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Diary w/e 17 September
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11th SeptemberA beautiful sunny Berlin morning. We revel in our western decadence - well, Rich revels (in the tent, of course) while I get up early and go to pick up the CROISSANTS from the campsite shop. How decadent can you get??? Eventually the beast emerges and after a leisurely breakfast and showing Kiwi Mike over some of the special features of the car that have caught his attention, we pack up and head off about 11.30. The plan is to see how far we can comfortably get across Germany today. If everything goes well, we may even get to Gent in Belgium, which Rich fancies a good look around. He has been there before with rowing, and says it is very beautiful. We have a couple of days in hand, so that sounds like a good plan. Alternatively, if the drive across Germany is dragging, we might stop a little earlier for an overnight stop somewhere near the western edge of Germany before pushing on to Gent the following day. It is a bright, hot, sunny day right across Germany, it seems. We are driving along merrily and already have an hour under our belt when there is a terrific bang from under the car, followed by a very expensive sounding grinding noise, which goes on and on. We immediately turn off the motorway, find a side road and jack the car up to have a good poke around underneath to see what has happened. We can find nothing obviously wrong, but we can't tell exactly where the noise is coming from - though there is a bit of a mess of gear oil splattered around the centre differential/ transfer gearbox. The car still seems to be moving ok, it just makes a really horrible noise and is quite clearly preparing to do its dying swan act. We decide to push on slowly along minor roads which criss-cross the motorway, in the general direction of home, and see what happens. If things do go horribly wrong and we have a sudden and dramatic transmission failure, we don't want to be stuck in the middle of some contraflow on the autobahn without a hard shoulder to cry on. So we wiggle our way slowly (no faster than 50 mph, generally much slower) through the idyllic north German countryside. It has a sprinkling of beautiful little villages, really well kept (not a spot of litter to be seen anywhere) and we feel we are seeing the real Germany - a small consolation for our relaxed plans all being thrown in the can. For some hours the car seems to behave ok (still intermittent loud bangs from the transmission which shake the whole car, plus patches of horrible grinding noises, but it still keeps on motoring), and it's getting really late so not long after driving through Hamelin (no pipers to be seen) we risk going back on the motorway, which is now much quieter with evening traffic. Suddenly, instead of our GPS software giving us an ETA at home running into several days, we are back down to a projected journey time of only about a day. We are driving on tenterhooks, fearing that each succeeding bang might signal the terminal demise of our transmission, but the car struggles on. It is all very stressful, but Rich alleviates the pressure by seeing how many indicator flashes he can get out of truckers as they overtake us and he flashes to show they can pull in. His record is four (mine was five). What larks. We decide that if we are indeed on a short timetable before the car gives up, we had probably better simply keep driving until it does - in the hope that we might at least get back to England before it dies (we qualify for roadside help, etc, there). So we drive once more into the night. In response to a text from Geraldine enquiring as to our progress, we tell her we are crawling across Germany and may or may not make it home in time for Christmas. Eventually we get past the Ruhr and the Rheinland and cross the border into the Netherlands near Eindhoven. We drive on past midnight and eventually the Belgian border comes into view. The car is still much the same - horrible noises, but still moving. We dread to think what damage we are doing by grinding on in this way, but the alternatives are not very palatable. There are not (m)any Land Rover dealers to be seen and we will be on our own if the wheel does metaphorically (or actually) fall off. So as Monday turns into Tuesday, we have no fixed GPS position (let's call it "approaching the channel coast") and we are mostly crossing everything, hoping that after well over 16,000 miles without any really major mechanical problems that we couldn't fix, we are not going to fall victims to something really nasty in the last few hundred miles. 12th SeptemberAs we approach Bruges, we wonder briefly about cutting our continental journey a little shorter by taking an Ostend ferry. But a quick look on the internet via a mobile phone connection shows us that is unlikely to be worthwhile so we decide to push on to Calais. Eventually, at 4 am, we grind noisily onto the quayside at Calais docks, waking up all the more fortunate campers who are sleeping there in their caravans and camper vans before they catch an early morning ferry. We thought briefly about a diversion to the 24 hour booze supermarkets, but drop the idea straight away - how foolish would we feel if we found ourselves broken down in the car park of Tescos Calais branch? We buy tickets for the 5.30 am ferry, then join a short queue of vehicles for a short kip before they start to load. We watch English immigration officials poking long sniffer probes into lorry trailers in an attempt to track down illegal immigrants hiding there. No success while we watch. The ferry is loaded up and we are off. Rich is so tired he doesn't even manage to make it to the video arcade to play some game he has been going on about for ages. We both crash out on nice comfy benches in the bar (along with most of the other handful of passengers). We are rudely awakened an hour and half later by a slightly surly French waiter who seems a little offended that we have slept in his bar rather than spent our Euros on Pastis and Gauloises during the crossing. Then we drive out into the early morning traffic in Dover. Driving on the left feels very strange after three months of sticking to the right (or, in Mongolia, going wherever you wanted without worrying about other traffic). The intermittent banging and grinding continues, but so does our forward motion. We stop at Maidstone services to let the M25 rush hour subside, then crawl around to the M4 and towards Worcester via Swindon. Rich says he almost wants the thing to collapse so that we can have some more "fun" today - I bite my tongue. With every mile that passes without "the big crunch" happening, the tension lessens and finally we arrive home at lunch time, having driven almost exactly 800 miles from Berlin to Worcester at no more than 55 mph without really stopping (apart from the ferry crossing). We have already called Rob at Liveridge to ask if he can minister to our sick Land Rover if we can get it to him, and he is glad to oblige, so we unload quickly, have a brief shower and drive up to Solihull to drop the car off. In the course of a long chat with Rob, he admits to having thought us crazy for doing this trip - he says it is not something he would have felt comfortable attempting on his own, and he knows Land Rovers inside out. So now we know! Then it's back home to surprise Geraldine (we had been sending deliberately ambiguous and evasive text replies to her enquiries about our progress, designed to leave her with the impression we were still overseas). The house is amazing - it's a bit like one I used to live in, but much larger, more comfortable and convenient. We start to lose things because there are so many places to put them. Taps that deliver hot water any time whenever you want it, without having to heat it yourself out of a jerry can or negotiate for someone to light a fire under a boiler....We really need to get ourselves back into gear... There are lots of things we both have to do urgently, and once they are sorted, we will spend a bit more time on bringing the website up to scratch, tidying up the pictures, and pulling together some kind of "tips and wrinkles" page for anyone thinking of trying a similar harebrained scheme. There will probably also be some kind of retrospective thoughts section to pick up some of the less tedious (matter of opinion) million and one things we have missed putting into the diary as we have gone along, like how Rich fared with the Russian traffic police when he was caught overtaking in one of their slightly fuzzy no-overtaking zones, and how Russia (particularly east of Moscow) has grown on us now that we understand the "rules" much better. But for now, that's it. Hope you have enjoyed reading it even a tiny bit as much as we have enjoyed writing it, and if you haven't already, now would be a good time to follow those fundraising links on our homepage to make your contribution to the work done by the Acorns Children's Hospice Trust in the Midlands, and the Christina Noble Children's Foundation in Ulaan Baatar. |