The Dutch Mountains

The terracing can just be made out, perhaps.
Gulpen, is in Limburg and the area known as the Dutch Mountains because of the slight hills that discriminate this area from the rest of this dead-flat country. The Osebos campsite is actually terraced to take the small slope into account.

It's hot, 30°C, and a good plan might be to catch the bus into Gulpen and slowly consume some of that beer for which the town's brewery is famous. However the campsite reception had leaflets from 3 different camping shops within a few miles of here, all of which looked large. So it's shopping time.

The first shop was excellent and gave us several ideas but we went on to the second and then the huge one in Brunssum. This was by far the biggest outdoor shop we've seen, easily dwarfing the local Go Outdoors here in Southampton. Yet, somehow it lacked the Aladdins Cave quality of the shop in Margraten. Still €12.99 for a 10m power lead was good - we discovered the 15m one we already have was a bit short for some sites so now we have 25m capability. A few other bits and time to rush back to Gulpen for a quick cuppa and tidy-up before heading back to a few miles from here to meet our friends in Landgraaf.

A lovely evening - thanks Chantal for the excellent home cooked Indonesian food. It was great to meet up again. We'd met Chantal last September when running an amateur radio station from Sumburgh lighthouse on Shetland but hadn't seen Jos since he accompanied Chantal on the radio expedition to the Falklands a couple of years ago. Great company and really nice to meet their children Jens and Runa (is that correct?). In fact the company was so good that we left it until the very last minute and it was a race against time to get back to the campsite before curfew at 10pm. We made it with a couple of minutes to spare!