Goodbye Germany, hello England – 31st January to 7th February

We have been a little lax with writing the diary this week, blame it on the adjustment to a working life. Our last entry was from Germany, where we were enjoying the hospitality provided by our friends, the Jakobs. We spent a lovely final day with Gitte and Stefan on the 30th. They took us to Hanau to visit a palace, but it was closed. Instead, we cuddled up to some friendly (and sleepy) bronze lions and took a stroll around the palace gardens. We then went for a walk through the Staadtspark Wilhelmsbad, a veritable winter-playground of frozen lakes and creeks, windmills, and lookouts. We skidded along the frozen ice, walking out to a small island in the middle of the lake, upon which is a pyramid. Fletch declared it the best he had ever seen :) We had a lovely time strolling around the park, enjoying the crisp cold air and the lovely blue sky. Little did we know that this was the last sunshine we would see…


When we had exausted ourselves and Gitte’s dog, we went home. We all had an early start the next morning, us to England and Gitte & Stefan to work, so it was early to bed and early to rise. The 31st was a foggy and very cold day. We caught a train to Frankfurt’s main station and then a bus to the Hahn airport to catch our flight back to Stansted. It was mid-morning when we arrived at Hahn but the fog made everything quite dark. It was only beginning to lift when our plane took off three hours later.

When we arrived in London, it was mid-afternoon. We caught a bus into Oxford Street, where we had to attend to some banking matters. This achieved, we headed for Victoria Station to catch a train to our new home. Commuting via tube and train with backpacks during peak-hour is not an experience we would recommend. Our travel woes were compounded by line-failure near our destination, so we had to hop off the train and catch a bus to the station of East Grinstead, in West Sussex. From there we caught a taxi (having missed the last bus) to a small dot on the map that is known as Wych Cross. It is here, at a 17th century hotel, we will be living for the next few months.

Wych Cross is several miles inside the border of East Sussex and is in the middle of the Ashdown Forest. It is a junction on the A22 motorway and home only to a car-yard, a hotel, and a rose-shop. Oh, and a bus stop. This bus-stop will quickly become our lifeline with the outside world. The hotel is a lovely old building, complete with lovely old building pros and cons. The atmosphere gives an impression of a hunting lodge and has excellent heating but the plumbing leaves something to be desired. Our room is in the oldest part of the hotel and from the road looks quite charming. It is a comfortable space and we have our own en-suite bathroom. All staff rooms are along the road-side, this being the noisiest part of the hotel. However, having come from living on a main road in St. Lucia, the road here is positively peaceful.

Our first day at Wych Cross was taken up with settling in. We started work on our second day. I am working in the hotel’s restaurant and Fletch is manning the bar. At present, the hotel is a bit overstaffed, so our first days of work were very quiet. Several people are leaving around February 16th, so things should settle into a normal routine around then. Our working day is not overly strenuous. I do the breakfast shift, which lasts until 3pm, and Fletch does a split shift across lunch and dinner.

In our free time (Monday & Tuesday being our days off), we have taken a few walks around the neighbourhood. As I mentioned, Wych Cross is in the Ashdown Forest. As the area around Wych Cross is wooded, it took several days for us to discover that the title of forest is misleading: it is only called a forest because the royal family used to hunt there. It is an ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’, aka AONB (the Government’s acronym, not ours), consisting primarily of heathland. It is considered to be the best-preserved heathland in the southeast of England and is the source of some 80 miles of walking tracks. We need to get some maps of the walking paths (and the visitor centre is only open on the weekend, which we didn’t know), so we have thus far stuck a main path that goes through a nearby golf-course and past a llama farm. Today, however, we took the hotel-manager’s two golden Labradors for a walk: more precisely, they took us for a walk. They led us on a path through the woodland – we had no idea where we were but they did and an hour and half later we ended up back at the hotel.

The rest of our day today has been spent decorating our room. The interior is shabby, so we have been hanging bright calendars and the papyri we purchased in Egypt to try and cheer the room up. We’ve managed to get lots of colour on the walls: an alpine scene on one wall, a 1962 Morris Mini 850 in bright blue on the other. The camel that Fletch traded his watch for at Sinai is hanging on one of the other walls, exclaiming ‘Welcome to Egypt’, flanked by papyri. It’s a bit chaotic but does take attention away from the holes and cracks.

BTW, we celebrated our 1.5th anniversary today! We were going to shout ourselves a coffee in East Grinstead to celebrate, but we didn’t have enough money.

Fletch’s tips for new travellers

The Shandy is still a popular drink here in England, unlike Australia where it has fallen out of fashion. I have thus learnt a new thing!

Directions for making a Shandy:

Follow either of these two procedures to make the perfect Shandy

1 Fill glass to half full with lemonade. Top the glass with beer.

2 Fill the glass to half full with beer. Top with lemonade. Become overwhelmed with froth. Look awkward and embarrassed. Pour what is left of the concoction down the sink after much has already spilled on the floor. Get told off by manager for pouring beer down the sink. Use procedure 1. Then mop bar floor…