It's been a while...

The Port of Hull.

Well it been a couple of weeks since I last wrote anything on the blog, mainly due to the fact that we were travelling all last week.

Before leaving we managed to have an evening with our great friends Allen & Jean and I took a couple of photo's but seem to have left them on the English laptop but hey, they know what they look like I think.

Cheers, Dinner at Kappel-Grafenhausen

We set off from the P&O ferry terminal in King George dock in Hull on the pride of Bruges bound for Zeebrugge in Belgium.  As always it was a pleasure to get up and disembark after a sterling breakfast already on mainland Europe feeling refreshed and ready for the days five hundred mile trip.  Our normal overnighter is Germany just over the border from Strasbourg, a little place called Kappel-Grafenhausen.  Here there is a small family run hotel just half a mile off the motorway which suits us fine.  Dinner on this occasion was just across the street in a schnitzel bar, good food and good value.  Wednesday morning after a super breakfast once again we set off for Venice, Well the terminal for Anek ferry's has now moved just onto the mainland before you cross the causeway to Venice.  Dead easy to get to, in fact they even send the grid reference for the sat nav.

Anek have changed the ship which they use for this route now and there is only limited outside space and no longer a swimming pool on board, but it was clean and serviceable and suited our purposes.  We arrived in Lefkas at eleven thirty in the evening and couldn't sleep due to the heat and humidity so we were still unpacking our kit until we finally collapsed into bed at four AM.

Nice meal at L'Italiano with a strange German guy.

The bikes were covered in Rust - not now!

 Since we have been back we have done most of the jobs I was expecting to do on our return.  New batteries have been installed we now have three hundred and thirty amps at our disposal rather than the two-twenty we had before.  I had passed my old batteries onto Ian up in the mountains but now he can only have one as the one has a catastrophic failure inside.  I thought the side of my bed was feeling hot the first night we arrived home, this is adjacent to where the battery was located,  When I changed them the next day you could have fried eggs on it, We were lucky we came home when we did as it could easily have caused a fire, next time disconnect the solar panels from charging maybe?

We have laid our new "expensive" flooring in the cockpit and taken out the teak duck boards, great improvement we think and of course whilst we were away the new upholstery and mattress we made and fitted.  Takis Paspalidis has done the work and we are delighted, very comfy compared to the old worn out stuff.  There is one minor thing which he got wrong but is going to change that for us whilst we are house sitting next week.

New upholstery - bloody marvellous.

I have even found time this week to get all the rust off our bikes, you can't really tell from the pictures but they were covered in rust.  Such is the price of living besides salt waters I guess.  Anyway they are all cleaned and lubricated now and ready for that new fitness routine, nahhh.

Just before I close a mention of the guy in the picture with us above.  I was walking past the shower block in the marina and this guy in a hand painted van shouts out something in German to me which I did not understand.  I asked him if he spoke English or Greek and he did a little of both so it turned out he thought I was his friend, "You have the face of my friend" he said.  No I assured him this was really my face, I had had it all my life and was pretty sure that no one else had been using it without me knowing. "No it is his face face" he insisted.  Anyway to cut a long story short Sandra and I were out that evening for something to eat after a long hot day and he came and sat with us uninvited and talked to us all evening long, a little weird in all honesty.  We ensured that we got our bill separately though in case he did a runner as he lived in the van and worked as an odd job man all over Europe.  Got to give the guy points for initiative though, he definitely  went looking for work and not the other way around and he paid with no problem.  Cheers Meik.