Lunch was grabbed at a motorway services under fabulous sunshine and temperatures reaching
towards an unseasonal 27 degrees! Our lunchtime stop also set up one of those amazing fluke
meetings as I exchanged brief text messages with David and Charlie Mason who had ridden with
Dambusters in 2013. Due to business commitments David and his son Charlie had not left Dorset
until early that day on his Triumph Tiger and planned to crunch all the way to his hotel a few miles
outside Arnhem in the day! More in conversation that anything else I had told sent David a text
telling him that Craig, Barbara and I expected to be in Veghel at about 4pm and then thought
nothing more about it.
The final directions on the website of the vehicle encampment were vague to say the least and so
we spent a few minutes riding around Veghel in the vain hope of seeing a signpost or other pointer
to the location of the display. In the end we stopped and took refuge in Google which gave us an
address and post code for a Truck Parts business we knew was next door the ‘OMG2014’
encampment. With that plugged into my SatNav we set off again and as we turned right back out
onto the main road an orange Triumph Tiger, two up, was coming the other way!
I waved, David waved back – what was the chance of that? The OMG2014 ‘Base Camp’ as they called
it was a largely accurate representation of a 1944 Allied Army encampment with large numbers of
beautifully restored 1944 vintage trucks, jeeps and half-tracks and, most interesting to us,
motorcycles! The five of us wandered around the site for about an hour in the afternoon sunshine
before it was time to get back onto the bikes and each make our own way to our hotels. For me this
was the Linge Hotel at Elst about 11km to the south of Arnhem which turned out to be a
comfortable and friendly base for the next couple of days.