Langos via leipzig: Eten, Drinken & Slapen

For years I have been praising the functionality and efficiency of bus transport in Australia and elsewhere. Buses rule! From Victoria Coach Station, London, we took the National Express to Cheshire for £6.00 a piece. Enroute to Cheshire we had two coach stops: a fifteen minute coffee break and a 30 minute lunch break. And a smooth as silk ride. The entire jaunt took 4 hours, faster than a flying hire car out of London. Faster than the other option: public transport to Heathrow, followed by a flight to Manchester, and a maxitaxi to Cheshire. And, certainly, as cheap as chips.

We arrived to pick up our motorhome: calm, smiling, relaxed. Dumb to do otherwise. We filled our little motorhome with our stuff, dumped our empty duffel bags with friends, and shipped ourselves off for our first night’s camp on a rural farm high on the gloomy moors just a couple of miles out of Leek: in cold, bleak, misty-wet, soft, moor-like weather. We love the English moors: the moodier the moors, the more Sir Arthur Conan Doyle they are to me.

Once we’d caught up with our friends we headed off to Holland. Enroute, we spied asparagus in season. Thin, green British asparagus in bunches as big as a fist. To eat these for lunch in Cambridge, in a restaurant overhanging the Cam, cost £7.50 a person. Naught else to accompany it.

Just a few kilometers out of Cambridge, enroute to Harwich (pron: Har-ritch) to catch the ferry to the Hook of Holland, we found them perfect, green and snappy fresh, in an organic farmyard sale for £3.50 a large bunch. That night Pete flashed just half a bunch in a fry pan with hot butter and topped it with shaved parmesan, and that fed three of us as a vegetable. To die for. A bargain.

This is such a time of year to arrive in Europe. In Holland, on our first day, the asparagus was white, not green. I have been so looking forward to it. This has become an annual pilgrimage almost, finding the early white asparagus. Thick as the biggest thumb, but longer, fresher, crispy-crunch-fresh, and sold as a main course special in Wonder’s Eten and Drinken restaurant in the town of Bergen as soon as they get it. What a lunch! The Dutch really know how to serve freshly harvested asparagus. It comes topped with delicious slices of salted parma ham, three tiny jars of accompanying melted butter, snipped parsley and chopped boiled eggs, along with a side dish of tiny new potatoes in warm parsley butter. €15.00--and yumptious.

Tonight I noticed a restaurant just down the road from where we are camping that advertises Eten, Drinken and Slapen! But, I can see that our motorhome pressure cooker is on steaming with chicken doused in red wine: a discarded plonk vintage from a superstore in England that I refused flatly to drink. It is now being used as a stock. Frugal Pete. I had thought that having tried out the Eten & Drinken place for lunch I was wont to find out what the Slapen was. But, not tonight, Josephine!