Hi Brian, I think that we all got on very well with all the Dutch guys who all seemed to be multi lingual and helped us out on many occasions.
You mentioned a couple of posts back about seeing Jan de Lely motors in lots of obscure places around Yugoslavia. Well quite often if we were loading hanging garments back from the Commie Block we would sometimes see one of their motors loading at the same factory.
We did a lot of Courtaulds work from around the U.K. into Yugo and if we tipping down in Southern Yugo we usually did customs in Skopia. If the load didn’t go straight into the customs warehouse then we had to find some out of the place little town, usually in the mountains which had a factory making clothes.
It must of been in January 1981 when I met up with one of Jan de Lely’s drivers with a Volvo F12 somewhere around Teto Veles in Macedonia and as we both loaded around the same time we were told to wait as the customs man was coming out to the factory to start our carnet and to seal us both up. We were both very happy because it meant that we didn’t have to go back to Skopia to do our customs especially as it had started snowing again.
Well I followed this Dutch guy and that night we got as far as Nis by about 10 p.m. and so we decided to call it a day by pulling onto a bit of waste ground and parking up. Now both of us didn’t have night heaters so it was a case of stopping and starting the engine all night just to get a bit of warmth. The next morning about 6 a.m. the Dutchman bangs on my cab and tells me to bring my cup as he is going to make a pot of coffee. You know what the Dutch are like, they like real coffee with their coffee beans, coffee percolators and their paper coffee filters, back then for me it was like watching a science lesson in school. Non of that spoonful of Maxwell House straight into the cup like us.
I was sat there in his driving seat with his two burner camping stove in between us and he had a saucepan of water which was attempting to boil on one of the gas rings, when I noticed that the flames on the cooker were very low so I asked him if he was running out of gas. No he said, it’s just the gas that’s frozen in the gas bottle and he then lifted up the gas bottle from the passenger side footwell and placed in on the other gas ring which was also lit. I nearly jumped straight out of the drivers door in shock as I had never seen this done before. Isn’t that dangerous I asked. No he said, the heat will turn the frozen gas back into liquid and the flames will go higher. He was right but I still felt very uncomfortable and as the flames got stronger he eventually removed the gas bottle off the lit gas flame while the pan of water boiled.
Like I said I felt very uncomfortable watching this but the following morning I found myself doing exactly the same thing and it was something that I did on a number of winter mornings in years to came.
Another company that also did hanging garments around the Commie Block back then was this West German firm Josef Meyer from Osnabruck. I think that Dave Shawcross said that this photo with his son Robert was taken at The Zagreb Motel and it looks to me as though it was the same trip when they met up with Mick and Pam in Czechoslovakia.
Now Mick said on Page 2 of this thread that the little boy in the photo was a Czech kid who came up with his mum talking to him and Pam. As Micks book was coming out at the time I thought that I wouldn’t mention it on here as it seemed a bit pernickety but I am pleased to say that Robert did dozens of trips with his dad over the years and on one trip I met up with Dave and Robert at the National when we were both on our way to Athens.
I see that there is a new member on Trucknet called Pedro 2 who joined last week and I meant to welcome him to the forum especially as he mentioned a driver who called himself ■■■ Machine.
Now the only driver who I can recall at the moment who had a yellow number plate on the front of his motor with the words ■■■ Machine on it was a guy who I met parked up in the desert at Fallujah, Iraq on the 2nd of January.
I.I.R.C. he had an American truck, a White Road Commander with a West Coast cab, the one with the two windows in the roof at the front of the cab and I think that it was painted black. I have a feeling that he might of been from Yorkshire, he was single, he had fair hair and I am sure that he said that he was doing internals, not only in Iraq but all over the Middle East.
The thing that I really do remember about this guy was the way that he explained to us how he had enjoyed a New Years Eve party at the Saddam Hussain Hospital in Baghdad with an Irish nurse. Would it be right to call a driver who had a bonk in Iraq (with a girl), a middle east legend. 
I don’t know if this is the same guy who you mentioned who was parked up in the National with you all those years ago. 
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