Itchy Feet and Titchy Feet

Have you ever woken up suddenly and forgotten exactly where you were and what was happening? I have, and for a minute or two I had that feeling that I was annoyed but I couldn’t get my brain started quickly enough to work out what it was.

Does the car need moving or parking updated? No. Do I have a ferry to catch? Yes, but it’s mid afternoon so that’s not the ‘now’ problem. Is it someone’s birthday and I need to call them? No. Do I need to visit the glass-doored toilet before the kids wake up. No, bladder check is good.

Back to the car……….have I been ripped off by a hotel offering free parking and then charging me for it? YES. That was it. I went to sleep thinking that I might have been better to try and get my car up the stairs and park it in the room with me, but as Ross from Friends would have pointed out, there were too many corners to PIVOT!

No, once I was showered and dressed, my first job was to get to reception and get more payback through the medium of pens! Between the three of us, we managed to get another twenty or so pens from the unmanned reception as we had to leave the room in pairs to allow for showering privacy for the one left behind. They gave us plenty of opportunity to walk past reception multiple times, we just took it!

With 35–40 pens rattling about in the car, we had plenty to keep us going and it felt like we had made good on the parking costs. We could, at last, move on. And move on we did, this time to Gouda, a place that daughter child and I had visited on our last trip (see below) and which had clearly left an impression on us, particularly the cheesy parts.

It was a lazy Sunday morning and the roads were quiet and the sun was shining. It was a perfect day to have an open road in front of you. We picked our way through the suburbs of Gouda where beautiful large homes were just about waking up and with it being in Holland, there were loads of bikes pottering about, mixed between lycra-clad men trying to break a speed record and people with baskets on the front of their bikes filled with bread and other fresh breakfast provisions.

We parked, by chance, in the same car park as last time we visited and walked over the road towards the town square. Right in the centre is this beauty of a building, dating back to the early 1400s. Prior to this, the previous town hall had been destroyed by fire and so they built this sandstone monster in the middle of the market square so it would stand apart from any other buildings for safety reasons. I guess you would get bored of building new town halls every 20 years, wouldn’t you?

Again, with it being the last day of the trip, we needed gifts and so piled into the Stroopwaffle shop and the same lady that had served us on the last trip was still there, making the same jokes about the siroopwafel liquor being ‘like lemonade’ when it was in fact 14% ABV! What a woman!

With our presents bought and lunchtime approaching we made our way over to Gewoon Gouds where we ordered as much cheese as we could cope with in one sitting and some extra fries just in case we ran out of things to dip in the cheese.

What a feast it was too. Cheese soup, yes, it is a thing, a cheese and croquette and a few slices of cheese and bread with a mustard dipping pot. Sat with my kids in the lovely town square, watching the world go by while chomping on deep fried breaded cheese, what better final setting for the trip could you want?

But time and tide wait for no man and so we, reluctantly, made our way back to the trusty VW Golf and headed up to IJmuiden, the home of the DFDS ferry. I tried to take in all I could to try and make memories of driving in Europe stick in my head for longer. The way that roadsides always seem to have 10-foot barriers alongside them to try, I assume, to shield the houses near the road from noise and pollution. The way that cars in the outside lane will leave their indicator on if they think you are driving too slowly and they want to get past, it’s all just a tiny bit different, but I loved it all.

When we eventually got to IJmuiden, we found out that it was the Big Sea Parade, the opening festival of the SAIL-In Parade. The streets were packed with visitors and there were restrictions all over and we had to ask security guys for directions. Being a bloke, I didn’t listen to him at all and had to make a U-turn at a dead end and ask him again…he understood, he was clearly a bloke too.

We picked our way through the docks and eventually made it through customs and made our way onboard the DFDS ferry and on to our cabins. Maybe a little bit too quickly in fact……after a little wander around the ferry to stretch our legs and work out where we were in relation to the various shops and cafes, we returned to find a note on our door asking me to return to my car as the car alarm was going off….I had forgotten to turn it off!

Eventually, the sleeping giants that were our engines fired up and slowly pushed us out to sea. It was a great time for people watching. There was the family of four all wearing matching hoodies proclaiming that they were all on holiday in 2025…what the hell they thought that would add to anyone’s day is anyone’s guess. There was a lady that tried to buy a bottle of water in duty free that had forgotten her purse, so I bought it for her……I honestly expected to bump into her again and she could have returned the favour, but I think she must have jumped overboard right after that. I wish I had taken another thirty pens from the hotel to pay for that one!

Daughter child and I eventually settled at the back of the boat, reading our books and watching the mainland get smaller and smaller. It is always sad to be heading home, but we were all going back to our loved ones and our normal lives. I knew I would remember so many parts of the last nine days forever, clear in my mind. It had been a long trip…..2,129 miles in total.

Would I do it again? In a heartbeat.

Would I do it differently? No.

This had been our silly little drive around Europe and I wouldn’t want to do it any other way or with anyone else.