Game of Fours

A fellow but competent blogger tagged me in a Game of 4's: a challenge in which 4 questions are provided, to be answered by 4 answers, and then to nominate 4 other bloggers (or vloggers). Thank you, Sonja for providing a most welcome distraction from growing old and moving house and cleaning filthy gas cookers.

The Questions are:
1. What is your favourite food?
2. What are your favourite drinks?
3. Places you've been?
4. Names that you're known by?


Answers 1:

Meatballs Asia Minor style

Gigandes - giant beans

Meatballs and spaghetti

Wild boar balls...

Answers 2:

Planter's Punch 

Red wine....

Answers 3:

Constantinople in case you were wondering

Answers 4:
Oi you
The bottomless pit
Your Royal Highness
Mr Botchit


As virtually no one reads my blog I can safely nominate:

Retired Blogger Richard from Yorkshire

The very lovely gluten free cook on 2 wheels

A cultured musical  Franconian

Ms Wonky Words

Post Brexit North Sea OCD

July 2016: Given the depressing news of 23rd June 2016, I can't keep away from escape routes to the continent.

A short tour of Suffolk took me to Harwich and a ferry trip to Hook of Holland enroute to Brake on the Wese.

I travelled initially with the pensioners motorcycle club. We stayed at the unimpressive Brome Grange Hotel IP23 8AP.

Somewhere east of Ipswich - a liitle excursion to the River Deben...

and the Ramsholt Arms for lunch

A day later after drying off my clothes following the torrential downpour on the journey back from the Ramsholt Arms to the hotel, I headed to the continent to try out Stena Lines super cruise booze ferry service Harwich to Hook of Holland

A short evening flit to Harwich and some Garmin mis direction later I arrive in time for the evening departure of the Stena Hollandica

Motorcycles accomodated on the main car deck.

Decent size inside cabin

Useful TV with charting of route on channel 23, and

meanwhile on channel K9p, a view of the kennels!

Looking back at blighty.  I check later what SCR means - Selective Catalytic Reduction - a technology ignored by Volkswagen

Looking forward to Hook of Holland 

 Egress from the Hollandica was straightforward and onward travel to Brake am Wese hindered only by a Garmin gps lock up and manual navigation around Amsterdam.  The Garmin whilst displaying a map and route started counting distance backwards showing my destination receding...

I went fresh and drank my capuciino al fresco in the drizzle

No sooner had I arrived in Wese upthe Brake or whatever, Mrs N. decided that we should spend some time on an island in the German Bight.  I had just read Erskine Childers classic The riddle of the sands and seen the corresponding movie Bei Nacht und Nebel with the lovely Jenny von Agutter so was keen too.   Due to the short notice and lack of pre planning we could not go to a nice island so went to Helgoland instead.

The route to Helgoland with a duck under the Wese

At Cuxhaven we just missed the slow boat so Mrs N secures the last 2 places on the jet service

We have waiting time to explore the Cuxhaven dockside accoutrements.

Invaluable wind information for vessels headed for Bremerhaven.

The jet arrives, and I wonder about Limassol

I am comforted that the Limassol registered vessel has a Greek (Cypriot) style boarding routine

The weather at Helgoland is sunny and we ascend the bomb crater to take in the views

This is the bomb crater resulting from the British trying to remove this former German Naval base and munitions dump from the map WW1

Interesting topography

This path forms a circular route around the island - about 1.5 hours walk

Guano generators prevail

We were quite glad to leave Helgoland especially as all the restaurants were closed for lunch.

I was told off for saying moin moin.

On arrival at Cuxhaven we decided to explore the dockland area where we had eaten some years ago.

Cuxhaven - Sea food restaurant revisited  - sadly in its last year as the owners are retiring

German ocean liners used to depart from here

Further to sea food (rather a lot) we explored the beach side area where Mrs N had stayed some years ago.

Iced coffee glee

clutching at clouds

Magic ocean going ships pass yards away from canoodling couples

sun set over the beach baskets

This is Mrs N's home from home at Brake.  Bicycles are complimentary.

I have lost the pictures of the return leg from Ijmuiden to Newcastle. To be concluded....

jhgjgjfv

Going Nadgery up Offa's Dyke

Greetings!

First off what does nadgery mean? It seems that to nadger is to (quoting some spurious internet source) "Of software or hardware (not people), to twiddle some object in a hidden manner, generally so that it conforms better to some format. For instance, string printing routines on 8-bit processors often take the string text from the instruction stream, thus a print call looks like
jsr print:"Hello world"
The print routine has to "nadger" the saved instruction pointer so that the processor doesn't try to execute the text as instructions when the subroutine returns."

Secondly what and where is Offas Dyke?

It's a sort of ditch built along the Welsh / English border for 177 miles in the 8th Century by the then parody of Donald Trump, Offa Dump to protect from raids on Mercia from Powys. Offa's Dyke is now classified as a National Trail and takes one through changing landscapes offering amazing opportunities to catch a view of native wildlife and Welsh people. In practice the dyke looks like this in cross section:

And the point of all this is?

Back in June, Martin organised a motorcycle excursion over 2 days to follow the route of Offas Dyke as closely as possible. He sent us all a route named "nadgery" as well as a non nadgery version.

I was expecting to see this.

This is the complete dyke

I joined what was remaining of the group on Saturday night at Montgomery - I therefore completed the  nadgery ride north to the Welsh coast at Prestatyn

Montgomery - The Dragon Hotel - I rode down from Knutsford to meet up with he main group who had started earlier from Chepstow.  We stayed here and started off early Sunday morning

Montgomery - border outpost town

View from the garret - beautiful countryside

Some old blokes having a nadgery off road adventure, but only just

Horsehoe Pass, the Ponderosa cafe

The end of the road at Prestatyn

A commemorative rock...in the rain.