Notes on foreign travel...

My former neighbour, Frank, doesn't like it "abroad." Apparently the rooms are too small. This wonderful insight has been Frank's reason to avoid all foreign travel for about 30 years. Fortunately we have chosen to ignore Frank's sage advice on this and other subjects and have sampled rooms in several different "abroads" over the past few years, and with the notable exception of Denmark have always found the rooms to be very pleasant, and even the one in Denmark was of a perfectly good size.

So now we find ourselves in Foreign Parts once again, with all the fun of giving and receiving directions to and around places with names that no respectable English speaker should ever have to pronounce, and, just occasionally, being reminded of entirely random things by something as simple as a name on a roadsign, as here for example:


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which put me in mind of this for the rest of the day,



I don't know what Frank would make of Holland, but I'm finding it flat. Not just flat in the way that Norfolk is flat, but flat in a whole new way that must make car handbrakes utterly redundant. This is no bad thing as we're here to cycle, not climb mountains, but what I didn't expect was just how far away the horizon often appears, and how "big" the sky seems when you are out in the middle of nowhere.


I've never asked Frank's opinion on foreign menu's, and never will, but if I had I'm sure he would have warned me about things like this:





(For the record, the Lukewarm Salad was excellent, and I shall most certainly be having another of them before we leave this place on Friday.)