We got up together with Justyna and Kacper to say goodbye. Then we ate breakfast, cleaned a bit in the kitchen and drove off. Through Germany. I must admit, it was a bit boring part through highway. Therefore, I will describe few observations from the road.
- In Germany, as in France, you can enter with dogs to many places. Apparently, even to church. Cool. I saw also dog wash in Speyer, near the gas station.
- Shops are closed on Sunday. As I mentioned before, we don’t count days. And Sunday surprised us without bread or water. In Denmark, shops are opened 7 days a week. We get used to this, so we didn’t expect opposite situation in Germany. Good, we were in the evening in Justyna’s place, and we were treated to dinner. Once again, thank you very much for extremely pleasant two days!
- It is possible to go into McDonald’s with a dog, which makes us happy. What doesn’t, is their Internet. We spent several hours trying to add photos to the gallery on the blog. We managed to upload just a few. It was the waste of time and nerves… Nevertheless, we drank coffee in one McDonald’s, in the other we were just standing in the parking lot, catching WiFi in the car. It took so long, that we played „Countries, cities” – mental game.
- On the highway number 7 to Hannover and Hamburg, there are many parkings and petrol stations. But there are hundreds of trucks as well. In the evening they turn aside, barely fit within designated space. Some of them stood at the entry, some at the exit. And the rest still was in the right-hand lane of “Autobahn”. We came to one parking, but it was full, besides we didn’t want to sleep surrounded only by big trucks. We passed them slowly, noticing two rats. They fled in panic when we came closer.
- Generally, car parks are not well maintained, the toilets are not clean. And the road is not the best condition either. There is an entire network of, often three-lane highways, but the wheels pound of boards joints or fell in ruts. Some sections are under repair. Well, they are quite old, so they had right to be used.
We found a place for our Volkswagen in a large parking lot, with separate space for passenger vehicles. It was not a perfect stay but had to be enough. We made it a little more pleasant by drinking wine. This time we opened it without infringing the cork. A friend of mine sent me the link to „the boot method”. The boot didn’t work, simply because it had too soft sole. We used Europe map instead. It did its job! The method involves hitting the bottle in the tree, putting it earlier in a shoe or separate with a book from the tree. Cork is pushed out. Thus we had opened wine without a spill, or pieces of cork inside. I just cannot believe, I’ve never heard about this way before!
That night we froze in the bed for the first time. It was so cold in the morning, that we just drank hot coffee/tea and drove off. We ate breakfast further on our way. We stopped at the parking behind Hamburg, about 90 km before Flensburg. We just finished, when a girl approached and asked something in German. She was hitch-hiking through the country for 5 years, living, as she said, “anywhere, nowhere, everywhere”. She was looking for a lift to Flensburg. We dropped her at the door of some kind of shelter. We used very good Internet there and did some shopping – bread, and water.
It was getting dark when we crossed Danish border. We are home, one can say. A lot of cycle paths, good roads and signs, from which I can read something. We stopped at the gas station to buy window clock, which we should have to set the hour of arrival to the car park. It was time to look for a stopover. We found forest parking in Nationalpark Vadehavet, on the west coast of Denmark. It was much warmer than last night, empty and quiet, big moon cast shadows on the glade. And only the wine was missing, which we didn’t manage to open with “map method”, as the cork was artificial. It was difficult to push it inside as well. Jurek helped the process by hitting carefully the bottle to the ground. Unfortunately. The bottle broke and the wine spilled…
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