Lost Car Keys

Well, 24 hrs on and we are just waking up in a lovely little campsite in Salzburg, Austria. Arrived in Salzburg about 6 last night after a long drive from the Heidleburg gathering/party which for some, (not us old gits), went on till 4 in the morning. There was a huge gathering of ralliers at the site and in the morning the ‘thistle’ field that we were given to camp in looked like the tents at a music festival but without the mud and considerably more thistles. A few of the revellers were strewn around the site outside their tents or simply on the floor of the car park surrounded by empty bottles.

Surprisingly we were packed up and on the road by about 8.30 am on the way to Prague and then suddenly decided to go to Salzburg instead. That’s the beauty of doing this, so long as you’re heading in the general direction of East you can go where you like without giving anybody notice. Which is fine to a point, but unfortunately later in the day we decided to head west instead of south and went for about half an hour in the wrong direction. Andy P blamed me for the error because I was navigating but I countered with the defence that if the navigator is clearly asleep at the time (which I was), then it is the driver’s responsibility for the direction in which he has pointed the car. When the navigator awoke and checked the position of the sun against the time of day and did some quick mathematical calculations in his head it was as clear to him (as it should have been to the driver) that we were heading in the wrong bloody direction. A quick U-turn and after a scenic diversion of about an hour we were soon back on the right road.

We’d had a bit of a scare the previous day shortly after leaving Lille when Andy P announced that he couldn’t find his set of car keys. Like any good husband I reassured him that they MUST be in the car somewhere but after considerable searching and a not inconsiderable amount of swearing from Andy they were nowhere to be found. I was VERY tempted to tell him what an idiot he was at this point but since this was only the second day thought I should be more supportive and so made some appropriate comments about ‘how it could happen to anyone’ etc whilst secretly thinking what a bloody twat he was and that I wasn’t going to let the remaining set anywhere near him. I was quite grateful that I took this approach because as we got back into the car with heavy hearts I reached into my pocket and found Andy P’s car keys which I then remembered I had taken out of the ignition when I had taken over the driving. I thought of exclaiming ‘there they are’ and reaching down under the seat but decided that owning up was the best policy, much to Andy’s delight, and he tucked that one away to be brought out some time in the future.

We had gone on-line earlier in the day at a café where we’d stopped for lunch and tried to book into a hostel in Saltburg for the night but it was full so decided to try and find somewhere once we got there. So in the centre of Salzburg Andy asked a young guy, Martin, who spoke perfect English, where we could get access to wifi and he took us back to his apartment and checked out all the hostels for us on his computer (they were all full – nothing like forward planning eh?), and then phoned a camp site to check there was space there. He then walked down the street with us and pointed us on the road we needed to take to reach the campsite. What a great example of helping out complete strangers, an example of hospitality for all of us to think about.

That was ‘Thought for the day’, by Andy Coe!!!

Going to pack up now and spend a couple of hours in Salzburg before heading off to Budapest or Vienna or just down a wee country road if that’s what we want to do.

Cheers for now,

Andy C