21st September 2016. Röttingen, Germany.

The first thing we did today was cycle into town for ice cream and cake.  We were so late getting there it was almost lunch time so we ended up having a filled roll to start with.  The smiley lady was serving again and she remembered us.  When I asked her if there were any vegetarian rolls she asked whether we’d like her to make a mozzarella and tomato roll.  It was gorgeous!

When we’d finished eating Darren decided to take a leaf out of Mark’s book and suggest that I should go in and choose the ice creams.  After a lot of persuading I finally went in and tried to decide which flavours he’d like.  I ordered eine kugel (I hope that means 1 scoop!) of the apricot ice cream and zwei kugeln for Darren.  I wasn’t sure which flavours to choose for him and when I asked for the cookie ice cream the lady mentioned that he had had that one yesterday, which I thought was very nice of her so I was able to choose something he hadn’t tried before.  She even checked with him later to make sure she’d remembered correctly and was thrilled to find that she had.

We cycled round the town to make sure we hadn’t missed anything.  We discovered the Paracelsus-Gärtchen up by the fortified wall.

We cycled back along a different path and found more ornate sundials, we eventually came to an open area by the water and startled a heron which flapped further up the river.  Naturally I had to stop to take some photos!

When we got back to the van Darren did some work and I sat in the shade of the van and resized some photos, I’ve done very little on the blog for the last few days.

The three other motorhomes were German, one of the vans was a pretty van and it was very old.   One of our neighbours had a collie and there was a cute spaniel in the van next door but one to us.  It was funny watching the two dogs as they kept popping over to see each other whenever their owners weren’t looking.  The collie was very much in love and he sat with his head on his paws with a soleful look on his face as he stared over to his love!  Every so often he would give a little whine.  His owner was sitting on a seat next to him reading.

She wandered past on her way to her motorhome and I pointed to her dog and said “Awww!” as he whined.  I’m glad I spoke because she came over and we had a nice long chat about where we both came from.  The mystery of flag on the satellite dish was answered, they live in Ghent but they’re both German.

They’ve been caravanning since their children were little and when the children left home they went off for a year’s trip and now they just go home for a couple of months each year.  What a wonderful life.  She also mentioned that the ticket we’d bought for the stellplätze had a pull off bit on the bottom and that was a money off voucher to use in the local shops, she told us we could use as many of the vouchers as we wanted in one transaction, what a great idea.

In the evening we walked back into the town to a restaurant we’d noticed the day before.  It was lucky we went in reasonably early because by the time we had finished our meal the place was heaving with people.  The food was lovely, the owner/waiter was the tractor driver with the dog from the previous day!