Dijon and Geneva - Monday 30th August 2010

What a sleep that was! And to wake up in another country and feel rested for the day ahead was just brilliant!
The trip today took us from Saint Quentin to Geneva, Switzerland via Dijon. Google told us that it would take about 6 hours to get there and that the trip would be 401 miles.
These are good distances we thought to be travelling. Anna had found it hard being in the heat of Cyprus earlier in the year and she didn't know how being 6 months pregnant would effect her being in the car for so long.

The Toll roads were once again kind to us and we reached Dijon in good time. I've been to this great town before as a first night stop whilst on my stag do with my brother and two friends.
We parked in the station car park and took a short walk into town. Since my last visit the town has started massive building works everywhere so we skipped some of the nice bits due to the bulldozers, diggers and scaffolding and headed into the town centre.

We moseyed about for a while searching for a couple of Geocaches before stopping at a cafe under an archway for a savoury crepe for lunch. We waited out a passing rain cloud and then headed back to the car. We stopped off to look at the incredible town hall that is more of a palace than anything in the UK, it was just outstanding!

Back in the car and south we flew. We weren't staying in Geneva itself becasue i am incredibly stingy and didn't want to pay out three times as much as the hotel we had. We stopped at the Hotel IBIS in Archamps, just outside the City and on the French side of the border.
Once again, the room was very clean and had a lovely view towards Lake Geneva, the only drawback was that the motorway was in the way.

We shifted all the stuff from the car and into the room and set off looking at the sights of Geneva and attempting to find some food to keep us going. We arrived a little too late for the shops were closing as we arrived and got into the city centre. We had a wander about, looking at all the closed museums and churches. I thought to myself that i'd like a good couple of days here to really get to know the place and actually visit some of the many galleries and blow a large quantity of cash on watches for me and handbags for her,... we can dream right!??!

Anyway, enough day dreaming, up comes my most stupid idea of the whole holiday. I thought that i would be great fun to explore the harbour and go to see the huge fountain that erupts like a geyser from the lakeside. So off we trotted, it took a little longer to get there than anticipated. We walked out onto the pier and up to the fountain, MASSIVE! that's what it was, it was really tall! we kept walking out to a lighthouse at the very end of the harbour wall and looked back. Horror had stuck us as the wind had changed direction. The fountain which was once blowing out onto the lake was now blowing back onto the wall where we had just walked. Vast quantities of water which i couldn't even guess as to the amount were plummeting onto the path in front of us, trapping us by a lighthouse, far from shore.

Only one thing to do i thought, RUN FOR IT! So, we did, and got soaked. Anna was not happy with me. We were both tired, now soaked and very hungry. We couldn't even change at the car because all of the spare clothes were in the hotel. Nothing for it now, lets splash out i thought.
MCDONALDS!

A dirty burger and some fries later, we were on our way back into France and to the warmth and dry of our hotel room.

More Sleep :D

Saint Quentin, France - Sunday 29th August 2010

Another trip in the car to mainland Europe I'm afraid for our latest holiday abroad. This trip will take us south, through France, into Switzerland and Italy, then back out through Austria, Liechtenstein, more Switzerland, Germany, Luxemburg, Belgium then back into France for the last leg home to the UK; all with a boot full of luggage and a pregnant wife on board!
The plan is to do the trip in 9 days so, LET'S GET STARTED!

Day one for us started at around noon with our now well travelled Skoda. I finished early from work and we had already packed the car so we headed straight off and blasted our way to the Channel Tunnel. The aim of the afternoon's drive was to get to Saint Quentin, Picardie, a town about two hours from Calais so a nice and easy first leg of the journey to get us to 'The Other Side' without having to wake up mega early and have a very long drive on the next leg (to Geneva).

The mid afternoon drive was outstanding through France. The road was clear and the sun was lovely and warm as we drove steadily along the E15 and the E17, south to our destination. 
Google told us that this leg of the trip would take us 4 1/2 hours and it was 245 miles in distance. 

To be fair, it probably took us about this amount of time, stopping for the occasional toll booth and rest stop. It wasn't long before we arrived at the Campanile, St Quentin. This roadside motel didn't look much from the outside and was quite small from the outside but it was very clean, had internet access with the room and was very comfortable. I think if we plan another journey out this way, this place is an ideal overnight stop.


We unpacked the valuables into the hotel room and took the car into town. It was getting gloomy at this point and in true Sweeney Family style, the rain clouds had moved in over our heads. Being on holiday and annoyingly stubborn, i'd refused to wear trainers and trousers (being still summer) so i was sporting sandals and 3/4 length trousers. The footwear i would very much regret later on. 

The town of St Quentin is very nice indeed. It has a large town square with a beautiful town hall, loads of places to eat and quite an impressive church, all of which were closed to the public due to the late hour. The only option was to grab something to eat at a local pub / pizza parlour. What a lovely place it was too! It always makes me a bit nervous when continental drinking establishments are called 'Pubs' but this one was great. The food was awesome, the waiters were fast and even the local gendarmes came in (in uniform) for a beverage, something not seen in the UK for a good number of years!


After food a wander back to the car through the soaked market place led me to stub (and take most the end off) my big toe. Classy Andy, very classy, another holiday with a painful foot.... A quick bandage and drive back to the hotel followed and then sleep, a very deep sleep.

Cyprus - Wednesday 12th May 2010.

The morning today began by an enormous amount of eating. We had to work through as much leftover food as we could before we had to leave at 10am. There was no option to take anything from the refrigerator with us as anything that required cooling would be at a million degrees well within the six hours it took us to book into Villa Klouni for our second week.

The melon (named Tara as she was unable to come) was swiftly eaten, and I even managed some more ice cream. Most of the food was binned to be fair.

We were ready, packed and out of the house for 0955hrs, winner.

Gaz and Janey were due at the airport for about 1630hrs so we had almost a full day’s worth of last minute sight seeing to do.

The plan was to stop off at the Limni Jetty (just down the road from the house). It was out most elusive cache and we had failed to find it about three times over the week. With a little help from the cache owner (via Goldy) we found it within minutes, genius hiding place!

The day passed quite quickly. We took in Kourion, the chariot race track and the Sanctuary of Apollo with a spot of expensive (and beige) lunch at Avdimou Beach at the Malanda restaurant. I love this beach so much. It is typically our ‘last day’ beach and is really still and relaxed. If there was a place that I could go, live in a hut and sit about all day in my pants, this would be it.

We drove back towards the airport and stopped of at the Birthplace of Aphrodite, a giant rock on the beach which is said to be one of Zeus’s balls from which Aphrodite burst. In reality it looks like a headland which had been made into a small island by the tides and waves of the Mediterranean or and erratic rock.

After this stop we said goodbye to Gaz and Janey. They are excellent travelling companions and would love them to stay for a second week! Also, Gaz seems to be good at this writing lark

Cyprus - Sunday 9th May 2010

We got up and went to a drive today to grab some Geocaches. We managed to get four of them today.

We drove out to our local dam at Evretou. The dam is named after a small village that we visited later on in the day. As dams go it was fairly unimpressive.  It’s not like the Mohne Dam in Westphalia or the series of dams outside Brecon. These are massive brick built emplacements designed to stand out and be a marvel of architecture and engineering. This one at Evretou was a little more subtle, overgrown and rocky. Oh well, each to their own. . There was no cache here but the area was nice and a good visit all the same. The water on the lake side looked very inviting and quite clear.

The dam was a mild disappointment – I’d been hoping for some sort of epic, but it was actually more or less a road over the end of a (very large) pond. Some very nice rugged scenery though.

There was a cache we were looking for at the other end of the lake to the south and on the way we logged a few.

The first one we snagged was at a church called St Aikaterini. It was a classic Greek Orthodox style church that was locked up so we were unfortunately not allowed to enter. It always surprises me how much litter is left laying around, even at religious sites.

The church was very pretty and quite rural, with an ornamental bell in the grounds. Shame the wall paintings outside were so faded/damaged.

Our next stop was at a random chapel in the middle of nowhere that we could only have found with the help of a Geocache. The small one roomed chapel was on the side of a valley along a very narrow single tracked concrete road with, at some points, a sheer drop to certain death – just how we like it *gulp*.

Inside the chapel were painted icons of holy people and candles, oils and other religious paraphernalia.

Being as we were in the following car, we had absolutely no idea where we were off to down the tiny dirt track. So to turn up in a steep valley (with a fairly serious drop-off) at a tiny church was actually quite a surprise. It was a nice little place – and to be honest, not being religious I find simple places like this one much more interesting than massive cathedrals and the like. This is where the real people go, not some gold-encrusted palace populated by bishops in hats a mile high.

Hunger started to set in soon after this cache and we went up to the town of Simou. The town is very small but has a large church and a school. The only place that looked open to eat was called “Pomegranate”. It was open (but unfortunately had a private party going on) I spoke with the owner “Kevyn” and we all looked hungry and tired. Much to our surprise he let us stay for some drinks so we stopped outside at a table and sipped away at our much needed beverages. Soon after he brought out possibly the best plate of chips I have ever eaten. They were very obviously hand cut and very fresh. The man is a Geordie Legend and EVERYONE should go to his place to get food. (Thursdays and Saturdays I think)

Kevyn was a top bloke indeed, even if he does spell his name in the most absurd way possible. As was the bloke who’s private party it was, who looked a bit like Richard Branson. Even though we’d crashed it he happily came out and said hello.

Simou was otherwise pretty dead, though there was the fascinating site of a bench that had been placed on a wall 8 feet in the air looking out over some bins. They really like to make their pensioners work for a nice sit-down round there. The large church in the town square also seemed to be hugely out of scale for the size of the village – like plonking St Paul’s down in the middle of a little country hamlet.

Feeling refreshed and happy again we continued our mystery tour and the next place we visited was an ancient bridge. It didn’t go over water anymore, something, probably time’ had shifted the course of the river about 20 meters away. The cache was found, logged and we moved on.

Our last stop of the day was the deserted village of Evretou. This was a Turkish village which had its occupants removed during the mid 70’s. It was now being used to house goats and farm equipment. It was really eerie and it seemed a great shame that the village, which was in a prime location next to the Evretou reservoir, just sitting abandoned.

Weirdly, despite the village only being emptied in the 1970s there seemed to be no roads between any of the houses. And not that the roads were just overgrown – they literally weren’t there and there seemed to be no space for where they might have been. It was very strange – if you’ve ever played “Resident Evil 4”, it’s more or less just like the beginning of that.

We returned home for a leftovers barbeque and at the end of the meal we were attacked (well invaded) by a giant creature that Jane thinks might be a field cricket. He was VERY ugly and a little bit wrong looking.

The terrifying thingy turned out to be a mole cricket, according to Janey’s guide to bugs and thingies. During the barbecue we were also visited by a very stupid cat – stupid because it left precisely before we were actually going to give it some meat.

Cyprus - Saturday 8th May 2010

I’ll start today off, and the main excitement is that today is the day that RICHARD BENNETT will be arriving, so Gaz took the opportunity to poop in his toilet before he gets here. We may yet all follow his example. You never told me this !! boo to you

To be fair, I left it as I found it. Which in this case was with a dead mosquito in the toilet. Though I should add the mosquito simply didn’t flush – I didn’t remove it then gently replace it, like some sort of sacrifice to the temperamental lavatorial gods of Greek plumbing.

It started off quite hazy and overcast this morning but it’s now nearly 10am and it’s starting to clear up, so I’m glad I’ve stayed home as I’m feeling a bit dizzy and weird – I think I had a bit too much sun yesterday and it’s left me a bit woozy – the plan for the others is a geocache trek into the Akamas peninsula to bag the half dozen or so that follow the coastal path beyond the Baths of Aphrodite, but I’ll let them fill you in when they get back.

Thanks Anna. Yes, as Anna said, we went for a trek up the coast of the Akamas peninsula. We drove over to and through Lachi and parked at the watery hole known as the Baths of Aphrodite. As described last time - it is a mossy ridden pit containing an eel and this time had the added bonus of a dead pigeon and some empty condom wrappers, lush! Mint flavoured if I’m not mistaken.

I didn’t know dead pigeons came in flavours?

The first cache took us through the Baths (well the trail, not the water) and up the other side through various types of foliage all labelled. We kept rising along what I can only assume was an ancient trading path over the hills to near the top. We were very glad that the sun was not fully out and it was a bit hazy otherwise we would have all died of heat exhaustion right there. This one was quite cool actually, we had come through the baths and got to the point on the other side and the tool was telling us it was behind us but to the right which yes took us up a hill, it was quite a hike up but it was so cool to see the view when we got there, I’ll drop a picture in this later, worked out where it should be and I saw a glimpse of orange in this bush, looked in and saw the cache, bish bash cache.

Given everyone else has covered what and where, I’ll cover what it was like – lots of hot and a great deal of up.

The cache was bagged and signed up by us all and we then went down the way we came along the E4 footpath following the coastline northward.

The footpath was an unmade road with a loose surface. I thought that the Pimp-Mobile would have been fine along it but we soon got to some incredibly steep inclines, I then re assessed, no matter how cool our car was, I just didn’t want to risk it.

The pimpmobile might have made it, but I doubt the Note would have. Not that it’s a bad car per se, it’s just designed for school runs rather than stunt runs and despite looking quite tall doesn’t actually have much ground clearance. Also, as it had a manual gearbox I think it would have protested quite a lot being revved like mad in first gear for about an hour.

Along the path we snagged a further two caches. One was missing and needed maintenance and the other was very well hidden in an interesting rock formation. Boo Hiss to the missing one but we got to the rock face one and that was a heck of a cache to get to….

The rock face one was very cool as it was literally a ‘rock face’ – it had weathered into essentially a natural Easter Island head.

The day was getting on and the temperature was rising so we decided to head back to the car. We were half way through the water supplies so it seemed sensible. Checked the one that was missing on the way back and found where it “should” have been but decided that it was gone and it needed reporting and carried on.

Let it go, dude. Let it go!

The trail back was more of the same, sweat, pain and a lot of dust. There were a large amount of German hikers going both ways and most of them were elderly, it made me a little ashamed as I was almost ‘done’  from the experience whereas they looked pretty chipper! I think I need to work on my endurance walking and fitness when I get back to the UK. Trail back was bloody hard!! Seriously I’m just not fit, I admit this openly and boy this pushed me and my limits. We got there in the end, I was having major flashbacks of my cadet days starting to resent doing this in the first place but wanted to prove to myself I could do it because believe it or not I was enjoying doing it (yeah I know but I was !!)

Walk back was indeed quite hot, but the occasional sea breeze helped a lot and the views took your mind off feeling tired. Plus on getting back and passing the camp site there’s always the realisation that there’s someone better off than yourself – specifically anyone spending days on end in 30 degree heat under canvas who has to use a portaloo that’s previously been occupied by the aforementioned troop of German tourists. Not that I have anything against Germans, but they do like lots of beer and curries sausages. You can see where I’m going here. Or, rather, you don’t want to see where they’ve been going.

The view from the path of the coast was amazing. The rugged and rocky coastline spread out in front of us with a steep slope down to the sea below. We could see all the way along the bay and in the distance in a bank of haze we could see land where we guessed our house would have been.

There were a number of local lizards en route and surprisingly snails as well. We thought that they must have been pretty ‘hard as nails’ due to them being moist little buggers.

On arriving at the car we headed back to the house and met with Anna and saw how she was. Goldy headed out again to get some internet and to have another look for the Limni Jetty Cache from the other day. Having got the new co-ords for the Limni cache I thought I’d have a look, but alas it appears to also be gone unless I’m just being a numpty about magnetic caches…

I drove back to the Fly Away pub to get some internets and log our finds for the day, got there, logged on, had a refreshing glass of coke and a dirty chilli burger to satisfy my tummy J

Gaz and Janey went out for a small drive to get some bread and have a look at the village of Argaka. – they returned pretty quickly to be fair. The village was tiny and there was not a great deal there.

The bakery was a fabulous little place, with tons of really nice looking home-made stuff. I don’t have a massively sweet tooth so the baklava wasn’t up my alley what with it being made with all the sugar in the known universe (a slight exaggeration, but not far off), but the bread was lovely.

Upon everyone’s return, we received word from RICHARD BENNETT that he was unable to make it out from the UK due to work commitments. He has therefore been branded a loser and I took a ceremonial dump in the toilet that would have been en suite to his room. BENNETT you suck so hard…… got back went for disco nap woke up then had Andy asking me if I wanted a chicken burger that I’d bought on the BBQ went downstairs and was greeted with…..

BENNETT is the gay. Plus I wanted to have a go in the convertible he was allegedly hiring.

Team Fire (just Anna really) started the barbeque and I broke open the meat purchased the day before yesterday. It was a lot bigger than I thought.

We have over two kilos of beef rump steak cut into three strips about a foot long and four inches wide, eight pork cutlets and a load of other burgers, sausage and Stifados. This would have been about right if RICHARD BENNETT had been able to make it out, our mortal bellies however were not able to manage such a feast.

I put two of the beef steaks, five cutlets and two burgers on. Gaz and Janey were in charge of the salad.

When it was ready, it truly was a sight to behold.

The sun was setting, the food tasted great and we were in good company. AMEN to that, even if RICHARD BENNETT was absent…..

MEAT HAPPENED!!!

Tonight we are off to “Fly Again”, a local Irish Pub that “that man” told us not to go to. It is Karaoke night, I’m sure as it is off season we will be the only people there, which will be good.

The Fly Away (Fly Again - someone kept calling it the wrong name all week like a stupider) was as expected and quite a nice place, the owner I think was a German lady, the karaoke compare was called Daz (or Darren) his other half who’s name I forget started the singing, there was a table of three and two other people at the bar, all in all it was Anna, Andy and myself doing most of the singing, just the way we like it, well to a point, good night though, a few bears, an email from HackiB the Geocacher who has placed most of the areas Caches emailed me to say he deleted my comment about the lack of his cache at one of his locations due to a spoiler but he’s going to replace it. I messaged him back asking to confirm the Limni one was actually there because we’re convinced it’s not now….

Christ on all manner of bikes. The Fly Again is the sort of place I see in my nightmares of pikey holiday destinations populated with red-faced idiots in England tops and knotted hankies demanding egg and chips and “none of that foreign muck”. Actually that may have been a bit harsh as it wasn’t rough by any stretch (indeed it wasn’t much of anything, given it was mostly empty) and the staff were very nice, but it was undeniably somewhat naff – especially as the local idea of an Irish pub appears to be nailing any old crap to the ceiling and walls and not selling any local beer. The karaoke was actually fairly enjoyable (to watch – to participate in for me would have been about as much fun as bowel surgery performed by a drunk with a broken hedge trimmer), but you get the impression that everyone bar us, which was basically ex-pats, do that every week with the same songs and probably have done for years now, like some sort of 1970s pop-powered Groundhog Day. The bewildered reaction when Anna sung something by a relatively modern band was palpable. Thankfully, Goldy set things straight with a rousing rendition of the Chas & Dave “classic”, Rabbit. Also, all their arcade machines were switched off L

Bed time now, off to a dam tomorrow and more caches, oh and I’m 2179 miles from home, well the nearest cache near home, it’s gonna be fun looking them up when we get there.