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8 - 24 September 2006

The Black Forest (and Vogtsbauernhof),

 Switzerland (Interlaken and Zermatt),

a dash into Italy,

back to Chamonix and

down to the Camargue.

(A pretty much inexcusable 3,351 miles).

Day 1 - Home - Dover - Dunkerque, 364 miles

How to stand out from the crowd at the ferry port.     Click it? An Alvis TA 21 from the early '50s.

In the '60s my dad owned a 1926 TG 12/50, not unlike this one. When I noticed this TA 21 I was filled with unreasonable nostalgia for an era I'd never known, a time when travel "on the continent" in ones own car was only available to very well off Brits).

Perhaps there was no such thing as a gay lorry driver in those days? (Not that there's anything wrong with a gay lorry).

	France was clearly visible from Dover. In the bar I drank most of a melon-flavoured J2O. It tasted like disinfectant. Two hours of tedium? I still find the concept of the channel crossing very exciting, the reality less so.

Arriving in the dark but under a full moon we over-nighted at a campsite several of which we'd noticed in July just down the D600 from Dunkerque. This one was Camping les Dondaines at Cappelle Brouck. Although it was adequate as a night halt (but so is a layby?), I include its name so you can be sure of finding somewhere better. It was next to a canal, the locality smelled mildly of dog poo, there were big spiders in the toilet block (there, there, never mind), and we were unable to find any showers.

    The owner was a cheerful chap though and his daughter was just back that evening from a trip to England and seemed shocked that "nobody" in England could, or would, speak French. He said my French was good. And if that isn't an indication that all things are relative, then I don't know what is.

Day 2 - Dunkerque to (almost) The Black Forest, 373 miles.

I hoped that the hill had once had an ancient fort upon it, but I'm pretty sure it was only a timber extraction road. We were in the Bas Rhin near the German border, but still in France on a good, but not excitingly good, site at Camping Municipal l' Oasis ***, 5, rue du Frohret, 67110 OBERBRONN.

    We like municipals. This was one Jo plucked from the Michelin road atlas towards the end of a day of almost entirely autoroute travelling during which for ease we'd avoided the most direct route and stayed within France. Most memorable from this day was the sensible German BMW motorcyclist who overtook us and was seen to have long blonde pigtails hanging out below his / her helmet. Was this a female, or a joker bloke with a silly wig?

    "We'll soon see", I said to Jo, "Watch him on these bends. If the bike leans over, 'she's' a bloke".

    At no great speed the rider "threepenny-bitted" (remember them?), round the corner remaining near as dammit bolt upright throughout.

    "Well, it might be a wig, but he's definitely a girl", I chortled.

    (Scuse me fra minute, I'm just off to download The Groundhogs' I Love You, Miss Ogyny.

    There, got it. Paid for it too!).

Ooops!!!!!!!!!!! I "forgot" to mention the new van! It has no name and probably never will have. After the T3 it seems to be characterless, but utterly wonderful which qualities prevent me from calling it Jodestine (being a combination of the co-driver's name and that of Robert Louis Stevenson's hired donkey). Puzzled of Lancashire thinks, How will I explain this to the T3 owners?     Simple answer really and one already provided here by one of them. Another answer is that I'm fortunate enough to be able to pay back the money in quite a short time. Yet another answer is that although it's possible to be quite forgiving over a long period of time, you don't keep a dog that has turned on you, as did our T3 last July at Dover.

Day 3 - Into the Schwarzwald, 111 miles.

The Black Forest.

That morning I felt somewhat ill at ease and could only blame this on the No-Man's Land in which last night we'd arrived and through which this morning we continued to travel. Although I'd never been to Germany everything around us looked much as I'd expected Germany to look....., But we were still in France. The place names were a crazy mix of both languages.     I drove rather clumsily and was annoyed with myself for having forgotten on the Saturday to re-fuel. I put in our spare 5 litres and on our way to the border we visited every closed-on-Sunday supermarket with its 24hr card-operated fuel pumps and failed to find one which would take any of our cards. (Just very occasionally we've found one that does do).     On the previous day at an aire de service our coffee had been served in doubled-up paper cups. Now we were using the second cup! That'll teach 'em!     On a wonderful new road surface we crossed the enormously wide Rhine and headed for Baden Baden (so good they named it twice?), where we planned to locate an information centre, buy a map and find out what there is to do in the Black Forest.     And that is exactly what we did. We bought an excellent large scale map and a good guidebook in English, and were directed to the nearest of many proper fuel stations which were open all Sunday long. I've completely ignored the language for 32 years but, were he still around, I'm sure my A level German teacher would be pleased to know that I somehow still managed to dredge up just enough of it to form the necessary questions in the tourist info centre. In fact I'd put so much thought into what I was going to say that the assistant expressed her surprise that I wanted a guidebook in English! How kind.

At the site at Enzklösterle we were invited into the office. It was really a desk in the hallway of the owner's home. Darkly wood-panelled, poorly lit and decorated in the style referred to (by the father of one of my many former brothers-in-law), as Bavarian Klutter, it temporarily filled me with gloom and strongly reinforced all sorts of barely proven generalisations about the German national mindset and attitudes.

    I do very much hope that you'll try hard to forgive any cynicism on my part, but in the '90s for a few years I experienced the non-joys of a German mother-in-law and have consequently developed an extra-jaundiced view of certain matters Germanic. Is that germane? Yes, I think so. The ex-mother-in-law is not entirely to blame though. Brought up in the UK by parents who lived through WWII (my dad lost a brother, a ship's surgeon who went down with a torpedoed destroyer), and having listened from an early age to opinions such as (and it sounds truly awful nowadays), "the only good German is a dead one", etc., I know that I have an ingrained attitude which is sometimes difficult to suppress, improve, or remove, I'm afraid.

    It hasn't stopped me from owning, in all, four VWs though, has it!

I keep coming back to this shot because to me it looks essentially so right. And I know why too. It's the awning that does it.

You might see no sense in this, but it takes me right back to

• those early Kombi days and

• (now, this is embarrassing), Born Free, a film in which Land Rovers, big canvas tents and huge awnings played quite a large part, and

• Brecon Jazz Festival, because I realise that I want to wrap the van around in a modest version of those magnificent, colourful and very large  canvasses which perhaps the organisers still fasten above The Bulwark.

We sold our tunnel awning with the T3. Although of a modern design, the awning was heavy, quite bulky and we used it very little.

	In much the same way that its alloy wheels had made me want our T3, it was these ace pockets which really got to me when we were thinking (long and hard) about buying this van.

Here's an odd thing - when we arrived at this site I partly filled the water tank and found that I was using a connector exactly similar to the one we'd bought in 2002 on the Île de Ré on our first trip to Europe together. Never before had I found a tap which it fitted!

In the late evening we wandered off towards the village and past a very surprisingly scruffy derelict hotel and into the centre where the houses appeared, with their geranium-loaded balconies, to be mimicking Swiss chalets. Jo spotted some hippy-ish flowers for sale.

I didn't like this at all.

Day 4 - A Walk in the Black Forest and driving south to Wolfach, 124 miles.

We bought the hippy-ish flowers.

	This beautiful rowan weighed down by its berries reminded me of the firework display at Souillac.                              Good enough to eat? Somehow I doubt it. And we hadn't brought a reference book.     Nearby were tree stumps cut (very wastefully, I thought), at 4ft high. On the tops were growing even more and different fungi. And then we found these which also looked frightening:                   Detail:

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