The Endless Motorway

20 May 2017

20:24

I could have done France in half an hour if firstly, I hadn't stopped to stick bits of plastic on the lights so that our British light wouldn't dazzle the poor continentals, and secondly if the wretched van engine hadn’t been sick. It has a bronchial problem which has weakened it so that it takes an age to get up to motorway speed - Belgian, Dutch and French speeds that is. There is no mechanic on earth who could have persuaded it to chase after the slick, black, low slung cars which flash past in the outside land in Germany. Whenever I did manage to get the van up to 70 I would see a blur to my left as another bit of forsprung durch technik disappeared into the distance up ahead. 

Belgium passed with little to differentiate it, and the boundary between the Netherlands and Germany was not even marked - just a single letter D above one of the road signs. I had hoped to get to Munster or even Bremen, but first I had to get through the infamous Ruhrgebiet, the industrial heartland of Germany, and it seems the entire district was being dug up. Google maps very helpfully outlined in red all the bits where I would be delayed, and even found short cuts for me so that I got an unguided tour of the back streets of, I think, Hamborn. When I finally got clear I'd had enough and decided to look for a camp site some miles south of Munster. I seem to have an instinct for odd sites with nobody there. This was it:

I walked through the lovely beech woods round the site

and suddenly came across this:

All around the area and right up through the Ruhr and the north, the fields and the forests grow these mighty wind turbines - just small groups - 2 here, three there, five there, but all as tall as they come, the great 80 metre, slow moving monsters. They seem to me much more at home like this than the massed ranks of them that disfigure our mountains.

On Friday I got off early to get to Bremen where I had located a Citroen main dealer. I hit the motorway just after 6am and was amazed to find it as busy as the M4 at rush hour, but of course this was rush hour - at least for the cars, but the other impressive feature of all the motorways through Holland and Germany was the roughly 50/50 split between trucks and cars. The entire slow lane in both directions is taken up by an endless stream of huge 6 axle 40 tonne trucks. This, together with the ships that link up with them, is the growth engine of our economy, and it frightens me.

Arriving at the showroom, I explained as well as I could in my once fluent but now very rusty German, that the van lacked "kraft". The workshop manager took a drive in it and soon recognised the problem. He would link it to their computer and get a proper diagnosis, but first I must show my passport and the log book and agree to a 50 Euro diagnosis fee. OK by me and I sat in the comfortable waiting area with free coffee and a book. About 40 minutes later he returned with a document explaining that something to do with the air supply to the injectors needed replacing. The bill would come to 170 Euros altogether, but they could not get the parts until Monday.  Ahrr! I explained about meeting my wife in Copenhagen, paid the 50 euros for an incomprehensible diagnosis which I  hoped a garage in Copenhagen would understand, and set off again nursing the beast on yet more endless ribbons of concrete and tar. 

If the Ruhr was stressful, getting past Hamburg was even more so. I have never seen a bigger or longer programme of road enlargement, and we Brits are old hands at road works. Two hours of temporary narrow lanes, mostly slow moving but sometimes frighteningly fast moving.

At last I got to the Danish border where there was an actual barrier and we all had to slow right down - but were waved through. Almost immediately 80% of the trucks disappeared. I'm still pondering that one. Looking for a campsite near the motorway I picked the nearest which turned out to be yet another small site with nobody there. It was on the edge of a small town called Vojens and next door was an enormous arena:

A small part of it was being occupied by some sort of office party with live music from this lot:

How else a small town in a rural area fills a place large enough for a symphony orchestra or a Barry Manilow concert is a beguiling mystery in a fascinating country.