastricht again.
A quick look at the signs near the border. OK, motorways are good for 120 km/h here, so I guess 130 is safe. It's time to make time. Next petrol stop is at Geleen, north of Maastricht; 260 km from the rest-stop in 3h 45m -- it's now 1700 and I told the hotel I'd be in Den Haag by 1600. Familiar (and not-so-familiar) names flash by -- Eindhoven, Tilburg, Breda, Rotterdam, Delft. Getting close to my destination, I realised that my throttle was getting hard to turn. Difficult to think why, so I just kept pounding along. Eventually I realised that I'd slipped my grip on the 'bars further outwards as I got tired, until my little fingers were around the bar damping weights -- the stiffness in the throttle action was due to my little finger gripping the weight!
Finally, I'm in Den Haag, but where's the Hotel Petit? Not that I've got a very good map of the city... I tour along towards the city centre until I feel it's time to turn left. A major problem with Den Haag, as with all European cities, is that the streets basically follow the goat-tracks from centuries before. Why they can't rip down the buildings and build a regular grid, I'll never know! Then they compound the problem by making all the streets one-way. And skimp on the street-name signs... After one stop where I thought I'd got my approximate location, I hared off in the "right" direction but still couldn't find what I was looking for. Then I had a brilliant idea -- see if the bus-stops have maps! (They do in Züurich, but I found it's not a universal idea when I got lost in Bern looking for the Australian embassy.) Luckily they do, and I soon found I was just a few blocks up the street from where I wanted to be. The wrong way up a one-way street! Ok, so I've got to go up here, around there, across here... Hope I can make it.
And I did. It's the right street! Now, what was the hotel's number. 42, and I'd never noticed... There's 34, which way do the numbers run? Idle along, there it is, but there's a traffic island down the middle of the street. Hmm, no traffic, so probably no cops. Just do it! (Last time I did that I got thrown out of Queanbeyan with an admonition never to visit the town again!). Whew, here I am, finally, and they've even kept my room for me. It's now 1940, so the last 216 km were done in 2h 40m. Total trip -- 870 km in 12h 40m (68.7 km/h). Measured petrol consumption for the first 651 km was 18.98 km/l, a little better than I usually get in day-to-day usage.
Now to find Mike and Amy. The hotel-keeper gave me their room number so I phoned up. Turns out they'd run late too, and were just about to hit the shower, as was I (although it had been rather warm on the trip, I was quite comfortable on the move, only breaking into a sweat when slowed by traffic or civilisation). So, we arranged to meet at the lobby after respective freshening-ups.
I was rather releived to find them both fairly normal types -- well, you never know with Geeky-worshippers! On their part there was no recoiling in horror so I presumed a similar reaction to me... Since they'd already been there a few days, they'd sussed out the area fairly well, so we wandered off to a nearby pub to get a meal and a few drinks. It was still quite hot, and the pub crowded, so the first drink was especially welcome. We found a table in a back room and eventually attracted the attention of a waiter.
The food was quite reasonable for a small establishment, and a fair range from what Amy said was a rather small kitchen. The name of the place was "The First Page" if you're ever in Den Haag looking for a congenial establishment. One nice thing about Holland (like Scandinavia) is that just about everyone speaks English quite well; certainly a change from trying to be understood in places like Spain and, um, Switzerland... :-(
As well as the food, we sampled some different beers, including one "triple" beer supposed to be three times normal strength. Amy found a light beer with more taste than any American mass-produced beer, let alone any "lite"! All this accompanied by lots of conversation. Somewhat one-way as often happens, but Amy was was very curious and asked many questions. I like that in a woman! :-) On the way back to the hotel, I found that my Eurocheck card worked very nicely in the local ATMs; Mike and Amy had covered the bill in the pub, tho' it took all their cash, so Amy snarfed a $US10 note I had left over from my conference in Maui last year, negotiating with the waiter to take that as his tip!
Mike was committed to accompanying Amy on Saturday, to the cross- country and dressage events, so I was to have the whole day to myself. I ended up going back to bed for a while after breakfast -- I'd wound up very stiff after my trip. Not only the usual stiff neck and back, and sore left upper-arm (all the legacy of old war-wounds), but also the sore left fore-arm from the slow-going and tingly hand and fingers, indicating that the arm was somewhat pumped-up and pressing on some nerve. Mike and Amy suggested that I set the clutch lever lower to get a better grabbing action (Amy's a physiotherapist). It's still a little tingly a couple of weeks later, but I've realised that I don't "hold" the handlebar as one would expect. Instead of having the bar run down the tunnel of the hand I have it running aft of the heel of the palm. At first I thought that this was to do with a more comfortable position for my arm and shoulder injuries, but a bit of experimentation showed that it's really because the reach to the lever is too great if I ride in the "normal" position. I may have to investigate alternative clutch levers.
I later took a walk down to the centre of town, after a bit of a wander in the suburbs which showed that we seemed to be in the midst of the Embassy section. The Iraqi Embassy grounds looked rather overgrown... It was still very hot, so after I got back to the hotel I had a couple of beers in the bar, then a shower and another nap. The bed wasn't that comfortable, and the pillow even less so, so the sleeping wasn't that refreshing. Later, I ended up at the same pub, not as crowded as on Friday night, so I was able to get a table on the footpath where it wasn't so hot. I had the mussels, which came in a huge dish, but I'd eaten too much of the bread and herbed butter to start, and couldn't eat them all. I also found that if you ask, you can get a decent glass of beer, about 500 ml instead of the 150 ml or so they serve if you just ask for a beer.
The next day I hooked up with Mike while Amy went off to see yet more horses. We wandered around for a while in search of a video store Mike had found out about, where he could rent a player. Eventually we found it, but it didn't open until 1330. Next, we roamed around looking for a grocery store to buy some liquid supplies. I took him down one street I'd found where there's a store, almost bare, with a counter hacked up from boards, the sound of Caribbean music drifting out, and a hand-drawn sign advertising different kinds of "stuff"! We also found an antique and military disposals store. Buried in the window was an old motorcycle, a Gnome, which looked to be in a quite clean condition. I charged Mike with finding out if it was for sale; Dave Tharp later ventured the opinion that it was a "Gnome et Rhone" from around 1920, and quite collectible.
We spied a little grocery store (actually, Mike used his greater Dutch experience than mine to recognise it; I thought it was just a greengrocery), and went in to buy some beer. As we were paying the clerk, somehow the owner and/or some kids knocked a 500 ml can of Heineken off the shelf in the back of the store. It apparently landed nearly upright, denting one side of the base. The pressure wave popped the seal right open, and most of the contents exploded over the owner. He offered the can to Mike, but it was apparently totally empty! I'd better not tell this tale on sci.chem -- the pressure in a shaken can of beer/coke is a perennial point of discussion!
After consuming some of our booty in the hotel grounds, we headed up to Mike's penthouse suite to watch the German F1 GP, crashes and fires and all. Eurosport had Dutch commentary, but luckily the hotel also had BBC2 with the perennial Murray Walker commentating. When that was over, Mike cycled over to the video store and returned with a player that I eventually managed to find on his TV's tuner. So we sat back with more beer watching my tapes until Amy appeared.
That night we took Amy down to show her the "stuff" shop (I suspect she was thinking of visiting it before returning to the US) and the Gnome. Further along the street was a likely-looking pub/restaurant, so we stopped there for refreshments. It was rather hot still, but the large dining hall was almost empty (a mezzanine upstairs totally so) so it wasn't oppressive. The food was again good, and we started off with a large glass of a very dark, very flavoursome, beer. Amy called it a "dessert beer", not a term I'd heard before. We followed that with some Grolsch Amber, which was also dark(!), but after the previous stuff it seemed almost tasteless! (I once had a similar experience, drinking American Budweiser immediately after sampling Tasmania's Cascade Pale Ale.)
The next morning, I bade my farewells after breakfast, with Amy immortalising the moment on Kodak (soon to appear on a server near you, I fear). At 0830, I rolled down the street with a rough idea of the route I had to take to find the motorways back to Switzerland. A very rough idea...
As you might guess from the last sentence, I got lost in the outskirts of Den Haag before finding my road, then it started raining, then I turned the wrong direction onto the ring road at Rotterdam, then I struck a long traffic jam and ended up splitting lanes (turned out to be caused by traffic lights at one motorway junction!), and so on. Went back up the hill at Spa, and had fun at the spaghetti junction in the wet -- charging around at a goodly pace, judging lane changes on the fly, when a little Belgian police car came up behind me, siren blaring and lights flashing. Well, there's no place to stop or slow down and I don't think they're after me so I'll keep going and stop after the interchange -- no, they've taken another exit. Phew!
Then, I got so lost trying to get back across Alsace that I ended up going knowingly in the wrong direction until I came across a place-name I could find on my map (It was a map of Germany, with just a bit of France in the corner). Freiburg was so choked in rush-hour with all the construction that I ended up lane-splitting there, too. Finally, up over the Black Forest and down into Switzerland. Another 800-odd kilometres on the odometer.