mandymoochops

SKEGGY FFS ()

mandymoochops

My favourite part of your post bar none.

Was it supposed to be "I am planning a trip back next year perhaps, with the OH"

Or is it this "I am planning a trip back next year, perhaps with the OH"

If it's the second one I bet you're really in the good books right now lol

bats

Great yarmouth, hunstanton, gorleston, cromer....

slammer

I wrote this for another forum, but as a fellow red roseite I think you may like this humble offering...

..Home at last, or at least back to the 300 Chuff a month hovel in Basel that I call a roof over my head, nice place with all the trimmings, it even comes complete with it’s own entertainment, the quite batty, missing a few Rappen to the Chuff, landlady.
I had just finished a five hour run down from Rotterdam and I was fuming after crossing the border into Switzerland and getting shot at for speeding.
It's crazy. Germany is the only useful country in the world without a speed limit on the Autobahnen, the only speed limit is how fast your vehicle can give common sense the finger, the only other country is Nepal, but good luck doing anything over 50 on the goat tracks there.
Imagine, you are bubbling down the A5, relaxed, at a nice and easy two-hundred-and-odd Kmh, then you hit the Swiss border and get totally de-speeded, the moment you see that Swiss cross time dilates and things get reeeeeal slooooow, liiiikkke ruuuunnninnng iiiiinn tttrreaccccleee.

I was overheating and sweaty in my rags and hot enough to register as a heat-bloom on Infrared satellites.
Slammer tries to come over as a badassed biker (badassed bikers may disagree though) the fumes from unzipping my IXS jacket was opening the gates to the pits of foulest Acheron, removing underpants like stripping Velcro and my socks were for want of a better word “crunchy,” I showered and relaxed on the couch with a cuppa.
“Knock, Knock”
“Herrrrr Slaaammmmer”
Ah! A thin, quavery whiny voice. Enter on stage, the bane of my Basel life, the mad landlady..
“..A little boy shot me with a bee from his blowgun and it stung me.”
I really do not want to know where this is heading.
“Look, right here”
She says opening her blouse with both hands.
Arrrrgh! Even after days I still have nightmares about the dugs from hell dingdangalanging in my face.
It has been a funny 2012 up to now, sadly, or knowing what I know now, maybe a mix of emotions, the gig in Antwerp fell through, the company showed it’s self pretty much advice resistant and I had spent two months picking my nose, finger up my arse and my brain running in neutral, totally ignored by pretty much everybody, now in retrospect seeing how they are floundering I must admit feeling a tad smug
HA! HA!
April 27th I packed the bike gave the company the finger and headed of to the ports and a ferry to the UK and my mom. A few days of drinking her whiskey and getting tucked in at night would do me a world of good.


The time in Belgium was not all bad though, I quite like Antwerpen and the Bollekes, I like the art decor style and that everything is not clinically sterile and squeaky clean as is in CH, people are a bit more relaxed and don't runaround with a pinched look and broomstick up their arses.

I found and immensely enjoyed the Anna tunnel, a footpath under the Shelde, with its humongous massive wooden escalators that worked with a bumpy, clunky, wooden sound from the time when radios worked with little glass bottles.

Either Jew do or jew don't.
Living in a quarter mainly inhabited by Hasidic Jews and Moslems I find some of the interaction or lack of it quite amusing to watch.
There is a small park in the 'hood' with a playing area in the middle, a few restaurants, shops and a handfull of bars surround the square. Kids are as loud as you would expect, prams are pushed and people relax and enjoy themselves, people from all strata of society and all religions.
Moslems drink tea shoulder to shoulder with Baart Smit supping his 'Bolleke' (Antwerp typical beer) The only ones missing are the Jews, surprising as this area is right in the center of their quartier with Synagogues on almost every street corner, you see them up and down the steets to ane from their place of worship mouthing soundbites from the tora all wearing the black robes, dreadlocks and black or white tights, depending on the time of the day, and of course the strange looking furry hasidc hats that make them look like a chimmney sweeps brush.
A Swissified Slammer does the CHian thing and I am ashamed to admit to it but I find myself staring.
My fingers just itch to grab a hat and fling it.. Not because of anti sematic tendencies, I just want to see how far I can get it to fly.
They are totally integrated but are also totally apart, I mangaged a 'shalom' to a group and was regarded as something dropped from a dog that you step in.
Next time I gonna try a 'Salem Aleikum' just to see them burst into flames.
When there is interaction it seems to be mainly jews and moslems trying their best to annoy each other, two groups the other day all bow woof woof and in the middle, the DMZ, (my imagination runnin on overdrive here) a roman catholic child blarting his eyes out like a UN blue helmet soldier in the Gaza-strip.
Last friday against my own advise I drove into town and had to wait at a crossing, a bunch of Jews huddled so tight together as to be a solid mass. A scattering of Moselms, a group of men dressed as pirates, a large black woman carrying two 6 packs of water on her head in the african way, a group of Umpalumpas and a black pot bellied pig.
Slammer has a cast iron sense of weird and I did not bat an eyelid, howeverI did think that a pig in a part of town inhabited mainly by Jews and moslems must be the happiest pig on earth.
Also I met another brother from the BMW LT Forum, "Sleuth" we had gotten on like a house on fire and I had immensely enjoyed his company.
Did the usual things, went drinkies, went to the (brilliant) air museum in Brussels, rode out, did all the man thingies that interest us y-chromosomers.
We also rode through the creepy abandoned village of Doel, right next to the Nuke plant.

If any white haired golden eyes kids ask me to come and play with them I am so opening the taps.
On the last run we had ridden along the Schelde river on a day studded with patchy rain, a quiet, subdued run, back in Antwerp after the Waaslandtunnel he rode to the left and I turned right.

Late afternoon the handful of bikes on the ferry disembarked and each went their separate ways. Driving on the wrong side of the road is quite a challenge until you re-callibrate yourself. I turned a corner and came face to face with a French car driving on my side of the road, old bugger gave me a French potty-mouthing and I gave some choice lessons in German. Behind me a police car whooped and I thought: "good, gonna give them daft froggies what for"
"Oi, You on the motorbike.. GIT over to the other side of the road"
Ooops!
I spent a few restful days in Blackburn and did my usual run to Glasson dock and the best bacon butties on the planet. sadly the jolly green giant, a huge green caravan that had been the home of butties since I was a kid was gone, replaced by a more modern caravan, when I asked what happened the girl behind the counter told me it had:
"Gone to the great caravan site in the sky"

Bacon butties are the same though, All hail the buttie!
I also met up with IanK and Owd Nick for a beer or four, or was it six or seven, memory get's kinda fuzzy.


All to soon it was time to leave, besides Mum was running out of whiskey, I headed back cross country to Hull and the ferry to Rotterdam.


Iron Pig II under the Humber bridge.
I have just been sorting out a few pictures, being unemployed means that you don't really have a lot of time for such frivolities. You have a lot of things to do. Make sure that your shoe laces are exactly the same length. Watch back to back Ashes to Ashes over the internet. Wait until the sun is over the yard arm. Repeat next day. Occasionally going to they gym, at the moment the only thing keeping me from getting wicker chair spread and cabin fever in my under the roof cubby-hole.
I still have one or two picture from the last trip, so here they are.
The last time I rode the Bike over to Blackburn just after Dover and still trying to get to grips with riding on the wrong side of the road, It just feels sooo wrong, I noticed a brown sign announcing the battle of britain memorial, at the time I just made a mental note to check it out- next time- well here was my chance. I left the motorway and headed (almost going on the wrong side again) to the memorial.
A gravel car park, the usual tea-room selling plastic model spitfires and hurricanes and the Me 109 of the baddies and all the other tat designed to empty dad's wallets and keep hyperactive kids amused for a second or two.
It's a park, a very serene park in beautiful Kent, overlooking the bluey-green waters of the channel and onto France, quite peaceful now that the only merlins now are heard on memorial days.
http://www.battleofbritainmemorial.org/


The concrete effigy of a fighter pilot in the middle of the memorial looking out to sea.
Replica Spitfire and a replica Hurricane, recently along with Sleuth I had the pleasure to see the real thing in Brussels. The replica's themselves are made of glass fiber and very accurate, a bit weathered though.

Note the high-tech all-seeing cameras on the post, a sign of the times I am afraid.
A trip to Blackburn always turns into a navel searching, My father was a avid motorcyclist and I like to re-run the runs we did on the back of his Norton, generally starting a Lythem St Annes and working my way past Blackpool and Morcombe up to Fleetwood, not the Mac one the Fishermans friend one.
My father would be found frequently in Fleetwood working on the engines of the Fishing boats, one of his better tricks was to marinize any old lorry engine and knowing dad some of these engines could well have been happily chugging away in a truck just the day before being parked up for the weekend.
I like to stop at the fishmongers and get me some sour whelks and dressed crab, the whelks so sour that your nose actually falls into your face like when the planet Vulcan got eaten by the black hole.


Blackpool tower, the one in France is just a scratty cheap Froggy knock-off copy you must know.

Blackpool beach, they have done a lot of cleaning up and re-doing the seawall in the last years, for me, returning every few years it has been like watching time-lapse photography.
The beach donkey haven't changed much, still looking like something from the '60ties, just like me.
Past Fleetwood you go past Skippool, the road is tiny and easy to miss, however if you go down the narrow lane you really return to the 60ties, my father would repair the boat engines and I would spend many a Saturday bored out of my skull in a boats cabin trying to teach maggots used for fishing to race, (don't ask, some got away.) whilst dad banged and hammered away in the bilge.
Skippool really is creepy in it's own way, the tides have gouged deep ravines into the land and access to the boats is only over long rickety, raised boardwalks.

Next stop, of course the bacon butties and tea of Glasson Dock.
http://www.glassondock.co.uk/

High water and a spring tide and the water comes over the ledge, normally it is a meter or so lower.

The river Lune, as a kid I learnt how to catch Place by standing on them in the water, that takes some will power since you stand on something squishy and organic in muddy water and your normal first reaction is to jump 5 meters out of the water and run screaming like a girl for the shore.
I learnt what kind of seashore plant was edible, Samphire as I now know how it is called and how to dig for clams.
I also learnt how to extract myself out of quicksand and how to read the tides, thankfully I have always been a good swimmer.
Dad's comment of: "did you fall in?" got him a withering glance every time I came back dripping.

Jingsamichty

Needs more detail.

Shard

If you haven't been to Blackpool for 25 years, just be sure to remove rose-tinted spectacles prior to disembarkation! I went a decade back and lasted only an afternoon. Put it this way, you will appreciate Canada all the more after your visit.

caretaker

It's an old country; are you sure you really needed a new book?