We‘d been told the previous night that breakfast finished at 10.30, so we (Berry, Collin, Jessica and myself) agreed to meet in the hotel restaurant at 10am. One of the first things I learnt about touring was that if you make yourself a packed lunch at breakfast, you don’t have to suffer motorway service station food or pay motorway service station prices for it! We set off at around 11.30.
I slept for a while, we listened to music on Collin’s ipod and then, 5 hours later, we reached the ferry port in Denmark. This time, our trip on the ferry was plain sailing (sorry, bad pun!). We paid at an automated toll both, drove to a queue and a few minutes later we boarded the ferry. On the ferry, I noticed signs for car decks as well as a train deck… a train deck?!! We had joked about it on the journey to Sweden – imagining that they actually carried a train onboard the ferry (rather than what the sign obviously actually meant; there was a train station at the point where the ferry docked – meaning that passengers could walk from the train, onto the ferry and vice versa). As we drove off I looked behind at the ferry and, below the ramp where we’d driven off, I couldn’t believe what I saw… there was a regular passenger train pulling off the ferry! So, the ferry actually did carry an entire train from Denmark to Germany – amazing!
After we got off the ferry, we paid another visit to the Boarder Shop.
We wandered around all 4 floors, Collin Tasted some wine…
I discovered a cunning ploy to introduce kids to gambling…
… And then we got to the whiskey section. Now, I’m in no way a Whiskey connoisseur myself, but I had NO IDEA just how old or how expensive a bottle of whiskey could be from a regular duty-free shop, until I spotted this bottle of whiskey, distilled in 1940…
… which cost 2683 euros (that’s around £2300 or $3800; depending on what the exchange rate is when you’re reading this).
In Germany we hit a bit of traffic around Hamburg and then had to drive through the most torrential rain – making visibility really bad and driving treacherous. Berry did a great job and drove the whole way with only one stop (plus an additional emergency pee stop for me, by the side of the autobahn – Brits abroad, hey?!). We got back to Collin and Jessica’s house at around 11 – meaning that our journey had taken around 11 and a half hours (3/4 of an hour shorter than our journey to Sweden). When we arrived at Collin and Jessica’s we were greeted by Mattias, who had driven back from Sweden with Max and Ruben – they’d left the hotel at 7.30 and it’d taken them 14 and a half hours as they had to go via Neal’s hotel in Germany to pick up his hire-car. We sat and chatted, discussing the tour and recalling various incidents that had happened. Then we went to bed – very tired.
