We started out morning out a bit earlier today as we knew we
had a lot of distance to cover. Our plan was to travel west avoiding Hamburg
and take the ferry across the Elbe (the widest river in Europe) to Gluckstadt,
avoid the autobahn and enjoy the countryside – fresh odors and all (being
sarcastic here). Have any of you seen the old British sitcom “On the buses”?
With no obvious place to purchase a ferry ticket on we got only to have the
ticket collector come along to each vehicle, change device slung around his
neck collecting from all of us. A bit of nostalgia here. After the 30 minute
crossing which included a beautiful tall ship passing by, the next part of the
adventure began.
We almost went sky diving!
Explanation: we are quite dependent on our motorcycle’s GPS
as we don’t have a hope in understanding all the road signs and unpronounceable
town names. Danilo set the programming to English so it was user friendly for
us. We set it in the evening to our destination the next day. Today we were
merrily following the purple line and came to a road barrier with all kinds of
directions in German. Well, we thought, we will be careful and went along until
we realized the road was closed. Luckily there was a van and a car in front of
us so we followed them as they obviously knew where they were going. They did –
past a restricted sign into an airport whereupon they stopped and wanted to
know if we were going skydiving too! We know we are on an exciting trip but
that was a little too much for these two old adventurers.
To end this story happily, after back tracking and with
instructions from a gas station attendant and some dead reckoning/map
interpretation we eventually found our way. And we did all that without having
to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.
Unfortunately the change of road meant we ended on the
autobahn for a good part of the day. The day was warm enough but pretty windy
at times, very overcast and a few spits of rain until the very end of the day
when the sun came out. Half way through the day we crossed into Denmark where
they narrowed the traffic down, had guards standing watch but just flagged us
through. Not sure what that was about.
Again we found regular motorway rest stops so were able to
get off for frequent breaks. We were given a choice of WC (water closet or just
good old restroom facility) or pissior – you can probably guess at that one!
 |
| Rest stop |
Forgot to mention we “Canadianized” our rental motorcycle.
Hope they can get the stickers off. . .
Tomorrow we ferry across the Kattegat Strait,
(Danish: “Cat's Throat”) forming part of the connection between the Baltic Sea
and the North Sea. After about 3.5 hours we hope to find ourselves in Sweden.
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