Friday 20th July the Black Forest

Today was meant to involve less driving, a quick hour and a half to near Baden Baden and the Black Forest but the weather turned British on us!
We spent an hour having a quick driving tour of Wurtzberg to see some sights, then a detour back into town for some pastries followed by some circular routes out of town then back again for cheap fuel, down the wrong way down a one way street then finally we were off.
We realised that the heavy rain was not a passing shower so we stopped at Ikea for a break, free toilets, free kids food & hot drinks -yeah! gotta love the Ikea famile karten.
We picked up a few "essentials" before discovering that even Ikea do not take visa, had to send Rich back to the van for cash while they rescanned everything on another till.
We then decided to buy some pasta & sauce from the food shop but the till there was closed so back to the main tills to queue again - joy.
BUT they did have kids films playing so they got to watch Madacascar 2 followed by the Muppets both in German while waiting for us! They may not have understood the words, but after almost a week of no TV this was heaven.
At Ikea we had a serious discussion about the kids behaviour & how we were heading for Europa park soon and made a pact that they had to get smiley faces for every part of every day or there would be no Europa park.  Since that moment we have had happy families all round!! love a bit of bribery.

We finally arrived at our cool camping spot near Stuttgart in the heaving rain and set up camp. For the first time we put up the awning, not to sleep in but as a shelter from the rain!! its huge without the bedrooms in, space for a dining room and lounge! OK so place for the table and the chairs :0)

We managed to get everything out and finally feel organised for the first time since we left home.
Kids played in the playpark, Rich wandered around town while I cooked curry and pasta (forgot the rice!) plus we toasted the old cheese sandwiches from lunch, we even had pudding as we'd been so well behaved!!
Banana custard for us , toasted jam sandwich (lunch again) for Edward and fried bananas with syrup for Amelie (Brownies recipe!)
After feasting we headed into town for an evening drink, it was lovely but regretted it when I needed the loo at 3am in the rain!


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