More Hotel Shenanigans

Taking a look at the hotel bookings my eye was drawn to one in Germany. When I'd first booked it, it had some ridiculous price quoted, because the lady at Booking.com told me, they hadn't finalised the room price. She told me the correct price would be, a hefty £70 each. Now looking down the list, as I said my eye was drawn to that figure and so I decided to see if there was any way to get the price down. Hey presto! I was able to book 4 more rooms, this time at £40, which is much more like it and cancel the original booking. It doesn't always pay to jump in early but you can't blame me, given quite a number of the hotels I'd originally identified, were fully booked before I even got a sniff of them on B.com. Anyway, all's well..... I double checked the other hotels too but they were still the price as originally booked.

Moving on, and looking at the itinerary, I was trying to get some idea of what train we would need to catch on that first morning. So, working back from our various stops, I have determined that we shall need to be on the 8:20, which pretty much means a 6:30 start for me, picking the Hogs up at 6:45 for the run to Le Tunnel.

During this exercise I was checking the opening times and cost of the Hill 62 trenches, our first stop on the other side. It was at this point that I came across and read some reviews on Trip Advisor. I can normally take these with a pinch of salt, for every good review, someone will hate the same thing. Here though, I was finding bad review after bad review. It seems that the place is a bit of a rip-off and not very well looked after. It was hard to ignore the number of very similar reviews, so I decided to have another look round and came across some German trenches instead, that seem altogether better looked after and even take a few miles off the day's riding. I have, therefore, re-routed us to visit these instead.

Moving on to the second day, we have a visit to the Maginot Line fort at Hackenberg. Least that was the plan. Reading the website though, it wasn't entirely clear if the place was open outside of the weekend. With us arriving on a Monday, that could be a massive planning faux pas. Clarification was needed and so I emailed the address on the website and asked them when they are open. The answer came back today that they will be open on the Monday in question, from 14:30. I'm still not clear if that is the opening time or the time for a guided tour, as those are mentioned on the website but for now I'm happy that the plan stands and my planned timings should see us arrive by 14:00.

I'll be undertaking a similar exercise for the other places we plan to visit. There's little point in arriving at a venue shortly before it closes, if getting on the road an hour earlier would make all the difference, so it's a worthwhile exercise in my book. I know the Hogs will be happy with whatever I decide. They are just grateful it is me doing all this and all they have to do is turn up and ride.....Oh and pay of course!

Less than 300 days now. It'll soon pass!