We all have our off days, don’t we? Feeling under the weather. We trip over. Bump our head. Cut a finger . . . Beastie’s no different to us in that sense. He needs the occasional TLC too, just like us.
On day two, Beastie had a tummy ache and was running a temperature. Or to be more precise, the garage where Beastie’s heating system is housed was going into melt down. If you’ve ever stepped out of a plane into the searing heat of an equatorial country and experienced that terrific blast of hot air, then you’ll know what hit me when I went to check on the problem. Seemed he’d only gone and spilled out some of his heating guts.
Day four saw him suffer a cauliflower ear. The bruising’s turning a little orange now.
Day 6 and we’re pitched up 100 metres from the shore of Lake Constance. Any ideas of this being a romantic setting are blown out of the water by the dull greyness of the day, the grey gravel Beastie is resting on, the grey shoreline and the grey paddle-man as he paddles across the grey water.
Checking out the lie of the land when it comes to every pitch location is not always possible. So in Strasbourg, we had the delights of a church clock that struck the hour relentlessly throughout the night. Your brain gets sucked into its timing. Being reminded on the hour of how few hours there are left before it’s time to get up, not the most conducive, or refreshing way to prepare for another day’s journeying.
So here at Lake Constance, we have the lake to our right. And fifty metres to our left we have what must be the most efficiently run train service in the world. Trains whizz by incessantly 24/7 (even if we are here only for the 24 bit).