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LadyEllen -> my trip to Germany; a business traveller's tale (11/6/2008 3:57:26 PM)
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I’m just back from my business trip to Germany – yes, given my interest in the US election and my enthusiasm for Obama it was perhaps not well timed, but it was the first date available to negotiate what could be an important deal; in any case, German radio kept me up to speed and Dutch radio sort of did too – not that I speak Dutch but its sort of comprehensible if you know German.
For the first time in years – ten years in fact – I drove rather than taking a flight, and I drove a lot further than I used to back then; Brugge in Belgium, where I drove several times and worked for a few odd weeks over 1998, is only about 75 miles from the ferry at Calais – Rheda in Germany where I drove this time is a lot further, 325 miles from Calais.
Except that this time I didn’t take the ferry over Dover/ Calais but opted for Harwich to Hoek Van Holland. This made the continental drive shorter at 215 miles but more usefully it was an overnight ferry which broke the trip up there and back, allowing me to spend a day at our office in East Anglia too, which in itself is a four hour drive from where I live, and get a sleep.
Having loaded up with items to smuggle to the continent for my colleague who works in our Czech office with whom I was attending the meeting (proper British teabags and other such essentials as are unavailable over there), I was first on board after the freight trucks had been loaded, and proceeded to what was a very comfortable cabin where I dropped off my overnight bag and then went on an exploration of the ferry.
Now I’ve been on plenty of ferries on the shorter routes over Dover into France and Belgium – trips that take two, three or four hours where there’s no real time for anything much before its time to disembark on the other side, but the ferry provided for this trip at eight hours was something new to me – two restaurants, two bars, play areas, a cinema – you name it, this ship had it!
Still I only spent an hour wandering round – it was important to get some rest after what had been a long day and for what was coming tomorrow, another sizeable drive on the wrong side of the road. The cabin was wonderful, the beds were great, the crossing was as smooth as if we had been sailing over a lake rather than the North Sea, but stupid me – I left my mobile phones switched on as usual; our industry is 24/7 and all sorts of emergencies can happen overnight – but I had no calls from frantic drivers in trouble, just twelve SMS messages at hourly intervals between the two phones, telling me the tariffs for calling out at sea.
Needless to say I got little sleep that night but a hearty breakfast later– all you can eat – the morning after, I was ready to go. It was here I ran into my first problem. I had parked on deck three, so I proceeded to descend from deck nine to go to the car. Except no matter which way I went, even when I got to a door for deck three, I couldn’t get onto deck three! In the end, having played the part of the silly old woman to Oscar nomination levels, a member of the crew escorted me to my vehicle, which stood bereft and alone on the deck awaiting my arrival, everyone else having long since departed. I rather think he was more despairing of me than kind, but I thanked him nonetheless.
As it happened, my incompetent efforts at escape hadn’t overly delayed me and although I drove the few hundred yards from the ferry on my own, with freight drivers and port workers staring at me with looks that said what a silly bugger I must be, I soon found myself at the back of a sizeable queue for passport control and customs, which gave me time to bring out my secret weapon – the satnav, and programme it for my hotel in Rheda.
Hoek Van Holland was bedecked in thick fog once I was through the checkpoints – it was a very good job I had the satnav since there was no chance whatever of navigating by the road signs occluded as they were in a dense white. Within a few miles of turns, executed with consummate professionalism on the wrong side of the road at very busy junctions, I hit the Dutch motorways.
When I say motorways, it seemed more the case that they were slow moving car parks. There was thick fog, there were more road works for longer stretches than one finds even in the UK where we’re always having roads dug up, we crawled along for miles with the only relief being yellow faces on signs at the road side which indicated with their expression how much longer the road works stretched.
Then I was suddenly in free moving traffic as I passed Utrecht and got up some speed towards the German border – the satnav alerting me to speed cameras every now and then which I generally observed since the traffic was too heavy to go too quickly. After nearly three hours I passed over into Germany, sailing past the border where twenty years earlier I still remember, being out with one of the truck drivers, we had had to stop for customs clearance, passport control and to fill out a Tankschein to declare what fuel we were bringing into Germany in the truck.
Once into Germany the traffic started to clear – I’d expected it to be slow through the Ruhr but it was OK. At 90-100mph I was in Rheda in no time and parked outside the hotel. It was a nice little town – lots of timberframe buildings in the centre where the hotel was located, some of which had inscriptions, invocations to God to protect the inhabitants, dating back to the 17th century when Rheda must have been the frontline in the Thirty Years’ War.
There being no sign of life at the hotel I spent the next two hours drinking coffee (which was sorely needed) at the café across the cobbled street, waiting for someone to turn up and also waiting on my colleague who was driving across from the Czech Republic. The hotel owner arrived about an hour before my colleague and I was drifting off into sleep when he phoned to report his arrival. It was a nice little hotel, timberframed and ancient like the houses around it, but fitted out in a style that was both modern and traditional.
We met up and drank coffee whilst we discussed business and the meeting for the following day, and then ate a wonderful dinner at the hotel restaurant with the only complaint being it was no smoking, necessitating two trips outside into what had become a cold and dark night from being a warm and sunny afternoon earlier in the day.
Next morning, after a great night’s sleep, I paid our bills and having programmed the satnav we set off for the meeting. That the satnav had no idea that the local council in Rheda had decided to build a new housing estate and to make a dead end of the route it recommended we took was but a minor matter; what was more remarkable was the Liverpool accent that called out from the bunch of builders gathered around an excavator parked on the side of the road that the road was “closed, Love”.
The meeting went well and we left with assurances of receiving the contract along with price confirmations in due course. Having regrouped at another café for half an hour we parted, him for the east and me for the west. This was when I heard that McCain had conceded and Obama had won by miles, so I left with a smile on my face.
It had taken nearly five hours to drive from the ferry to Rheda, what with the traffic and fog in Holland. Having seen on the way that the way back was similarly affected with jams and slow moving queues, I decided to make a dash for it.
It doesn’t take long to get back to the Dutch border when you keep up with most of the fanatical drivers on German autobahns, and it doesn’t feel like you’re going that fast either in a 3 litre Jaguar, but 110mph is quick. Even so, plenty came past me including one Porsche which came past so quickly that I didn’t see it coming but merely heard a whoosh, and when I looked up it was already a quarter mile ahead of me. Totally nuts all in all; I could have gone faster – the Jag had plenty left to give, but at that speed and with some of the idiots one finds on roads everywhere, who pull out without looking, 110mph is quite fast enough in my opinion!
Back in Holland the traffic slowed down again but I was so far ahead of schedule by then it didn’t matter, and I cruised back to the port with hours to spare and to spend on searching out goods to smuggle back to England – cigarettes and booze, which are generally much cheaper on the mainland.
I walked the entire town centre of Hoek Van Holland for cigarettes and booze. Yes, it’s not a very big place but still, one would have thought my trip would have been more successful. The booze was no problem, but the cigarettes proved difficult. I bought up all of the Benson & Hedges and all of the Davidoff lights in every shop I found – and had altogether only about thirty packets in total. I could have gone back up the road of course, but the traffic leaving the port that I’d seen on the way back in was horrendous and more than enough to discourage such a notion. I opted to buy on the ferry instead – which is dodgy since it carries a risk of giving UK Customs all the information they might need to stop and search on arrival back in England; this can be serious – they can seize your purchases and even your vehicle as well if they want, and there’s little recourse.
Anyway we boarded the ferry and this time there were three hours to spare before bedtime. I secured the cigarettes – under the allowance but still an awful lot of them and at a saving of £1-50 per packet well worthwhile, then located myself in the smoking room just off one of the bars, where I drank several glasses of beer to the surprise accompaniment of a live soccer game between top Scottish team Celtic and Manchester United, (which Man U were losing thanks to some very effective play by the Scots), and then went for the all you can eat dinner in the restaurant – both because I was hungry and because a coach load of Dutch students had boarded and had taken over the smoking room and were being incredibly loud and obnoxious.
It would seem that Dutch students don’t need sleep. I had the misfortune to have a cabin located amongst their accommodation and they partied until around 3am at which point being awake I noticed that we were already alongside in Harwich, even though disembarkation wasn’t until 630.
I snatched a couple of hours and ate some breakfast and this time got to my car on deck 3 again without any difficulty whatever – proving that I wasn’t a total idiot after all. More passport checks followed and then having been waved through the customs shed with my potential contraband I proceeded up the road to our office again, spending four hours there before returning home to my kitties who had plainly missed me even though they enjoy my friend’s daughter staying over when I’m away.
I had covered around 800 miles by road from the Monday morning when I left home until Thursday afternoon when I returned. I had used just over 120 litres, around 26 gallons, of petrol, which isn’t very good mileage but perhaps expected for the vehicle concerned – and I have to say it is definitely the right tool for the job. Driving the Renault is OK for round the town and short distances, and at close to 40mpg its far more economic, but I always found myself tired at 100 miles in it – in the Jaguar I could have driven day and night; where in the Renault I would have been glad to get out of it after the two hundred miles or so I covered each day, I was disappointed to have completed my journey each day in the Jag.
And satnav rules!
E
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