Saturday 19 August 2000. We have to say goodbye to Austria as the coach set off north for Belgium. We were to stay overnight in Belgium and then back to the UK the following day.
Gazing out of the coach window brought a few reminders of the scenery we had enjoyed during our few days in Austria.
At times it threatened to remind us of some of the weather we had sheltered from during our evening walks!
We said goodbye to the musical box chalets that had been almost the only shape of building we had seen for a week!
We had seen so many chalets and other buildings of the same basic design that I was actually looking forward to seeing a house without a balcony and with a four-sided roof! The Austrian-German border came and was crossed and we turned onto a road with markers every kilometre. We would stay on this one road for several hours and the first marker read 510 km.
The Germans were building a new high-speed railway and we saw construction works every now and then as the road weaved its way alongside, over and under the embankments and cuttings of the railway.
There were also the occasional castles to break the monotony of the flat landscape. I watched throughout the day as we stayed on this one road until a marker said 1 km and we reached the border with the Netherlands.
The following day, rain spattered the coach window as we left the hotel in Belgium. "Where's your camera?" demanded Janet! It didn't do very much though and we set off from Antwerp towards France and the ferry port of Calais. A stop at a Belgian chocolate factory found the factory already full of visitors but the same firm had an outlet at the wine cash & carry near Calais so no-one seemed unduly worried! The border posts on the Belgian/French border were still there but were now deserted for most of the time as Europe had opened its frontiers to other European countries.
Er... the white bits (top left) are the reflection of the coach windows on the opposite side of the coach and not - as they might at first appear - a ghostly washing line of Y-fronts...
The odd reminder that 2 world wars were fought over this land and several typical French farms and villages flashed by until we reached Calais. The ferry crossing was smooth and we transferred to our feeder coach, swapping news and views with the people we had travelled from Blackpool with 8 days before.
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