By: Blonde Two

Mr Blonde Two spent a small part of today lying under (luckily it is very tall) his truck in a German Lidl’s (as opposed to English Lidl’s) car park.  He claims to have been fixing the exhaust (Auspuff) with wire but I think he had just lost the will to drive any further and had decided to hide while I was doing the shopping (I got a bit distracted by the rather large range of sausage).

The truck is fine if a bit loud.  Mr Blonde Two is fine if a bit quiet.  They have both driven 1120 miles to get here to Tux in Austria.  Please don’t shout at me here, my spacial awareness is as reliable as Mr Blonde Two’s German so we have decided a-la-Blonde, that he is in charge of driving whilst I am in charge of talking.  By the way, did none of you think to tell me just how big Europe is?!?

Trucks (Toyota Hilux Surf) are wonderful things for holidaying in.  Plenty of space for kit (not too much though), kids (we left those at home) and for people who need to go to sleep (we did this quite a lot).  Who needs a camper van when you can toss your belongings into the front, wedge aluminium insulation into the windows, roll out your sleeping bag and Thermarest and snuggle down?  If I am making this sound over comfortable, then please don’t be misled, it is not, but for this trip, it proved preferable to searching for campsites, paying for hotels or carrying on driving.

We had been reliably told that there are plenty of places to the sides of Autobahns and autoroutes where a tired traveller can pull up and sleep.  We had also done internet research which suggested that to do so would render us at risk of burglary, sodomy, being gassed and being mistaken for prostitutes (possibly all on the same night).  In the end, we were so tired for two nights that we ignored the research and chose truck (proper big lorry trucks) stops as opposed to motor caravan ones (we were neither but decided that the truckers probably knew the best spots.) Here is supper and our view for night one.  Not what I had expected from a trip to Europe but it kind of fitted in with the “non-plan” theme.  We are at our apartment now and have an actual bed (and more importantly an actual shower).  Gute nacht jeder!