Sunday, July 26
Travel time: 5 hours 30 minutes
Distance: 485km
Destination: The Hague
I’ve always felt German hotel breakfasts to be severely underrated. French breakfasts aren’t much more than a croissant, a few preserves and some underwhelming coffee; Danish smorgasbords are heavy on pastry and cheese but lack variety; the great British fry-up is a nice treat every now and then, but ruins you if you let it become a habit. German breakfasts can be slightly stodgy but are usually well balanced: a mix of bread rolls, cheese, meats, eggs, fresh fruit and yoghurt. There is, as ever in Germany, far more than you can eat; our hostess takes one look at me and the boys and suggests that two breakfasts will be ample for the three of us, which proves to be more than accurate, so the whole spread costs us just €10 each, which after a week in Iceland feels like insultingly good value. We grab a few pieces of fruit and a bottle for the journey, pay up and head down the road.
The last leg of the journey is long, dull and uneventful, like the hobbits’ homecoming in The Return of the King. The traffic builds as we get past Bremen and bottlenecks at the intersection of two motorways, thanks to the absurdly tight German slip roads. The inevitable roadworks as we approach the Dutch border don’t detain us for long and the crossing itself is mercifully free of the theatrics we had to endure in the other direction. At our lunch stop, just beyond Bremen, it starts to rain, and the drizzle continues intermittently as we cross the Netherlands. It reminds me of coming back to Glasgow from holidays on the continent, when Scotland invariably welcomed us home with grey skies and showers, and we understood that the T-shirts were about to be stowed in a drawer for the next 10 months. Or my longest ever solo road trip, a 12-hour, 1,000km marathon down from Sweden when the skies broke on the last leg, just as my brain started melting. The only good thing to come out of that journey was that I’ve never been tempted to try it again.
By the time we get to Utrecht the rain has become truly torrential: the spray from the road is as dense as fog and the water batters the roof of the car, washing away the Icelandic soil accumulated during 2,500km of driving. It sweeps away the magic of Iceland, drowns out the call of whimbrels and blurs the vision of humpback whales rising gracefully over the waves, giving them the the fragile, dream-like quality of all memories. But as we reach The Hague the skies clear, and by the time I finally pull up in the customary space outside our front door, the sun is out, the ground is dry and the temperature is a very amenable 20 degrees.
I get out, stretch my legs, unlock the door and carry the bags across the threshold. Back to real life, back to settled routines. I want to linger a little, to savour the memories while they’re still sharp. But first, I have to make a shopping list.
