My travelling companion Dick is a craftsman. In his spare time he has made water-going craft. Canoes, mostly, but he can also do you a dinghy or a boat. Also hot tubs. All with beautifully hand-crafted timber.
As we've rolled through the villages and towns of Europe, he has looked at the work of other craftsmen with a keener eye than your average bike-packer: Yes, but how did they construct that exactly?
We rolled to a stop last week in a German town to look more closely at the work on a timber framed building from - oh, it had to be four hundred years ago, didn't it? It was in a state of refurbishment, which required some stripping away of layers, revealing the construction method to Dick's satisfaction.
