Friday August 12 Bad Bentheim to Hessedorf

Playing with the camera as we are stuck in a traffic jam on the freeway.

It was still drizzling this morning, and in fact it was very grey…and we slept in, woke and couldn’t believe it was ¼ to 8! Spent time working out routes for today, and decided to head to Flensburg, just south of the Danish border. We want to get to Scandinavia for the last of the summer, so not spending too much time in Germany, will explore on our return south.

The Three network that I had organised for internet data in UK covers all of Europe..except Netherland and Germany, so yesterday bought a sim card for the Lycamobile network, quite expensive but would give us data on the road. I needed to be on the internet to register it so popped my coat on and walked back into town to the information centre to get organised. Arrived 20 minutes before they opened, but got onto their wifi outside, and tried to organise the registration but no luck. So when they opened at 10 went inside and the girls were so helpful, especially Burgit Baumann who spoke excellent English, had worked with Huawei and had me online in no time at all. So grateful.

We used the facilities at the camping spot and emptied all our tanks and refilled with fresh water and at 11am we were on our way, back onto the motorway and heading north east to Hamburg. Ian spent most of the drive in the slow lane with the trucks, only passing when they were too slow!. Stopped for a lunch break, then a fuel stop…and then we hit the traffic jam. We stopped and crawled at no more than 8 kph for almost an hour…I think there were roadworks, but hard to know as the traffic finally spwed up. Anyway we realised that we would be driving through Hamburg late afternoon, and a Friday afternoon at that, so decided to pull the pin and have an overnight and continue tomorrow morning.

I saw a town called Zeven and looked on a site www.searchforsites.co.uk that lists overnight spots etc and saw that there were several places we could stay. It was well after 4 when we pulled into town, stopped off at a supermarket and got some things for dinner as well as more alcohol…we are stocking up for Scandinavia as it is so expensive and everyone has advised us to fill every corner of the van!

We then set off to find the sites mentioned, but no luck. Some lead us to a dead end, and others were no existent. Not sure if it is my use of the GPS co-ordinates or just misinformation. Finally spotted a sign to a camping ground, and followed the signs through lots of roads until we got to this rather odd site, but “there was room in the inn” for which we were grateful. After last night’s success tonight’s has been a bit of a failure, but we are now relaxing over a few drinks and just about to cook some skewered, marinated pork from the supermarket for dinner, along with a tub of German potato salad.

Opened a German wine, hard to know what we are buying, but tonight’s is rather sweet….will have to drink it as can’t bear to throw it out….or do they say “life is too short to drink bad wine”! Guess we just have to put more effort into trying different wines and I am sure we will eventually know what we are buying.

Traffic jam

8.8km/hour on the autobahn....not what you expect!

Wind turbines are everywhere.