Germany – Page 4 – Martin & Joy's Blog

Traffic, rain & Internet woes, but we’re in Italy!

A trying couple of days in some respects… We left Kathryn’s on Saturday afternoon, thinking we’d get to the Austrian border by the evening. Unfortunately, the “A8; Stuttgart richtung München, am Aichelberg zwischen Merklingen & Mülhausen” (a well-known and feared traffic announcement in Baden Würtemberg) traffic jam bit us hard (“wegen Bergungsbearbeiten”). In short, we covered just 8km in over 3 hrs, and any thoughts of getting to Austria vanished. In fact, we only made 60km all day.

3 hours into the traffic jam on the Autobahn going up Aichelberg

Eventually we got to the head of the queue, just to find the Autobahn was closed & all traffic was being taken off onto the side roads. After about 5km, we happened across a “Wohnmobilstellplatz” in Bad Ditzenbach: This is akin to the French “aires” (see my earlier post) insofar as you can park up overnight for free, or for just a modest fee.

Yesterday morning, we set off relatively early (for us) and hammered (relative term for our motorhome, approx = 60mph) down past Ulm (stopping first in Blaubeuren to admire the bare cliffs). Before we got as far as the Algaü, it had started to rain and get colder. We stopped at Heiterwang – just over the border in Austria – at another Stellplatz; this time with great facilities, and a Gasthof attached! Wienerschnitzel mit Pommes for me & a Tyrolean version of Käsepätzle for Joy; both excellent.

The food was accompanied by the host who entertained us with the piano accordion, guitar and his singing.

The wireless internet was – however – troublesome to say the least, taking several hours to try to download an Italian camping book. The rain, in the meantime, had completely failed to ease up.

Overnight, the rain continued to not ease up. Quite the opposite, in fact. The temperature dropped to around 6 or 7 degrees, too. The main skylight in the van – the one that had leaked previously and had allegedly been fixed – leaked. The waste bin was pressed into service as a water collection device.

This morning, it was pretty damn cold, and still pouring down. When we stayed in Heiterwang several years ago – camping in a tent – we had a similar rain problem then (though not as cold). We came to the same conclusion this time as we did then: head to Italy asap.

However, the scenery around Heiterwang is stunning, even in the rain – and is worth seeing despite the cold:

As we were getting ready to leave this morning, a group of Belgian bikers – all on big Harley-Davidsons – who’d stayed the night in the Gasthof, were leaving. As a special goodbye, the landlord climbed up to the roof with his baritone saxophone, and played them out!

Quite bizarre, but not to be missed.

We then pressed on down through Austria, via Innsbrück, and over the Brenner Pass into Italy. It’s about a 50mile long descent from the Brenner, and it was getting warmer all the way – just what we needed.

We eventually arrived at a Sosta (an Italian version of an aire) in Lazise, near the bottom end of Lake Garda. Al fresco dinner with a glass of wine watching the sun set. We feel we’re there.

Dunno what’s going on with their wireless internet, though: my phone connected immediately with no problem. My Kindle won’t connect at all. Joy’s phone won’t connect and the laptop won’t connect. Most strange. Joy’s phone eventually managed to connect but we don’t know why, but no such luck with either the laptop or the Kindle. So what, I don’t hear you cry? Well, I would have liked internet access on the Kindle ‘cos I have the Times & Sunday Times app on there, and the laptop ‘cos I can’t write this blog from my phone! In the end, I was able to use my phone as a WiFi access point for the laptop, and this is the happy result.

Cheers!

About to move on…

Been at our daughter’s for 3 days now, and it’s been great to see them. Also gave us chance to replace the lost part of our toilet cassette – the part that contrived to drop off into the toilet disposal point in Longwy!

After an excellent BBQ, along with Mark’s parents, granddaughter Emily insisted on sleeping in the van last night with Nanny…

…and actually managed to sleep all night!

Now it’s time to move on. Although we’d originally thought we’d get down to Naples (Pompeii & Herculaneum), we feel the delays in the UK have now made this unfeasible without running into main holiday times. We’re also now a little more experienced in knowing how long it takes to get anywhere at the van’s ponderous speed (or lack thereof).

Tuscany is now in our sights, though exactly where is uncertain. We’ll probably take in 2 overnight stops on the way. Not sure where we’ll have an Internet connection again, nor when. Keep looking…

Arrived at our daughter’s house

We’re in Germany. Ehningen, to be precise.

Two days without any internet connection and I feel like I’ve been cast adrift. What were those days like before the Internet? I guess I’ve been in the IT industry so long, I can’t remember. We even had company-wide internal email in HP in 1983. Now, If it feels completely unnatural not to have permanent, wireless access.

Arrived in Calais around 2:15am, local time. We never intended to get the late ferry but – without having booked the early ferry (believing we could just rock up & pay at the gate) – we found the price of the earlier ferries had gone up from £43 to £105. So we booked the late ferry at £43 still.

We spent out first night away in the stunningly exotic location of Calais docks departure area. We’d read that it was possible to park up there overnight, the trick being to leave the arrivals area, drive out of the docks to the 1st roundabout, then double back to the departures where you could park up in a motorhome. Ok, so we were tired; we managed to get into the freight terminal amongst several hundred trucks from Rumania, Poland, Latvia, & goodness knows where else. We were politely shown the exit – the gate of which slid open majestically to allow us through to the outside world. A second stab at it saw us successfully entering the “departures with no tickets” area, complete with large car park sectioned-off for cars, motorhomes, buses, hang gliders, rubber dinghies, illegal immigrants, etc. It was almost full. We managed to park our beast in a slot designed for a Smart car, adjacent to an old, UK-licensed Astra with blacked-out windows and completely flat tyres, that clearly hadn’t been parked-up there anytime recently.

In the morning, we thought it would be nice to drive to an “aire” a few miles out of Calais, towards Dunkirk. We’d bought ourselves a guide book to all the French aires, and the one we selected sounded like a great place for breakfast. We’ll never know. We never found it. I think we covered 50% of the N of France coastline but had to give up in the end.

So we chose another one from the book, a little further along the route. We found the town. We even found the street, but we couldn’t find the aire – nor the cemetery it was allegedly next to – until our 3rd pass. Excellent. We even managed to find a friendly artisanal boulangerie close by.

By lunchtime, we hit the road proper: Lille, Namur, and a whole string of other places until we arrived at our next chosen aire at Longwy. In France, but we’d gone in & out of Belgium & Luxembourg several times in the 30 mins before arriving. With a name like that, it could have been in Wales.

I can’t figure out what drives the French to offer these aires. To cynical Brits, it seems odd that French local communities should go out of their way to provide (usually) free parking, often with water, electrical hookup, and chemical toilet emptying facilities. What’s in it for them? Many of these aires seem to be in provincial towns of little touristic interest, so I don’t really get it. Don’t get me wrong; I think they’re a fabulous institution, and maybe they are run out of true altruism for the traveller. But in the UK, they’d be barricaded, there’d be height barriers, £20 overnight parking fees & the threat of clamping for non-compliance. Which would you prefer?

Today, we drove again in & out of France, Belgium & Luxembourg for a while (Note: Luxembourg is THE place for less expensive diesel fuel. We even came across a bizarre section of road where – on one side of the road were – quite literally – ten or eleven gas stations next to each other. On one side of the road only. That side of the road was in Luxembourg, the gas station-free side was in Belgium.) before crossing into the land of speed-unrestricted motorways.

I’ve said this before of Germany: The fact that large stretches of Autobahn have no speed limits is – of itself – no great safety problem in my mind as long as all the traffic is doing more-or less the same speed. The trouble comes when you have a string of BMWs, Mercs, Audis, Porches, VWs all doing over (say) 160km/hr (around 100mph), when a truck (or even a ponderous motorhome like ours) doing 60km/hr going uphill pulls out to overtake another truck doing 59km/hr. That’s a closing speed of 100kph (or 60mph). And the thing is, those fast cars weren’t even in your rearview mirror when you pulled out. It’s the speed differential that’s the problem. Although some idiot is always going to try sending a text message whilst doing 180. That can be a problem too.

We have to allow ourselves an extra 25% on our SatNav’s anticipated journey times: Garmin haven’t yet figured that some vehicles just can’t do their calculated avg. speeds.

Our daughter’s house is on a teeny-weeny cul-de-sac, 6 houses long, and about 3.4m wide. Our van is 2.3m wide. There’s nowhere to turn even a Smart car around in the street. The only way is to reverse in; a worrying time for the neighbours’ walls and gardens. Made it without any known damage to vehicle or property. Whew.

Lovely to see our family & grand-children again.