Day 1 - Across the Flatlands

The first day of our European road trip. As described yesterday, I (Chris) only found out where I would be going today late last night, when Annie handed me the day's pack. I'm none the wiser for the next set of days - again, I only find out tomorrow's plan later tonight. Fun!

Today we started in Calais near the Euro Tunnel by popping into one of the massive hypermarkets nearby. We're not big shopping people normally, but it's always fascinating to nose round a foreign hypermarket - so many different things!

Then off to the Netherlands - shooting quickly through Belgium - to the first of our explorations. Baarle-Nassau / Baarle-Hertog is a crazy place that Annie has visited before, where (reportedly because of an ancient duke's gambling losses) the borders of Belgium and the Netherlands get well and truly mixed up. We drove from Belgium into the Netherlands, then through a small pocket of Belgium again, with multiple other Dutch pockets (enclaves) within them. If you like maps, it's a fun place. Perhaps the UK being an island gives us a fascination with borders?

On to Fort de Roovere, a restored earthen entrenchment with an award-winning bridge (the Moses Bridge) leading to it. It's a beautiful bridge, and we thought it would be photgraphically interesting - definitely worth looking up if you want to see it. The bridge is designed to be almost invisible from a distance, and is set below the waters reaching just up to the water's surface. Sadly for us, Moses had not parted the waters here today, as the water had crept up and spilt over the top! With no scuba gear, we took a few shots and wandered around this beautiful area, and then headed on...

...to the MediaPark in Hilversum, Netherlands. This amazing building (in the blip) houses the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision with an enormous audio-visual archive. But its exterior was what we were here for, waiting until the sun had set to capture it at its brightest. The facade of the building is a screen of coloured relief glass depicting famous images of Dutch television. Finally, time to head on to the hotel, as it started to rain heavily on us...

...and so, in our hotel in Teuge (Netherlands) to find out what tomorrow has in store for us.