Castle Donington, United Kingdom

Now before we start talking about HUBB-UK and Horizons Unlimited, we need to catch up with our visit to Belgium. Originally, we had planned to doing Anzac Day (25 April – for those readers who don’t know when Anzac Day is) at the Menin Gate, at Ypres Belgium. Sadly, we didn’t make that deadline, but we were definitely going to visit Ypres before we headed across La Manche (aka The Channel).

We first visited Ypres in 2000, on our first trip to Europe, and it was a wet & cold September day and the Menin Gate ceremony was almost deserted! This time, when we went to the Last Post at the Menin Gate, it was packed! For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about – Buglers from the Belgium Fire Brigade play the Last Post at 8pm, EVERY DAY, at the Menin Gate which is a large Memorial with the names of some 50,000+ Allied soliders who fought and died in the Ypres area during 1914-1917 and have no known grave. The Last Post started in 1928 and has happened every day except for the years that Belgium was occupied during WW2. On this visit, there were five buglers playing, wreaths were laid by a number of organisations and there was a full house. It is heartening to think that the sacrifice made by some many young men has not been forgotten.

After tracking down through Scandinavia, we planned on a few days in Ypres to have a break and we had heaps of fun exploring. We stayed at a campground within walking distance of the Menin Gate and it was very popular with Poms. But we also met a few people who were cycling around Europe. We met a couple from New Plymouth in NZ who were riding bicycles and were on their way to Helsinki. We also met a Queenslander who had cycled from Edinburgh. There are some mad people out there!

Our first day in Ypres, we visited the new Museum in the old Ypres Cloth Hall, which is called “In Flanders Field Museum”. Then in the afternoon, we had the Movie exploration – we visited Hill 60 (as portrayed in Australian Movie “Beneath Hill 60” and we also found a memorial for the location of the Christmas Day Truce in 1914 (“Joyeux Noёl”). Day Two was a visit to Tyne Cot Cemetery, the German Cemetery at Langbroek and the Passchendaele Memorial Museum in Zonnebeke. The museum has been there for a while but they have made a recent addition of reconstructions of Trenches, so you can walk through the Trenches, looking at how there were built, the differences between the German and British trenches. It was a fun afternoon – though the great weather helped to make it a good afternoon.

And now it is time to pack the car up (again), drive to catch a ferry (Calais – Dover) and suddenly, we were in the UK! And now it’s time to head to HUBB-UK!

For the uninitiated, HUBB-UK is the meeting held in the UK by the Horizons Unlimited community. Horizons Unlimited is an internet-based group that provides a forum for adventure travellers to share information & experiences, and to research for future travels, as well as meeting fellow-adventurers.

Another person that we met was Ian Coates, who went on a 4 month motorbike trip and returned 14 years later! Apparently his wife didn’t give him up for dead but visited him in various places before returning home and letting him continue his travels! Ian is a lovely Yorkshireman who has quite a thick accent and did all his travels with no maps! That is probably why he took so long to find his way home.

As a result of attending HUBB-UK, and meeting so many people who have done lots of travelling, we received invitations to put our tent up in various fields and backyards, ranging from Cumbria to Yorkshire to Oxford – and that’s not counting invitations to sleep indoors!