Wednesday 22nd of June Brake to Leer
Having suffered through the art of showering in the confines of our small motor home shower with the curtain clinging to every wet part of your body we ventured into Brake township. For a town supporting a shipping industry it is quite small but pretty. They will sell you a postcard but you need to travel to a bigger town to find someone to sell you a stamp. The next village we came to have a store that sold stamps but like France they closed for lunch from 12.30 to 2.30. It amuses me that during the busiest part of the day when you could do a lot of trade they are shut. The next day I found a store that was half stationery and half Post office, just as I approached the counter the person decided to take a break, bit like Roger approaching supermarket checkouts. However, luckily for me, the stationery lady who wasn’t on a break didn’t want to deal with English person and called the other person back from their break.
In Europe your number plate has the EU symbol of stars and your country’s abbreviation. The number plate starts with an abbreviation of the town it is registered to and then your actual registration number. Therefore in Brake most cars have BRA followed by the rego number which is normally 2 letters and 3 numbers. As we walked around I looked for a number plate that had BRA. KE and couldn’t find one until we saw one driving out of a supermarket as we were driving in so I missed the photo opportunity.
Getting low on supplies we went to the supermarket which was an Aldi, very similar to a Lidl. If you aren’t 
familiar with these supermarket chains they can be quite dispiriting. Having used them in previous European holidays we had experienced food rationing before. Aldi and Lidl are budget supermarkets; the stores are small and only shelve goods at low heights sometimes not even on shelves just straight from pallets. The prices are cheap but the selection is limited. So limited that it appears they get a pallet of stock in, say gherkins, they unload the whole pallet in the store as if they have no storage out the back.
Any goods that are diminishing in number get thrown into bulk bins by the door for quick sale. As we have been unable to buy fly spray we are unsure if it’s because no stock has arrived or whether flies are a protected species. Maybe when the 1,000 jars of bottled frankfurters sell they will be replaced by fly spray. More interesting is some of the things they sell like clothing, garden equipment etc but yet you can’t buy some staple food items. I can’t imagine going home to tell the cat that she can’t have cat biscuits this month because of post war rationing but she can have pickled frankfurters.
Stocked with rations we were ready to get in some serious motor-homing and take the GPS off motorways and get back to country life, small towns and sedate driving. 
Our bus back home would love this country side, not a hill in sight, 100s of mile of flat arable land. However the old bus wouldn’t be able to cope with narrow streets, cobbled surfaces, pedestrians, bikes, buses and random cars coming from all directions without a care in the world and no sense of fear or road rules.
We saw some lovely canal towns and settled for Leer which had free parking in a town public car park and most motor home facilities. We went for a walk along the promenade which had the usual cafes, teenage louts, rowing club, geocaches, canal boats etc.
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Leer RC Single heading off 
Modern architecture
The old and the new