Financial Difficulties
Another day. I’d half toyed with going out for the day with PlasmaWave, who I’d met the previous day, but ultimately I just fancied a bit of a random wander with no agenda, so I apologised and went back to sleep for a while. I’d decided to try a walking route in the village of Grolloo.
I made a half-hearted attempt at the hotel breakfast again. It hadn’t improved at all from previous days. No reason why it should, I guess.
And then I decided I needed to approach the subject of last night’s credit card failures. First I tried to go pay the bill at the hotel reception. It seemed wise to try to fix the problem quickly. Neither of my cards worked at their front desk either, so that was troubling. So next I tried my bank’s online chat line to see if they could see what was happening. Their feedback was that there was nothing wrong with my cards. They could see the hotel had attempted to make charges but they’d errored for some reason. They couldn’t say why. So their advice was to try using the cards somewhere else. OK.
The first “somewhere else” was an ATM in the hotel lobby. I was able to use my debit card to withdraw enough cash to pay last night’s restaurant bill. Plus a bit extra. The second “somewhere else” was filing my car up with petrol at the first station I saw, and paying with the credit card. That worked too. OK, so nothing wrong then. My credit is good.
Home of the Blues
Grolloo was a few miles out of town, hence the reason I was passing a fuel station. It’s home to the apparently legendary 60’s Dutch blues band Cuby + Blizzards. “Never heard of ’em” I hear you say. Nor had I. They were proverbially big when I was little, having played with the likes of Van Morrison, John Mayall and Alexis Korner back in the day. One of them later joined a Dutch band I have heard of – Golden Earring.
Anyway, Grolloo, a quiet little village in more or less the middle of nowhere, is where Cuby + Blizzards were founded in 1964.
It was a quiet enough village that the only place I could see to park off the street was at the pub. I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome, so I went inside and asked whether I could leave my car there for a few hours. The barmaid’s considered answer was “meh”, or the Dutch equivalent thereof. They weren’t bothered. It was lunchtime on a Friday, after all.
On my radar was the “Hij deze al ?” series – 39 trads following a series of farm roads.
Get on with it
For some reason, the series numbering started at the far (western) end from Grolloo, in a place where there is nowhere to park. So I joined the proverbial party at #22 and walked round in number order, which was anti-clockwise (Hot potato, orchestra stalls, Puck will make amends).
They were probably the easiest and well maintained series I’ve done in a while. Some were just wooden boxes screwed to a tree. The others were resting on the floor or attached with cable ties. All of them were, though, bleedin’ obvious from some distance. I can’t help but think that in the UK they wouldn’t last more than a couple of days.
The walking was also kind of easy. It was flat (well, it’s the Netherlands, innit) and it was mainly along farm roads. When I say that, you might imagine a rutted messy, uneven route with a big hump in the middle. No. It was tarmaced. And it was very nicely tarmaced, in fact. No cracks, potholes, or anything. There was one small bit that was a concrete cycle path, but even that had a perfect service (but no caches, for some reason). So progress was swift. I passed a few other cachers and at one point I was caught up by a cycle-borne gentlemen from Germany who was a massive fan of Arminia Bielefeld. He stayed with me for 3-4 cacxhes before cycling off, as I was going way slower than him..
I caught up with him again back in the village, where he was finishing off the set of adventure labs. The bonus for those was a cracker.
Anyway, a nice walk around in reasonable weather. And another random encounter with a random cacher.
His Royal Highness
The evening festivities consisted of a celebratory “wear something orange” event up in the town centre. Having taken the bus last night I decided I’d just walk up on this evening. The weather had cleared up and it was lovely, as you can tell from the two fantastic sunset shots on this page.
The event was basically just a big street gathering at the end of one of the canals in town. So here I bumped into a few UK cachers I know, and Petra from Cologne (again) and the same German gentleman from Bielefeld.
They’d promised a pub crawl after the event, but in actual fact there was no crawl. They’d just set a new series of labs outside ten of the town’s more notorious drinking establishments. After the event everyone just sort of wandered off. That was slightly disappointing as I was looking forward to maybe exploring a few bars in a group, but never mind. I did the labs, and went back. That makes it sound quick, but it wasn’t really. The centre of town was absolutely heaving (Friday night, and King’s Day tomorrow), so everyone was out. As it was a beautiful night, they were all outside. And there was a stage with live bands in the middle of town too. So getting through those crowds took a while.
Anyway, I finished the labs and walked back to the hotel. I hadn’t eaten much, but I also wasn’t really hungry, so I didn’t bother with much. Anyway, I’d got plans for the morning.
