Summer 2019: Europeade Germany and France

Background

Early July is hot and sunny, and we spend time in the garden at home getting it tidy and in order again. We dig up the old (and dead) heathers in the very top rockery bed and plant an entirely new bed of 20 winter flowering heathers. The yucca plant produces a formidable flower, 7-foot-high, after 7 years of waiting. It is a white phantom covered in about 70 or 80 white bell flowers… what a spectacle.

We spend the weekend of 6th and 7th of July at Drax Sports club in Yorkshire, in the shadow of the gentle giants (the 12 cooling towers of Drax power station) in two days of difficult and demanding English dancing with workshops during the day and an evening dance on Friday and Saturday nights.

We return home and spend the week of 8th July cleaning and packing the Hymer motorhome for a four-week road trip by camper to Germany and France.

We are part of an English Folk Dance group that is travelling to Germany to take part in a European Folk Festival, Europeade that is held this year in the small town of Frankenberg on the river Eder in Germany.  After the folk festival we will visit friends in Germany, then travel to France where we plan to explore sites associated with William the Conqueror before moving on the Brittany to meet our son and his family who will be taking a holiday in a country house set in a small village.

We expect to be away for about 4 weeks, as usual we have booked our outward travel, for this trek it's Eurotunnel from Folkstone to Calais; we don't normally book a return crossing so that we have flexibility. That means we can extend our stay or come home early.

On the individual pages you'll find a map of our route each day, taken from google Timeline plus photographs of the most interesting things, a description of where we stayed overnight with details of the type of location and cost.