Trouble at the Castle

Greetings one and all and welcome to the latest instalment of ‘Adventures with Harvey’.  This edition comes to you from the city of Maastricht and is sadly a little light on adventuring for reasons that I will shortly explain.  Yes, Harvey has been up to his old tricks again ☹

Eltz Castle looks spectacular from the outside but that’s pretty much where the good stuff ends.  Most castles in Germany seem to require a guided tour (and often only in German) which means there’s no audio-guide which is popular elsewhere, you usually see only a few rooms and cannot take time to explore and take things in at your own pace.  For no particularly good reason we found this tour quite underwhelming however maybe that’s a symptom of having been spoilt and seeing so many cool old castles and churches on this trip.  Or possibly our opinion is tainted by what happened next.

We were less than 1km down the road from the castle last Friday afternoon when the most horrendous banging noise started coming from Harvey’s engine.  We pulled over immediately and called our mechanic friends in Wales who confirmed that indeed “Houston we have a problem!”.  I’ll give some more technical information at the end regarding the breakdown for those interested but let’s just say that we were advised not to drive Harvey, or certainly as little as possible.  This castle was in the middle of nowhere with no camp sites or other stopping places nearby so the best option seemed to be to ask for permission from the castle to stay in their carpark over the weekend, and then for a day or 2 further once businesses would be open on Monday.  So I got on my bike, explained to the office what had happened, and they said it was fine to stay.  We had plenty of food and water and reasonably empty waste tanks so were good for a few days at least.  It was actually quite a pleasant weekend, there were a couple of other motorhomes staying and we had nice evenings making new friends over a glass of wine or 2.

I spent a good deal of the Sunday on-line looking for anyone within a couple of hundred kilometres who might have some expertise in American engines and be able to help us.  I sent off around 11 e-mails on the Sunday afternoon but by the next afternoon only one had replied.  So I got an on-line translation and re-sent e-mails to the remaining 10, only 2 of whom replied to say they couldn’t help either.  On Tuesday morning we continued our searching and I was preparing to cycle into town to chat with the local motorhome dealer and see if they could help or may have some contacts when things at the castle got nasty.  The manager of the castle asked to see me and rudely demanded that we immediately move our motorhome.  I explained to her that we were in the same predicament as Friday, still kaput but working hard to find a solution.  She was not interested in any such explanations and told me that if we did not move immediately she would call the police.  A short while later a couple of cops turned up, asked to see our passports, shrugged their shoulders and drove off.  Then a letter turned up from the castle office giving us until midday the next day to be gone otherwise unspecified consequences would follow.

All of which was totally horrible and unnecessary and made us feel very uneasy.  We’ve often reported how kind people have been to us, but this was quite the opposite, we were left with a bitter taste in our mouths and feeling very discouraged for a couple of days.  We hope you enjoy your Google and Tripadvisor reviews Eltz Castle! We were causing no harm to anyone, there were plenty of spare carparks, and we wanted to be there as little as they wanted us there.  The problem was finding someone to help.  I cycled the 50km round trip into town both Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning and spoke with the motorhome dealer, local Ford garage, and even tried to track down a mechanic I’d found on-line.  To cut an even longer story short, we ended up getting a tow truck on Wednesday afternoon that cost an eye-watering amount of money, he took us to a local truck fixit place where, in the morning, a couple of people were thankfully friendly and much more helpful to us.  Firstly, the mechanic (even though he was a diesel specialist) confirmed the diagnosis we received from Wales on day 1.  Then a man from another business in the same building took us under his wing and spent several hours (on and off) making calls and helping us with translation.  Finally he found a company around 80km away in a tiny little town called Binsfeld. The business is located immediately adjacent to a large US Airforce base and sells/services a wide variety of yank vehicles.  So another tow later (thankfully not so expensive this time thanks to some hard negotiating by my new friend Gerold) we were parked up in their yard overnight before having Harvey repaired the following day.

This last part of today’s story restores one’s faith in humanity after such an awful experience at the castle.  Autohaus Kröshell eK Ford in Binsfeld is a company owned by a couple both of whom are 82 years old.  Manfred and his wife started up the business in the 60’s to look after vehicles for American servicemen at the nearby base and have been doing so ever since.  These days his son and daughter both work in the business and couldn’t have been more helpful and welcoming to us.  When we arrived, Anita made friends with Birgit (daughter) and Eifel (the boxer who seems to be the real boss) and we were truly made to feel like part of the family.  Before we knew it they were provide local intel on where to forage for supplies and even offered to lend us a car.  However Manfred is still in charge and is there every day helping the mechanics and pottering in his workshop.  I say pottering but that’s not exactly correct – he has all manner of machinery which enable him to make any parts or tools he can’t obtain locally.  He has a huge collection of paraphernalia which means he can recreate almost anything needed to keep his customers’ vehicles on the road.  And what does Manfred do in his spare time?  He manufactures muzzle loading guns… from scratch!  That’s right, you imagine a musket or blunderbuss, except they’re brand new and bespoke and truly beautiful weapons (if one may call a weapon beautiful).  This older gentleman proudly showed your fascinated author his workshop, and puffed his chest out when explaining to me that the first and second place getters at the recent muzzle-loaded world champs used equipment built from scratch, by him right there in that workshop! We hope you enjoy your Google review! 

There was one remaining town on our list in the Eifel region of Germany before making the turn back for Belgium and some medical appointments for the shoulder patient – and that was Trier.  [thankfully she’s becoming more and more mobile which means I don’t have to make every single cup of tea anymore!].  Several people had advised us not to miss this place, so we drove the 30km or so down the road on Friday once Harvey was back and firing on all 10.  And they were right - if Roman history in this part of the world is of interest, then this town is top-of-the-pops!

Most Roman structures were destroyed in the centuries following the demise of their rulership, mainly for use as recycled building materials.  Not so the Porta Nigra (black gate) which was fortunately used as the foundation for a church in the 11^th century meaning that its materials were not pilfered.  Then in the early 19^th century, Napoleon had the church part of the structure torn down, leaving a decent chunk of the original Roman gate standing as you see today.  You can climb up to the top of its 4 levels, you’ll need to see the photos to see how eye-popping this piece of history is!

The Trier Dom Cathedral was also a treat as we arrived a few minutes before an organ recital was about to begin.  I’ll be honest and say the organ music is not generally high on the list of ‘likes’ for your author and his lovely travelling companion (and in fact nobody in particular may even have nodded off) however to hear such a magnificent sound at such a venue was quite special.

There’s plenty of other Roman remains in town including an amphitheater, remnants of a bath house, and a huge building constructed as the throne room for the Emperor Constantine, but these day used as a protestant church.  Sadly this last structure was destroyed when Trier was bombed during WWII however has been faithfully rebuilt and remains the largest one-room Roman structure in the world.

During the almost one week we were stuck at or near Eltz Castle the weather has changed appreciably.  Believe it or not, Trier was actually the first wet exploring day of the whole trip, I’d recommend travelling Europe during a drought if you can arrange it that way for your own adventures 😊.  The top temperature for the last few days has only been around 19deg with a chilly breeze however it’s lovely autumn weather today with a high of 26 and warm sunshine.

So that brings us to the close of today’s edition of AWH, thanks for sticking with us and keeping us company on our travels – hopefully it will be more adventures and less dramas next time (and henceforth we hope!).

Lots of love

The Travelling Woodies

 

Technical information on the Harvey breakdown.

You’d think that a low mileage, solidly built engine should cause no problems, right?  Sadly I’m discovering that apparently this is not true if it’s made in America.  At only 26000 miles this engine ‘blew a sparkplug’- which, according to my Welsh friends and own internet research, is a reasonably common fault with these Ford Triton engines which come in V6, V8 and V10 versions.  For reasons only known to themselves, the good folk at Ford manufactured these motors with an aluminium head and (here’s the kicker) only 4 threads holding each spark plug in place.  A spark plug typically comes with 11 threads meaning on these Triton engines, only the bottom 4 threads are actually holding them in place.    On occasion this leads, for no particular reason, to the pressure in the engine effectively ejecting the sparkplug out the top, stripping the thread from the head and usually breaking the coil.

The horrendous banging noise we heard coming from the engine was actually unburnt fuel squirting out the plug hole and igniting, essentially a backfire in the engine.  We were lucky the damn thing didn’t catch fire!

Our Welsh mechanics explained how they previously purchased a special kit which enables the sparkplug hole to be bored out slightly, a sleeve screwed into the new larger hole, then the sparkplug screwed back into that.  Our 82 year old friend didn’t buy the kit, he made it in his workshop years ago, although it took him around an hour of hunting to find the pieces he needed.

Does that mean Harvey is an unreliable dog?  Probably not however there always seems to be something not quite right.  Although this is Harvey’s 3^rd breakdown the other 2 were in a quite different category.  The damaged throttle body right back at the start in Redditch was caused by new leisure batteries being installed incorrectly.  The brake failure at Rouen was essentially a maintenance issue, so this malfunction is the first genuine breakdown.    Hopefully that’s the last of the failures because otherwise we’ll be eating 2 minute noodles for the remainder of this trip!  Check out the video below to hear what Harvey sounds like running with one cylinder short!

 

lovely from the outside, sadly run by a bunch of #$%&!!!

I feel like we've been here before...

quite a nice place to stay... until we found out we weren't welcome :-(

Manfred in his workshop - the man is a true genius!

here's what he makes in his spare time

Eifel the dog

as we left for our day of exploring what should appear out of the mist but a bridge...  but not any bridge - the first people to use this particular thoroughfare were Roman legionaries!

Oh, I forgot to mention that Trier is also the birthplace of Mr Karl Marx.

The Marx family home is now a museum

remains of Roman bath house

Roman amphitheatre

garden behind the throne of Constantine

Trier Dom Cathedral

Trier Markplatz

Porta Nigra, so named because weathering over the centuries has turned the stone a black colour

an actor dressed in period costume at Porta Nigra

same Roman bridge at the end of the day

In Germany heaps of signs say Fahrt. Which, if you're a 3 year old, is funny 😁