Dirty South In Europe

by Martin Hawks
17 / 09 / 2009

Me and a few friends have wanted to go to Europe to ride the cables for a while now, and was stoked to find myself on a ferry heading for Dunkerque at 3am surrounded by 5 friends; Liam Smith, Terry Hannam, Oli Woods, Sam Miller and my bro Sam. Once we had got off the ferry we drove to Holland and sat outside a café getting some breakfast. We ate in a small town called Terneuzen just a couple of hours from Dunkerque, Most places where we stopped nothing was open till midday so we made a move to our first cable and campsite ‘Kamperland’, although we didn’t get a chance to ride here as the wind was unbelievably strong. As we were all pretty tired from the drive it wasn’t long before every one was asleep.
 
The next day we drove further in to Holland to Tilburg where we had a nice coffee and a bite to eat before going to a cable at Best, just outside Einehoven. The cable was good with a few but solid rails and kickers. The people who run the cable were really friendly and sorted out our camping and even invited us to a members party. Einehoven was only a short but pricey taxi ride away, so once in town we began to celebrate my brother Sam’s birthday.
 
Waking up with sore heads the next morning we drove to Venlo, a quiet town with some of the friendliest waitresses I’ve ever met. After we had eaten and filled up Sam’s jeep with petrol (a 4-litre automatic - Not a good choice of car for a road trip!) we went over the border into Germany hand headed for Wankum and the blue lagoon cable where they also have a System 2.0 and wallride. The cable was good, not to busy and full of rails and boxes. After a good few hours riding we went to party in Venlo hoping to bump into the nice waitresses we had met earlier. Camping prices were reasonable usually working out to about six euros each, however wanted to have an even cheaper night so we stayed in the car park at the blue lagoon!
 
Knowing it was our last full day we were up early and arrived at Langenfeld cable before it was open, paid up and were pretty much first on the cable. This was the best cable we had seen, and had a solid S-rail & just about every other rail you would want to hit.  All the cables were well priced at around 30 euro for the day, and 20 euro for 2-hours, and I know every one enjoyed riding here. It was a shame to have to turn around and head back towards home stopping once again in Tilbury were we spent our last night at a safari park campsite, which reminded me way to much of Jurassic park!
 
From Tilburg it was about a 7-hour drive including the ferry and we were back home. The idea of this road trip was to find out more about Europe as we want to do a bigger longer road trip some time in the future, but it’s so easy to drive to a decent cable in Holland within 4 hours of getting off a ferry it was a great weekend excursion. The people there are so friendly its unreal. In all I spent just over £150 not including fuel but we could have saved money if we had avoided restaurants and done our own cooking. We covered about 800 miles, 5 countries, 4 cables and not one traffic jam until we got back to the UK. I highly recommend you do the same one day.