I am driving to our pad in Estonia with a spare car to leave there and a van full of furniture leaving Friday 13th.
I will have a pal of mine in tow who likes the idea of Eastern European women, who wants to see some in their natural habitat en route.
After our side of Europe, this little sojourn will be taking us through Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and the whole length of Estonia. (Going around Kaliningrad as you cant go through there without a transit visa)
So here is the route……..
So for those who don’t know, the channel tunnel between England and France is basically a drive on freight train, so after leaving Manchester after midnight, getting to Folkestone in the South of England around 5am, we got on the tunnel.
And off 40 minutes later in France. And through the border of Belgium about an hour later……….
Then into the tip of Holland for a little while near Eindhoven, heading towards Germany. As we were trying to make fast time East, most of this was road and nothing of note across the West of Germany except the appalling traffic on the wonderfully efficient Autobahns and the German Police Officers, half of whom fall into jackbooted wannabe Nazi’s (one of whom I met on the way back).
Driving in Germany is not as progressive as you may imagine; yes the Autobahns are fast as advertised, but only until some dozy Helmut spots a field he would like to get naked in, (as Germans do, usually sporting leather caps) and flips his Mercedes onto its roof. Everything is then clogged up for two hours while Police Officers with the enthusiasm of the guy above, hose and scrape whats left of him and his car off the road. After you get going you get the roadworks where everything bottlenecks down to one lane at a moments notice, as a consequence of this, often there is another Helmut in his silver Mercedes embedded in the central reservation upside down wondering what happened. So in practice, driving through Germany can be quite irritating and one needs to adopt the favoured habit of the locals and get out of the car in the traffic jams to chat to each other, smoke and discuss leather caps and general nakedness.
The women? In the West of Germany, forget it! Shall I say I can see why Germans are poking around Russia looking to procure some better genetics.
Next bit is past the old Berlin Wall area into the East of Germany and the dreaded Berlin Ring Road………………..
So we approach the Berlin ring road, an orbital road around Berlin as the name suggests. Last time I drove here it was awfully busy and often stationary, I hoped it wouldn’t be, I was wrong, it was like a damn car park.
After 30 minutes sat in traffic after driving for 18 hours or so, the Mercedes car we had taken began to overheat (as the viscous coupling was not stiffening up as it should) – We ended up on the hard shoulder (breakdown lane) amongst the roadkill whilst contemplating the situation amidst the clouds of steam. I suspected it had done the head gasket or the head itself and the radiator was leaking also, it didn’t look good.
At this point is when the Germans started leaning out of cars yelling, jeering, gesticulating and shouting. Seemingly two UK registered vehicles sat in the breakdown lane caused them great amusement.
I decided that the only way to cool the car down some rather than wait 2 hours was movement of air past the radiator at low speed, but the traffic was stationary. So we set off in the hard shoulder to the anger of the jeering Germans. Soon the car was cooling some at 20mph and we were moving much faster than the standing traffic and making progress, the Germans were hopping on behind us not wanting to be left out of getting ahead I guess. I thought if we saw a cop we could show him the temperature gauge and explain and it may be OK, this time there was no cops. However soon the car overheated again so we came off near Brandenburg and sought out a little hotel that had beds, a restaurant and a bar. The car could cool off overnight and we would think about it with new eyes the next day.
It took us 18 hours from Manchester to Berlin, that was more than enough for one day. Next morning, the car was topped up with water and working fine! As long as we kept it out of standing traffic too long it would be OK I thought.
In the little hotel we found was a waitress who had no English and a limited grasp of my schoolboy German. The more I looked at her (as my copilot was drooling with his tongue on the floor) I thought she looked Russian. (The jewel encrusted talon nails, heels and cheekbones gave it away!) I tried her with “excuse me” and “meine frau” to get some service but to no avail. So I tried “Dyevooskha!” “Da” she replied…………….
This story is continued with many photographs, on the Free Dating Forums, and is part reproduced here with their permission.