Germany on a coach

Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home.

The furthest I’ve traveled was to Germany on a coach. I went on a wine tasting trip with my mom. It was a four day trip and it was a bit disappointing because I had a cold.

We drove a long way from the Midlands through London to Dover. We waited for ages to get on the ferry, then across to Calais. I remember staying on deck on a cold wet afternoon because my mom had seasickness. Then on through France and Belgium to Germany. I noticed the countryside was similar to Britain but the electricity pylons looked completely different. Much sturdier and solid instead of our criscross filigree style. By then the cold was getting to me and I slept until we stopped at a petrol station and I tried to ask for aspirin, but used the wrong phrase ‘haben du’ informal, instead of ‘haben sie’, I didn’t know I was being over familiar.

One of our coach passengers thought we had gone into East Germany? Why, I don’t know, he was a bit odd.

After two days tasting (and snuffling) various wines and realising I liked ‘qualitatsvein mit pradikat’ the best. We had a trip on the Rhine, and to a cuckoo clock shop, and to a bridge over the Rhine to see statues of the Rhine maidens I think? Mom and I came home on the coach again. Just starting to feel better, the best bit was watching ‘the hunt for red october’ on TVs on the coach!

My Old Viking Queen

I was talking about this last week and I suddenly found a drawing of it in an old sketchbook. This is a Mixte frame which basically has two top tubes that run diagonally down to the centre hub of the back wheel. Some ladies bikes have a single tube running down to the seat tube (where the seat pillar is inserted into the frame). I’m hoping I’ve got the terms right but its been a while since I used them and I may be wrong.

I was and still am in love with this bike. I could cycle really fast on it. I once came off on a lane in Cornwall. I was chasing my boyfriend (now hubby) and a friend, they had cycled off fast and left me behind. They had seen a pile of washed away gravel in the road and were trying to get back to warn me. I came round a corner too fast, hurtled onto the gravel, tried to brake, and ended up flying through the air over the handlebars. My hubby said I did a somersault! I was very badly bruised. Then wehe we got to the ferry to go back across the Tamar the ferryman would only let two of us on the ferry. We turned round and cycled several very painful miles to get to the Tamar Bridge and back to my friends house in Plymouth, Devon….

Bad weather

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The lake was quiet on that day in November. The little ferry was only open one day a week so people could get supplies from the local village. It had been raining all morning. Grey clouds full of grey rain. The lake remained calm, placid, but the weather threatened to grow worse and the pressure was dropping.

They had caught the ferry earlier on in the afternoon and now they were making the trip back. Suddenly the wind whipped up. The water started to get choppy and white tops grew on the waves that were building up. Instead of the calm trip they were used to, the little boat was rising and falling over the crest of the waves, tipping and twisting. The internal lights came on and the ships captain announced that they were taking in a little water and that all passengers must remain calm, but they should all go to their muster points at the front and back of the ferry.

It was not far from shore when the propeller caught an old floating tree trunk. The forward motion stopped and the ferry lurched up and down. Waves were crashing over the prow, and the rain seemed to intensify.

When the squall passed the boat was gone. Only floating life rafts could be seen from shore. Of the twenty people on the boat 18 survived. The only two that were missing were an older man and woman. They were still holding hands when their bodies were found on the shingle beach in the morning.