Leipzig, Germany, Friday 20 November 2015
Our first day on the road. We left our apartment about 8:15 this morning and headed north toward the Czech border. There was no hurry today as we planned to spend the night in Leipzig, which Google Maps assured us was only about a 6 hour drive. The weather was chilly and wet (kind of like Portland), but it only rained hard for a few minutes all day.
We crossed into the Czech Republic without incident, stopping only to buy our motorway "vignette" on the way in. It's interesting to think about the fact that this has almost never been a border. In the last century, it was a border between two Nazi-dominated states during World War II, but otherwise not an international border at all until 1993. And soon after that, the border effectively disappeared into the Schengen aggregation. We found no border controls at all, just a sign as we crossed the Morava River.
The trip got more interesting as we turned west from Brno toward Prague. We began seeing signs on the electronic reader-boards saying that something was CLOSE (in English translation) at km-post 80. We couldn't read some of the words on the signs, so we weren't sure what to do --- until traffic came to a dead stop at about km-post 82. It was, of course, the motorway that was closed. We sat for about 40 minutes in a long line of vehicles, next to a truck from Romania and behind a car from Serbia. Finally, traffic starting moving and very quickly was back to motorway speeds (130 kph = 80 mph in the Czech Republic).
We stopped for gas outside of Prague and then for lunch at a McDonald's next door. McDonald's is everywhere here and we have only visited a couple of times, but roadside food in lands where we speak none of the language is really challenging and a Filet-O-Fish is the same thing everywhere! The blue-chip item on the Czech McDonald's menu is the Maestro Bohemia. You can see a picture below. Note that the menu is almost completely in English.
So on we went, with stomachs and gas tank full, north toward the German border, which we approached with some trepidation because of the residency question. But long before we reached Germany, we encountered a detour that took us off of the A-8 motorway (still being built) and onto a minor highway (also Highway 8) through lots of small towns. We got to see some of the Czech Republic in our trek through these towns and it reminded me a lot of Slovakia. Lots of broken-down, Soviet-era buildings alongside a lot of wonderful and well-preserved (or well-restored) historic buildings.
At some point we were supposed to go back to the A-8 motorway, but I don't think we quite found that point. We were about 5 miles from the German border when we finally decided that we had to head east and find the motorway again, having presumably missed the sign for the end of the detour.
It doesn't help that both the old highway and the motorway are numbered 8. The only way to tell the difference is by the color of the sign and we must have missed the red one for Motorway 8 and followed the white one for old Highway 8. It's like having U.S. Highway 5 right next to Interstate 5. The U.S. Department of Transportation (or whatever its predecessor was in the days when the interstate highways were designed) made a good decision when they numbered the Interstate highways high to low, in the opposite order of the old U.S. highway numbers.
So we finally got back on the motorway and headed north into Germany. Before the border are two tunnels. At the entrance to each tunnel we noticed multiple Czech police vehicles parked beside the road watching traffic. What were they looking for?
We crossed the border with no indication of any kind of border check, but about 4 km into Germany barriers routed all traffic onto what used to be a rest stop, but now is a border station. The speed limit was 10 kph, but we never actually had to stop. No document check. Presumably they would have stopped any vehicle that looked like it might be bringing in migrants, but our Volvo passed muster and we must have looked pretty innocent. In fact, no vehicle got stopped in the two or three minutes that it took us to proceed through the checkpoint.
Once we got past the border, we were back on the wonderful autobahn. No more 130 kph speed limit! Who knew that Suzanne would want to push it up to 140 or 145 when she got the chance? But the Volvo seems to like driving fast. :) We have to do it now, because that Oregon freeway speed limit of 65 mph is going to seem very, very slow!
So we've made it through the first potential trouble-spot of the trip with no problems. We'll have to get through the border stations entering Sweden, but I suspect that they won't be any more difficult than this one. We'll find out in a couple of days.
When planning our trip, I had considered trying to get tickets for a concert by the renowned Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig. Looking online, there was one pair of adjacent tickets available for Friday night, for 60 euros each. We have gotten used to paying 13 euros for concerts in Bratislava, so this seemed a bit steep. And given the uncertainty about our arrival time (with possible border delays) and the possibility that we would be too exhausted to enjoy the concert, I decided to pass. Tonight I have mixed feelings about that decision. Although we are tired from driving, it would really be a wonderful opportunity to hear an outstanding orchestra. Oh well, we'll be through here again in February on our way to drop off the car, so maybe we'll do it then. (In fact, we are thinking of a "music tour" in February from Bratislava to Sweden, hitting as many orchestras and operas as we can on the way.)
Our Leipzig hotel (the Windorf) is very nice and the dinner in the restaurant was tasty and (for Germany) affordable. (And the complimentary breakfast proved to be exceptional.) This is a bit of a relief, because when I asked Google Maps for directions I got a message saying "The business at this address has been reported to be closed." I figured that the Best Western Web site wouldn't make a reservation for us at a hotel that wasn't open, and I was correct!
The only issue with the hotel is the bathroom faucet. Very fancy! It has a sensor that turns it on when you put your hand underneath. But not when you put your toothbrush underneath. And not when you put a water glass underneath. Too fancy!
So a good first day on the road. I'll continue this post tomorrow from Denmark, assuming that we don't get detoured off the autobahn and end up in Switzerland or something!
Aabenraa, Denmark, Saturday 21 November
That's not a typo --- we really are staying in a town that starts and ends with "aa." How cool is that? After three months in the "land of no vowels," Suzanne is thrilled that we are back in a place that actually uses vowels, even wastefully!
Aabenraa is a charming little port town, located on a frigid fjord on the east coast of Denmark, just across the border from Germany. When we checked in the very sweet hotel clerk moved us to a different room than they had originally booked for us because from now until Christmas many of the 15,000 residents of Aabenraa celebrate Christmas very loudly until 1am underneath the other wing of the hotel. The entertainment tonight was "Casey Jones ... from Nashville!" I guess we didn't look like the sort of folk who would be up at that hour, so she wisely suggested that we move. (As it turned out, our room was right above where the roudy smokers go outside to pollute, so we didn't hear music but we did get a lot of noise.)
All of today's driving until the very end was in Germany and for most of the trip we made excellent time. But this seems to be a popular time of year for road construction on the autobahn. Construction is always a pain, but it is particularly annoying here. When you are cruising along at 140 kph (often in the right lane!), it seems dreadfully slow to have an 80 kph or sometimes 60 kph limit for long stretches of road. This was especially frustrating today because at only a few construction sites were they actually doing any work on Saturday.
It was fun to pass a van that, from the lettering on the outside, appeared to contain the Latvian Windsurfing Team.
As we left Magdeburg, I started wondering where the border between East and West Germany was, so I began watching for a large, unused border-control station. Sure enough, between Magdeburg and Braunschweig there was a huge border station on each side of the road. It didn't look totally abandoned, but it's certainly not a border-crossing any more.
When we arrived at a real border, crossing into Denmark was a non-event; they have not restricted entry at all. Just like Schengen before refugees. We'll see about Sweden tomorrow.
Dinner at the hotel tonight was an adventure, but one with a very happy ending. The restaurant was heavily booked, but the hotel clerk got a table for us. But when we opened the menu, the three entrees on the fixed-price menu sounded like a children's game: deer, duck, goose. Oops. Here we are 100 meters from the ocean and there is no seafood on the menu? We asked the waitress and she asked the chef, and returned to suggest that they could do a halibut dish for us. It turned out to be a wonderful halibut fillet with a tetrahedron of potatoes, leaves of brussels sprouts, a couple of long, slender oyster mushrooms, and a slab of garlic butter to melt over everything. Truly excellent! And the wine list featured several Joseph Drouhin wines, of which we drank a lovely half-bottle of 2010 Chablis. The celery soup appetizer and the baked apple dessert with cinnamon and vanilla ice cream were also very good. We didn't come on this trip for the cuisine, but so far we've had two very good dinners. Now if we could do something about the lunches on the road ...
Tomorrow we cross two long bridges into Sweden and prepare to complete our mission: winter tires for the Volvo. I'll write more from the other side of the water.
Gothenburg, Sweden, Sunday, 22 November
Guess what: It snows in Denmark! It sometimes snows a lot in Denmark!
We awoke this morning to find frost on the car windows (at a temperature of 31˚F) and the lightest of snow flurries blowing in the wind. How cool it seemed.
As we drove north and east from Aabenraa, the snow started to get heavier and the temperature rose a bit, hovering between 32 and 33. Soon we were in a full-scale blizzard, with limited visibility and snow accumulating along the sides of the road, but not in the traffic lanes as the temperature and traffic kept them clear.
Those who have refereed soccer games with me over the years might remember my standard comment on hot summer days: "It's better than 40 degrees and raining sideways." Well, this was worse than 40 degrees and raining sideways; it was 30 degrees and snowing sideways. At least I wasn't standing out in the wind wearing shorts!
Here are some photos of driving in the snow:
But by the time we got near Copenhagen there was about 6 inches of snow on the ground. It must have been very icy overnight because I counted 26 vehicles either wrecked or abandoned on the side of the road. Today, the temperature maintained at about 35 and the road was just wet. A few of the cars seemed to be damaged, especially the one that was upside down and the one whose top was collapsed, but the vast majority appeared to be just abandoned at the side of the road. I guess that it must be OK in snowstorms to just leave your car for a day on the side of the motorway until you make it back to retrieve it. Many were "plowed in" by the snow plow and we saw one man dutifully shoveling a path for his truck to get out.
Our car did very well in the snow (even without its soon-to-be-installed winter tires), but the GPS did not do so well, or at least did not do what we wanted it to do. After navigating around Copenhagen successfully, she took us north to a ferry landing at Helsingor rather than across the bridge to Malmo. We did not discover this until we were more than a half-hour out of the way. We didn't want to try out the ferry in these conditions (if they were even running in the high winds), so around we turned and backtracked to find the bridge. It is bad enough driving in the snow and wind, but driving an extra hour-plus out of the way is very annoying.
No doubt the ferry ride would have been awful, but driving across the two long bridges was terrifying! The cross-wind was very strong from the north and the snow made it hard to see far in front of us. I just slowed to 70 kph or so and concentrated on keeping the car in the lane as best I could. There was not a lot of traffic, so on the rare occasions when I got close to the lane line there was no one next door.
The toll on the bridge into Sweden is collected at the Swedish end of the bridge, and they had immigration stations located just past the toll booths. This time the agent stopped us (and had to wipe the accumulated snow off of our license plate to figure out what it was). He asked for our passports, checked the pictures, and waved us on through. Not a problem, but at least the Swedes were checking as the news reports had indicated.
Once we reached the Swedish side, we stopped at a rest stop in Malmo for lunch. It was snowing heavily and we still had 300 km to drive up the west coast of Sweden. I used the restaurant wi-fi to check the weather: Sunny and cold in Gothenburg. Really? Or was this the weather from a couple of days ago and my phone app hadn't updated? I typed in Malmo. It said snowing and windy. OK, so it was right and we might get better weather up nearer to the North Pole.
We headed north. Sure enough, about an hour north of Malmo, the snow quit and by the time we got close to Gothenburg there was not even any on the ground. The forecast for tomorrow doesn't look too bad, which is fortunate because we can't leave until the snow tires are installed and then we have to re-trace three days worth of steps in two long days. No time for any snow, detours, or missed directions on that trip!
Tonight we ate at a pretty lame pizza-and-falafel place near our hotel. It was edible and abundant, but compared with the wonderful, gourmet hotel meals of the last two nights it was pretty poor. The hotel is satisfactory though the room is small. This view of the hall makes it look like a cell block, but the cells are pretty nice!
Tomorrow morning we go to Volvo at 8am to have our tires changed. Then we head south as fast as we can. We have reservations in Hannover for tomorrow night, which is a nine-hour drive if we can go the speed limit and don't ever stop. Obviously that's not going to happen, so we'll just do our best and make as good time as we can. If I have any energy left tomorrow night, I'll update this post.
Hannover, Germany, Monday 23 November
Monday morning in Gothenburg the temperature was 16 degrees, Fahrenheit. That's the coldest that we Portlanders have been for a while. But our car was in the hotel garage so it stayed nice and warm and was ready to head "home" to Volvo.
We arrived at the Volvo factory delivery center a few minutes before their 8am opening. They treated us very well and had our snow tires installed in less than an hour. The snow tires are a little noisier than the original Pirellis, but they will do their job.
We headed south and made good time to Malmo and back across the bridge. This time the water was glassy smooth; no hint of the 50 mph winds of the day before.
Driving south along the Swedish coast was a fairyland on the day after the blizzard. In some places, the north wind had literally plastered snow all the way up the north side of the tree trunks. Many of the trees were crystal ice sculptures sparkling in the morning sunshine!
We have noticed over the years that it is particularly hard to drive into the sun late in the evening or early in the morning because the sun is just at the bottom of your visor. Well, at this time of year in Sweden, the sun is at the bottom of your visor all "day." I put "day" in quotes because it is only light for about seven hours, roughly 8:30 to 3:30, and the sun never gets anywhere near above you. Gothenburg is at almost 58 degrees latitude, which is closer to the Arctic Circle than it is to the latitude of Portland, Minneapolis, or anywhere else (except Alaska) in the United States. As we headed south, we were staring into the low sun for most of today's trip.
There was still a lot of snow on the landscape and on the sides of the road. Many of the cars that we saw abandoned on Sunday morning were still there on Monday morning. The crews were just starting to get caught up on clearing them.
There were no border checks today, either entering Denmark or going from Denmark into Germany. I guess the Germans aren't too worried about Viking refugees or invaders. We made good time, slowed only by a lot of construction in Northern Germany, arriving at our hotel in Hannover shortly after 7pm. The hotel is located down the street from a busy cinema and parking is truly scarce. Imagine our surprise that the one empty parking place on the entire block happened to be right in front of the hotel door! And there were three other cars coveting it when we pulled in. We are always grateful for good fortune!
After a quick dinner at a pasta joint down the street, we are ready to settle into an exhausted sleep. Another long day tomorrow brings us "home" to Bratislava. Google Maps says 8.5 hours, so if we get an early start we should be home by dinner time. It will be good to be off the road (and bring this lengthy post to an end).
Bratislava, Tuesday 24 November
We're back! Today's drive went smoothly and we arrived in Bratislava about 4pm. No border checks at all entering either the Czech or Slovak Republic. And we navigated the infamous detour in the north of the Czech Republic smoothly this time. We went east of the not-yet-finished motorway this time, through the lovely town of Ústí nad Labem perched on the edge of the scenic Labe River. I want to go back!
The roads in the Czech Republic are poorer than in any other part of the trip. (Though, in fairness, the only Slovak road we took was one of the best in the country.) In many places, the lanes of the motorway were like wash-boards, rattling our fillings as we drove over them. And there is no real motorway going around or through Prague, so one has to get off onto secondary roads with traffic lights and watch like a hawk not to miss the turns.
Every few miles on the final stretch south of Brno there would be a gap in the metal divider on the median. Every time this happened, they put up orange markers in place of the rails, and also slowed traffic from 130 kph to 80 kph, almost without warning. You are flying along at 130, then suddenly there is a sign lowering the limit to 100, followed 100 meters later by one lowering it to 80, and 200 meters after that we are back to 130! The first couple of times, I slammed on the brakes and got down to 110 or so before the limit went back up to 130. After that, I realized that no one else was paying any attention to these ridiculous tempo changes and I ignored them, too. It is a perfect speed trap, though, if a policajt had happened to be sitting on the side with a radar gun.
Speaking of radar, we encountered a new problem with modern technology in the snow this week. The front of the Volvo has a radar unit that detects the distance and speed of the car in front of us and adjusts our cruise control to keep us an appropriate (and adjustable) distance --- and also slams on the brakes if necessary. Except that the radar unit doesn't work when it is covered with snow. The car's computer gives you a warning message on the display saying that the radar unit is unavailable and that you will have to slow down on your own.
It also refers you to the owner's manual for more information. The only problem is ... the complete owners manual is online. There is an electronic version available through the car display, but only when the car is stopped. And of course we have no Internet access in the car in foreign countries, so there is basically no way to get this information without stopping and hoping that it is in the abbreviated car-computer manual. We decided to wait and ask the nice people in Gothenburg, who showed us where the radar unit was and explained the issues.
So we're back in Bratislava and tomorrow and Thursday I teach. There is no Thanksgiving here --- they are too busy celebrating all the Struggles for Freedom and National Uprisings to have any interest in giving thanks. In fact, Thanksgiving morning is my last PhD class lecture. One of the young American Fulbright "language scholars" is going to visit us for a couple of days and have Thanksgiving dinner with us, so that should be fun and a little bit of home.
If there's anything to say, I'll post again on the weekend, but perhaps not until some time next week. Until then, I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving.
That's not a typo --- we really are staying in a town that starts and ends with "aa." How cool is that? After three months in the "land of no vowels," Suzanne is thrilled that we are back in a place that actually uses vowels, even wastefully!
Aabenraa is a charming little port town, located on a frigid fjord on the east coast of Denmark, just across the border from Germany. When we checked in the very sweet hotel clerk moved us to a different room than they had originally booked for us because from now until Christmas many of the 15,000 residents of Aabenraa celebrate Christmas very loudly until 1am underneath the other wing of the hotel. The entertainment tonight was "Casey Jones ... from Nashville!" I guess we didn't look like the sort of folk who would be up at that hour, so she wisely suggested that we move. (As it turned out, our room was right above where the roudy smokers go outside to pollute, so we didn't hear music but we did get a lot of noise.)
All of today's driving until the very end was in Germany and for most of the trip we made excellent time. But this seems to be a popular time of year for road construction on the autobahn. Construction is always a pain, but it is particularly annoying here. When you are cruising along at 140 kph (often in the right lane!), it seems dreadfully slow to have an 80 kph or sometimes 60 kph limit for long stretches of road. This was especially frustrating today because at only a few construction sites were they actually doing any work on Saturday.
It was fun to pass a van that, from the lettering on the outside, appeared to contain the Latvian Windsurfing Team.
As we left Magdeburg, I started wondering where the border between East and West Germany was, so I began watching for a large, unused border-control station. Sure enough, between Magdeburg and Braunschweig there was a huge border station on each side of the road. It didn't look totally abandoned, but it's certainly not a border-crossing any more.
When we arrived at a real border, crossing into Denmark was a non-event; they have not restricted entry at all. Just like Schengen before refugees. We'll see about Sweden tomorrow.
Dinner at the hotel tonight was an adventure, but one with a very happy ending. The restaurant was heavily booked, but the hotel clerk got a table for us. But when we opened the menu, the three entrees on the fixed-price menu sounded like a children's game: deer, duck, goose. Oops. Here we are 100 meters from the ocean and there is no seafood on the menu? We asked the waitress and she asked the chef, and returned to suggest that they could do a halibut dish for us. It turned out to be a wonderful halibut fillet with a tetrahedron of potatoes, leaves of brussels sprouts, a couple of long, slender oyster mushrooms, and a slab of garlic butter to melt over everything. Truly excellent! And the wine list featured several Joseph Drouhin wines, of which we drank a lovely half-bottle of 2010 Chablis. The celery soup appetizer and the baked apple dessert with cinnamon and vanilla ice cream were also very good. We didn't come on this trip for the cuisine, but so far we've had two very good dinners. Now if we could do something about the lunches on the road ...
Tomorrow we cross two long bridges into Sweden and prepare to complete our mission: winter tires for the Volvo. I'll write more from the other side of the water.
Gothenburg, Sweden, Sunday, 22 November
Guess what: It snows in Denmark! It sometimes snows a lot in Denmark!
We awoke this morning to find frost on the car windows (at a temperature of 31˚F) and the lightest of snow flurries blowing in the wind. How cool it seemed.
As we drove north and east from Aabenraa, the snow started to get heavier and the temperature rose a bit, hovering between 32 and 33. Soon we were in a full-scale blizzard, with limited visibility and snow accumulating along the sides of the road, but not in the traffic lanes as the temperature and traffic kept them clear.
Those who have refereed soccer games with me over the years might remember my standard comment on hot summer days: "It's better than 40 degrees and raining sideways." Well, this was worse than 40 degrees and raining sideways; it was 30 degrees and snowing sideways. At least I wasn't standing out in the wind wearing shorts!
Here are some photos of driving in the snow:
But by the time we got near Copenhagen there was about 6 inches of snow on the ground. It must have been very icy overnight because I counted 26 vehicles either wrecked or abandoned on the side of the road. Today, the temperature maintained at about 35 and the road was just wet. A few of the cars seemed to be damaged, especially the one that was upside down and the one whose top was collapsed, but the vast majority appeared to be just abandoned at the side of the road. I guess that it must be OK in snowstorms to just leave your car for a day on the side of the motorway until you make it back to retrieve it. Many were "plowed in" by the snow plow and we saw one man dutifully shoveling a path for his truck to get out.
Our car did very well in the snow (even without its soon-to-be-installed winter tires), but the GPS did not do so well, or at least did not do what we wanted it to do. After navigating around Copenhagen successfully, she took us north to a ferry landing at Helsingor rather than across the bridge to Malmo. We did not discover this until we were more than a half-hour out of the way. We didn't want to try out the ferry in these conditions (if they were even running in the high winds), so around we turned and backtracked to find the bridge. It is bad enough driving in the snow and wind, but driving an extra hour-plus out of the way is very annoying.
No doubt the ferry ride would have been awful, but driving across the two long bridges was terrifying! The cross-wind was very strong from the north and the snow made it hard to see far in front of us. I just slowed to 70 kph or so and concentrated on keeping the car in the lane as best I could. There was not a lot of traffic, so on the rare occasions when I got close to the lane line there was no one next door.
The toll on the bridge into Sweden is collected at the Swedish end of the bridge, and they had immigration stations located just past the toll booths. This time the agent stopped us (and had to wipe the accumulated snow off of our license plate to figure out what it was). He asked for our passports, checked the pictures, and waved us on through. Not a problem, but at least the Swedes were checking as the news reports had indicated.
Once we reached the Swedish side, we stopped at a rest stop in Malmo for lunch. It was snowing heavily and we still had 300 km to drive up the west coast of Sweden. I used the restaurant wi-fi to check the weather: Sunny and cold in Gothenburg. Really? Or was this the weather from a couple of days ago and my phone app hadn't updated? I typed in Malmo. It said snowing and windy. OK, so it was right and we might get better weather up nearer to the North Pole.
We headed north. Sure enough, about an hour north of Malmo, the snow quit and by the time we got close to Gothenburg there was not even any on the ground. The forecast for tomorrow doesn't look too bad, which is fortunate because we can't leave until the snow tires are installed and then we have to re-trace three days worth of steps in two long days. No time for any snow, detours, or missed directions on that trip!
Tonight we ate at a pretty lame pizza-and-falafel place near our hotel. It was edible and abundant, but compared with the wonderful, gourmet hotel meals of the last two nights it was pretty poor. The hotel is satisfactory though the room is small. This view of the hall makes it look like a cell block, but the cells are pretty nice!
Tomorrow morning we go to Volvo at 8am to have our tires changed. Then we head south as fast as we can. We have reservations in Hannover for tomorrow night, which is a nine-hour drive if we can go the speed limit and don't ever stop. Obviously that's not going to happen, so we'll just do our best and make as good time as we can. If I have any energy left tomorrow night, I'll update this post.
Hannover, Germany, Monday 23 November
Monday morning in Gothenburg the temperature was 16 degrees, Fahrenheit. That's the coldest that we Portlanders have been for a while. But our car was in the hotel garage so it stayed nice and warm and was ready to head "home" to Volvo.
We arrived at the Volvo factory delivery center a few minutes before their 8am opening. They treated us very well and had our snow tires installed in less than an hour. The snow tires are a little noisier than the original Pirellis, but they will do their job.
We headed south and made good time to Malmo and back across the bridge. This time the water was glassy smooth; no hint of the 50 mph winds of the day before.
Driving south along the Swedish coast was a fairyland on the day after the blizzard. In some places, the north wind had literally plastered snow all the way up the north side of the tree trunks. Many of the trees were crystal ice sculptures sparkling in the morning sunshine!
We have noticed over the years that it is particularly hard to drive into the sun late in the evening or early in the morning because the sun is just at the bottom of your visor. Well, at this time of year in Sweden, the sun is at the bottom of your visor all "day." I put "day" in quotes because it is only light for about seven hours, roughly 8:30 to 3:30, and the sun never gets anywhere near above you. Gothenburg is at almost 58 degrees latitude, which is closer to the Arctic Circle than it is to the latitude of Portland, Minneapolis, or anywhere else (except Alaska) in the United States. As we headed south, we were staring into the low sun for most of today's trip.
There was still a lot of snow on the landscape and on the sides of the road. Many of the cars that we saw abandoned on Sunday morning were still there on Monday morning. The crews were just starting to get caught up on clearing them.
There were no border checks today, either entering Denmark or going from Denmark into Germany. I guess the Germans aren't too worried about Viking refugees or invaders. We made good time, slowed only by a lot of construction in Northern Germany, arriving at our hotel in Hannover shortly after 7pm. The hotel is located down the street from a busy cinema and parking is truly scarce. Imagine our surprise that the one empty parking place on the entire block happened to be right in front of the hotel door! And there were three other cars coveting it when we pulled in. We are always grateful for good fortune!
After a quick dinner at a pasta joint down the street, we are ready to settle into an exhausted sleep. Another long day tomorrow brings us "home" to Bratislava. Google Maps says 8.5 hours, so if we get an early start we should be home by dinner time. It will be good to be off the road (and bring this lengthy post to an end).
Bratislava, Tuesday 24 November
We're back! Today's drive went smoothly and we arrived in Bratislava about 4pm. No border checks at all entering either the Czech or Slovak Republic. And we navigated the infamous detour in the north of the Czech Republic smoothly this time. We went east of the not-yet-finished motorway this time, through the lovely town of Ústí nad Labem perched on the edge of the scenic Labe River. I want to go back!
The roads in the Czech Republic are poorer than in any other part of the trip. (Though, in fairness, the only Slovak road we took was one of the best in the country.) In many places, the lanes of the motorway were like wash-boards, rattling our fillings as we drove over them. And there is no real motorway going around or through Prague, so one has to get off onto secondary roads with traffic lights and watch like a hawk not to miss the turns.
Every few miles on the final stretch south of Brno there would be a gap in the metal divider on the median. Every time this happened, they put up orange markers in place of the rails, and also slowed traffic from 130 kph to 80 kph, almost without warning. You are flying along at 130, then suddenly there is a sign lowering the limit to 100, followed 100 meters later by one lowering it to 80, and 200 meters after that we are back to 130! The first couple of times, I slammed on the brakes and got down to 110 or so before the limit went back up to 130. After that, I realized that no one else was paying any attention to these ridiculous tempo changes and I ignored them, too. It is a perfect speed trap, though, if a policajt had happened to be sitting on the side with a radar gun.
Speaking of radar, we encountered a new problem with modern technology in the snow this week. The front of the Volvo has a radar unit that detects the distance and speed of the car in front of us and adjusts our cruise control to keep us an appropriate (and adjustable) distance --- and also slams on the brakes if necessary. Except that the radar unit doesn't work when it is covered with snow. The car's computer gives you a warning message on the display saying that the radar unit is unavailable and that you will have to slow down on your own.
It also refers you to the owner's manual for more information. The only problem is ... the complete owners manual is online. There is an electronic version available through the car display, but only when the car is stopped. And of course we have no Internet access in the car in foreign countries, so there is basically no way to get this information without stopping and hoping that it is in the abbreviated car-computer manual. We decided to wait and ask the nice people in Gothenburg, who showed us where the radar unit was and explained the issues.
So we're back in Bratislava and tomorrow and Thursday I teach. There is no Thanksgiving here --- they are too busy celebrating all the Struggles for Freedom and National Uprisings to have any interest in giving thanks. In fact, Thanksgiving morning is my last PhD class lecture. One of the young American Fulbright "language scholars" is going to visit us for a couple of days and have Thanksgiving dinner with us, so that should be fun and a little bit of home.
If there's anything to say, I'll post again on the weekend, but perhaps not until some time next week. Until then, I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving.
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