Our last night in Bruges was everything I’d hoped it would be.  It is a spectacular city, slightly reminiscent of some English towns.  But like they say in the movie In Bruges (which we watched later that night), it’s like a fairytale.

Our last port of call was a French Hypermarket where we stocked up on all the cheese (which stinks the van out every time the fridge is opened), wine and continental snacks we could carry.  And a few short hours later we pulled into the campsite where I wrote the very first edition of this blog.  There are moments in life where melancholy can slip over me and our returned presence to this very familiar place was one of those moments.

If I could’ve gone back to that late winter day, I would have swapped places in an instant.  We’d only been on the road for three days, our little footstep (that I would soon drive over), still had four fully functioning legs and the van still had its old clutch but we had no clue what we would soon see and experience.  Sheesh, we had some dramas on the trip but I would happily do it again.

So now, we have three weeks in England and if there’s anything more English than walking along the white cliffs of Dover in the pouring rain, then I don’t know what is.  The van needed a good bit of housekeeping on our first day back and we needed a service wash for our mounting pile of washing.

We moved up to Ramsgate for our second night where we stopped off in a pub, had a good crack with the locals and got ourselves a bite to eat.  Travel is actually incredibly easy when you know exactly how everything works, and speak the language.  The next day we moved on to Canterbury and then Whitstable, where we had oysters and a pint of stout to wash them down, initially our teenage waiting staff brought over 11 oysters rather than 12, which is a basic maths fail. This lot down South have been incredibly friendly and I think this next three weeks will fly by very quickly.

But I have woken up to the sound of rain on the van roof every day since we’ve been back.  It was so cold last night that I nearly put the heating on as we watched England scrape through to the semi-finals of the Euros on penalties.  It’s supposed to be summer and it’s hard to believe that only a few short weeks ago we were sweltering on the Adriatic Coast.  I’ve checked my weather app and we might have three days of sunshine next week sometime, we’ll be in Cornwall then, so that’s something to look forward to.