And we’re off!
! Well, almost! Our first few days have been a bit hectic and certainly we hope they’re not setting a trend for this trip. We broke down less than 2 miles from home right in the middle of Tesco’s forecourt blocking 2 lanes! Fortunately after about 10 minutes Taffy reluctantly managed to start and we skipped the refuel and headed straight to Imperial Commercial, the local MAN dealer, for repairs and a service. This was supposed to be an afternoons work but Taffy needed a lot more than a service and ended up having one tyre repaired and 2 re grooved, a new shock absorber, exhaust and some...
Read MoreNearly home now…
All that remains of the Peenumunde (in Germany) rocket testing site is the power station, guard house and the staffs housing (which is now normal housing). The Power station has been converted into a very interesting museum charting the birth of rockets through their use in WW2 to modern day. Outside the museum there are replica models of both the V1 doodlebug and the V2 which looks like it has emerged fresh from a Flash Gordon comic book. There is also one of the trams that used to bring workers to the site that survived the war, the Soviet pillage of equipment after the war and its...
Read MoreWe slipped through Greece
As usual we’ve spent far too long in Germany and so we decided to drive through Greece in a couple of days. We left Macedonia and re-entered the EU to find the landscape change immediately once more. The farming became intensive and properties looked more prosperous. You wouldn’t believe there was any crisis in Greece from the little we saw. We picked a stellplatz en route and found we had by chance stopped at the site of Alexander the Greats fathers tomb. This was only found recently and was completely in tact with the burial artifacts as they were almost 2500 years ago. The...
Read MoreIs that a cat?
We left Würzburg and began on our route south towards Georgia, Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Georgia (again) before coming back to Europe. There is something ominous about our destination this year and that could be that the list of countries above also spells GARAGE! We had driven a few kilometres out of Würzburg before we noticed the noise. It was a weird screaming from the engine – a bit like we’d got a cat stuck inside the gearbox. Uh oh. Just the sound of the new part bedding in perhaps? By the time we reached Munich the cat was in agony and clearly wasn’t bedding in...
Read MoreLast problem before Georgia!
Well the overland brigade will tell you time and time again that newer truck Chassis are a nightmare because of the electronics and computers and we were beginning to agree with them after our spate of dashboard errors. But, we thought, what if the errors we get are genuine and its the garages in the UK that are failing to understand the diagnostics properly? One more visit to a MAN dealer then! The dealer in Wurzburg was very swish compared to Norwich. Lots of new workshop bays and engineers who could actually speak German and English, as opposed to the English variety who spoke a kind of...
Read MoreJust one more day….
We’re now at Kitzinger near Wurzburg on the Main. Taffy is parked facing the river in a lovely stellplatz a short walk form the town centre or more importantly, the Ice Cafe where we end up each evening for an ice cream! We’ve cycled up and down stream for the last two days in glorious sunshine by the edge of the river on dedicated cycle paths passing numerous Disneyesque walled towns with the temperature in the high 20’s. The river had carved a small valley that is now lined with vines and is in our impression the loveliest of all the rivers in Germany. We’d planned...
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