After a great breakfast with Gareth (which followed a great dinner cooked by Jo) we mooched around a bit and then went back to the car.

We spent the next hour scouring the streets of western Amsterdam trying to find a Skoda garage to buy some coolant. It seems the garage in question has been razed to the ground leaving no trace, even in the folk memory of the local inhabitants. Ah well.

So we set off for Antwerp and then saw a Seat garage just off the motorway. There we struck it lucky and could get the right stuff.

But this is bloody boring! Who wants to hear about coolant, for God's sake? (Even if it was quite cool (oh dear!) that I managed to buy it in Dutch!)

Antwerp was promising to be shit, but turned out to be pretty. You just had to stumble across the nice bits.

Brussels was very relaxed. I found The's flat with difficulty, Brussels being famed for having no signage. But I got there in the end, having left Gareth at the airport.

That evening I had dinner with The at 'T Spinnekopke, where I'm sure I've been before (with Jezza and Simon I think). I had a supertasty horse steak. Yum!

The next day I did next to nothing, except surf on The's home PC and repack my bags for the umpteenth time. That evening was fab though, because The, Paulina & I went for food with Serge, Vero and Alex. It was such a lovely evening!!

The following day (Wednesday) was also a bit nothingy, apart from going for a walk with Paulina to the Universite Libre de Bruxelles to do some photocopying (me) and some banging head against brick wall (Paulina trying to get a book out of storage and ULB staff being pretty crap). Had a nice Banana Split which made up for it though.

Then I drove to Leuven and met up with Claude. Whose flat is obscenely enormous and lovely. After a really lovely evening chatting, eating and drinking, we finished off on his balcony with Cuban rum and a Cuban cigar. Nice.

The trip to Cologne was uneventful. Cologne itself was hot and sunny, which apparently was the opposite of the forecast. It seems I brought the sun with me from Leuven.

I thought I would take the scenic route from Cologne to Frankfurt today, so I drove along the Rhine. Most pleasant. And then I popped into Mainz because someone once told me it was nice. Well, from a signage point of view, I thought I was back in Brussels! But the centre was indeed charming, once I'd managed to find it and then a parking space.

And now I'm in Bad Homburg, waiting for Stefan to call me.