Blog 5: Destination Denmark

Hu was just a normal kid, trying to keep his head down and lead a normal life. He wasn't looking for adventure, but adventure was looking for him.



Humphrey was a your typical stay-at-home tarantula. He never got out much and, if he was pushed to admit it, was afraid of the great out doors. All he wanted was to stay under his piece of bark and quietly eat invertebrates, but sometimes you can't always get what you want.



Ludwig Van Beetlehoven started out life on the mean streets of Mexico before retiring to a commuter belt town 30 miles south of London to gracefully live out a quiet life of trips to the supermarket and leafy runs to country pubs for lunch. But the Volkswagen spirit of adventure was ingrained deep within his pistons.



When the call came they all knew what the had to do. Sometimes you have to put aside what you want to do and do what's right.


Or if you like the Lord of the Rings opening:

Hu: I'll go to Denmark but I don't know the way
Tomtom: You have my navigation
Ludwig Van Beetlehoven: And my wheels
Humphrey: And my web

Thus the unlikely fellowship was formed.

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Before leaving England I was once again faced with trying to cram an entire life into an improbably small space. This time however I had a little more than 20kg to play with and so managed afford myself space for a couple of luxuries such as speakers and a warm winter coat for the inevitable long cold lonely winter that's fast approaching.

I also managed to persuade my mum to take me to Costco to stock up on essentials like 6 packs of toothpaste, 4 halloumi cheeses and a gallon of mouth wash. Walking around Costco makes you feel a little bit like you're further ahead than you really are - as you walk towards what you think is a normal bottle of tomato ketchup, you stop to pick it up, only to realise you're still over meter away and it's not a normal bottle but a giant two litre behemoth.

It was a shame that I didn't have space for a 45kg bag of rice!



If you ever go to Costco and are hungry, I'd definitely recommend the buffalo wings and BBQ ribs you can buy piping hot there. Mum and I were ravenous after pushing our industrial sized trolly around, so got them for dinner. I would have included a picture but we ate them too quickly and my fingers got covered in BBQ sauce after the first one so I would have got my camera sticky... To quote an inferior products tag-line they were finger licking good!

I spent most of Thursday packing the car. I had to plan this quite well to ensure Humphrey was adequately concealed but also had enough ventilation to allow him to breath. The last thing that I wanted was for Ludwig to become a giant yellow spider coffin. (In the photo below Humphrey's packed in the left hand corner).



It turns out that I probably could have filled up 2 beetles and still have had to make tough decisions on what to take and what to leave. But I was pleased with the level of crammedness of the car, and made sure that I could still see out of the back, as really the last thing I wanted was for Ludwig to become a giant yellow person coffin (sorry Humphrey but that's just how it is).

With car packed I made sure I had my paper work:



And finalised my snacks for the journey.



As Ludwig would be my home for 12 hours straight I planned my snacks meticulously. To keep me awake, if I started to get sleepy I had chilli rice-cakes and strong minty liquorice chalk (skole-kridt), for savoury nibbles I had Twigglets and cashew nuts and for sweet tooth I had Tunnock's Caramel Wafer Biscuits; did you know 5,000,000 are made and sold every week! Of this particular week I had 0.0001% of the global stock of Tunnock's Caramel Wafer Biscuits! I also planned to pick up some Haribo in Germany (its birth place).

I also checked my state-of-the-art digital entertainment system - this would be all that stood between me and total insanity over the next 24 hours.



Here's the instrument panel that would be my connection to Ludwig's moods, I like it's blue glow! Oh and don't worry I haven't run out of petrol, I'd just put the key in the ignition and not turned it yet - otherwise this would be a really short blog!



This just leave the route:


View Larger Map

At 7pm local time I was waved goodbye by my mother and the intrepid trio trundled out of the driveway to start the first mile of this pan continental adventure. The going was good until I hit my first queue as I approached the Dartford crossing - little did I know that this was a sign of things to come.



I got to the Ferry port around 9ish and exchanged an internet print out for a key to my cabin. I drove through, what I can only describe as the most apathetic customs I've ever seen. There wasn't even an official watching TV not waving us through. Instead I was scrutineered by an empty chair, but luckily I wasn't stopped. As I drove up the gang-plank I knew I had reached my Rivendale.



Facts about the ship:

Length - 240m
Speed - 22 knots
Capacity - 1200 passengers
- 230 cars



As confusing as this may sound, this photo isn't actually the ferry I was on, it's a scale model of the ferry on the ferry. I know what you're thinking is there a scale model of the model on the model, but sadly I don't know, the windows weren't real windows on the model so I couldn't look in to check. Also how many things have scale models of themselves inside them? is it only nautical craft?

I parked my car on orange level 4, wished Humphrey a goodnight sleep and began my hunt for my cabin.



My cabin had bunk beds; I chose bottom and my overnight bag chose top. There was compact bathroom with a shower (just out of shot) and complementary Lux shower gel (I know what you're thinking, is this a ferry or a cruise?). The mirror in the cabin was covered in streaks of grey paint, I couldn't work out if this was a stylish design feature or whether a previous occupant succumbed to Cabin Fever and had smeared grey boot polish over it.









After settling in I retired to the Bar to enjoy an approximation of a British ale and a perusal of the internet.



Logging on to facebook on Stena's free internet cause a barrage of security questions involving me identifying you lovely people in various photos... this wouldn't have been a problem had you guys not tagged cup cakes as yourselves or if indeed all photo tags involved your faces!

However after several attempts I managed to log on to facebook and brag about my sea-faring adventure to a couple of you avid readers! It wasn't long before my eyelids began to droop and I hit the wooden hill to bedfordshire - I say wooden but I mean is gaudy gold-plated pseudo-grandiose.



There I had possibly one of the worst nights sleep I've ever endured - The boat rocked around, the duvet was scratchy and synthetic and engines made a constant 300 decibel drone.

I was woken by a multi-lingual tannoy informing me in Dutch and English that Breakfast was being served and would do for another hour so I better wake up. I turned on the TV for something to ignore as I got washed and dressed, and between various Dutch and German breakfast shows found this never ending info-merchal for a CD box set of 100 classic 70s country and western songs. The info-merchal consisted of video footage of each singer singing one line of their featured song, on a loop for ever.



I then went to the Taste Restaurant (Stena's words not mine) to try and get my money's worth from the breakfast buffet. I had 2 sausage, 4 bacon, scrambled eggs, mushroom, beans, toast, croissant with ham and cheese a boiled egg and coffee. My advise would be avoid the scrambled egg!

I then made my way to the car and swapped my English driver aid -



- for my European driver aid.



As I left the ferry I was worried that Gunnar Blomdahl the CEO of Stena had passed away, but luckily the flag was just in front of a lamp post.



I passed through customs with no hiccups and soon found myself driving through the Netherlands. As far as I can tell the whole country consists of green-houses and very little horses.





Everyone talks about Holland being flat, bit it still amazed me just how flat it is. I'm pretty sure no one in the Netherlands has ever lost a marble or ping-pong ball because they stop where ever they land, as they literally cannot roll anywhere. Apparently there is no Dutch word for hill, slope, mound or valley.



The boarder between the Netherlands and Germany took me a little by surprise. I sailed through at 110 kph about 70 mph. There was a building spanning the motorway with militaristic spikes coming out from the roof. The building however looked long abandoned since the conception of the Schengen agreement.

While in my first traffic jam in Germany I saw where Jason's family harks from.



Ludwig was starting to get thirsty, so I pulled into a motorway side Shell garage to give him a drink (strangely in Germany some service stations are only petrol stations, with no toilets and others have toilets but no petrol station). There I tried to implement plan Haribo- there was a shelf full of salty liquorice, which I avoided and grabbed the first gummy thing I could see. which turned out to be:



These might be the most disgusting sweets in the whole world, I actually wished I had bought the salty liquorice. Jogi-Bussi have the same gummi/foam ratio as my favourite Haribo hearts and frogs, but are also "mit joghert". Each sweet has a globule of actual yoghurt embedded in the gummy top.



I can assure you that the yoghurt/gelatine combination is actually worse than you expect. I managed to eat 4 in about 8 or 9 hours - and at least 2 of these were accidental when I was trying to get a liquorice chalk and reached into the wrong bag.

After my sweet disaster I had to stop for what an American would no doubt call a "comfort break". There I found the most confusing tap I've ever encountered.



To make water you had to punch the hand really quite violently. I tried to tentatively to tap the hand, push the hand and high five the hand but nothing happened and a man behind me waiting to use the sink gave me one of those "what are you stupid or something looks". Still once I was done it was back to the open road.

I approached Hamburg at rush our and soon ground to a halt in a sea traffic. Despite the traffic I quite liked Hamburg, the docks had cranes that looked like giraffe.



While in the tragically long traffic jam, I saw two interesting trucks:

This one has the German and internet celebrity Knut on it (although sadly only a picture)



and this one I imagined I could pick up with one hand.





I stopped just outside Flensburg for dinner. This is the last big German town before the boarder with Denmark, and I thought that a German meal would be a fair bit cheaper than a Danish one. The menu was hand written on various tiny blackboards pinned up around the seating area. I quickly established that the lady working there spoke worse English than I did German, i.e. no English. I also tried my best French, Spanish and Danish but to no avail. It was then that I noticed that the blackboards were numbered. Not to brag, but I am pretty hot on German numbers up to and including 12. Unfortunately the lowest blackboard I could find was numbered 15, so I was reduced to pointing while muttering "bitter and danker" over and over again. I hoped I would get at worse a horrible German sausage thing, but my heart sank as the lady grabbed a pale blob of unidentified meat with a pair of stained metallic tongs and plunged it into a deep fat fryer. A few minutes later this was put in front of me.



I cut into it and watched it bleed cheese over my plate. The chips were ok though!



The service station redeemed itself with two things, the first a dog bar (see my German's not that bad).



And secondly one of the coolest German compound words I've ever seen.



After nearly filling my belly and stretching my legs I made for the boarder. Just with as the crossing into Germany, entering Denmark was slightly underwhelming. All that signified the changing of state was an exit on the motorway called "items to declare". One thing that did impress me, however, was the rain that had persisted since England abated, the clouds cleared and the sun shone.



In this picture Germany is to the left and Denmark is to the right.

With the weather improving I donned my sunglasses, turned up the music on my high-tech entertainment system and had myself a right little sing song. With an eclectic mix of Frank Sinatra, Bob Marley, The Beach Boys and Johnny Cash I flew up Jutland and before I knew it was crossing the bridge onto the island of Fyn (pronounced fun but in very strong Birmingham accent).

I stopped to stretch my legs on Fyn and took a lovely photo of Ludwig.



I was eager to keep going, so jumped back in the car and motored on. I had almost completely crossed Fyn when Ludwig started to complain about being thirsty. I decided, as I was only 35 miles shy of my goal I a "splash and dash" (a term Formula 1 fans will be familiar with) was in order so I pulled into to the last petrol station on Fyn. In Denmark the petrol pumps have buttons on them so you can choose between 2 types of petrol from the same pump! How strange is that!



Here's Tomtom's view of the route at this point.



I was about to cross the Great Belt Suspension Bridge. The bridge is actually two bridges with a combined length of over 13 km. Midway between Fyn and Zealand is a tiny island where the two bridges meet. The first bridge, a long low snake over the sea, has a railway line next to the motorway, on the island in the middle this railway line plunges into a tunnel. At the highest point on the suspension part of the bridge you're at the highest point in Denmark! In this photo I'm actually already over half way over the 1st part of the bridge and as you can see the rest of it stretches pretty much to the horizon.



I was very impressed with the bridge, and once on Zealand I knew I was on the home straight. As I left the motorway (or E45 like the face cream) for the last time I couldn't suppress the grin on my face. "I can see clearly now the rain has gone" came on the advanced in-car entertainment system. I had made it!

But I know my task wasn't complete until I knew all members of "Destination Denmark" had survived the journey. I quickly scrambled for the boxes on top of Humphrey's vivarium. I was greeted by a slightly miffed but thoroughly alive spider!



After a chance to stretch our combined 10 legs and rest our combined 4 wheels all 3 of us reflected on our adventure. We were tired but happy. Humphrey and I shared a Danish beer (but if I'm honest I fell asleep before finishing it). No beer for Ludwig though - he's not allowed.





Me tired at the end of a very long day.

If you've read this far I'm hugely impressed! I'm so sorry to have used up so much of your time! If you're a glutton for punishment this week I'll be blogging about my first day at uni and possibly moving house. Thank you!