The trip - number four, the final one

Note: To read Susanne and Crosby's spin on the trip you can click here.

The Island Town of Lindau

Our last trip was to Lindau - a town built on an island in Lake Constance, which is partly in Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

I was now in the full grips of the 'flu, and would have loved to have stayed in bed ... but we had had to pay for this optional trip at the beginning of the tour because of low numbers. So I sat around in a beautiful park while the others explored the small town with its various tourist attractions.

Endless beautiful scenery



One way and another, we saw lots of Alpine scenery.

Knowing how boring motorway travel can be, our driver took us through a lot of smaller streets through the villages.

Time to go

Finally it was time for the long drive back to the ferry. To avoid too long a trip - and possibly missing the ferry - on the Sunday, we drove closer to Calais, and stayed in a motel in Brussels rather than the Liege hotel.

It was on the outskirts of town, in the industrial area. And there was obviously no rule about not smoking in the rooms. After dinner in the squeezy overcrowded restaurant where the fat greasy chef handled our food with chubby fingers in full view of the diners ... and then a night of coughing into my tiny smokey pillow ...

it was good to get back on the ferry the next day and head home!

Shearing was once again very efficient, shunting passengers and baggage onto appropriate feeder buses with the minimum of fuss. However, a few kilometres down the road we came up against one of the other buses by the side of the road, broken down. A few of the passengers got off and joined our bus.

We had spoken to the driver, asking if when we got to Norwich he could drop us off just out of town near our place - no detour required - to save us paying six quid for a taxi to bring us back to the same spot. He gave us a very gruff, unfriendly reply.

However, at the end of the day, after several unscheduled detours delivering people from the broken-down bus close to their homes, he was quite happy to do as we asked when the time came.

And we happily trundled our little red and blue cases down the road to our Victorian terrace ...

There, just inside the door, a pile of letters

including Peter's application for a British drivers licence, returned, AGAIN!

It was nice to be back in our own bed ... even if we did have to go to work the next morning.