Following on from part three of this “adventure”, we made it into Sweden via the bridge from Copenhagen at 2105 local time. That’s just short of 13 hours and roughly 500 miles in Europe. We decided to take the short cut rather than drive north out of Hamburg and all the way through Denmark. We went NNE and picked up the ferry at Putgarden.
It’s a 40 minute crossing at an approximate cost of £50 but definitely worth it as I think it saved us between 3 and 4 hours driving.
Currently sitting in a friend’s house just outside the university town of Lund in Sweden, I am very glad we cut the trip down a bit.
My navigator Simon (age 11) and I had fallen out big time. I had given up trying to get any photos of the bridge as there was nowhere to stop, the revamped heating in the car have turned my socks into something that would willingly crawl out of the bin and run laps round the town in the snow so all in all bed is looking good!
After taking the driving pretty easy for most of the morning – rarely pushing above 60 mph – by the evening I was quite happy to clip along at 70 or 80. Road conditions have been very good with the exception of a stretch in northern Holland where there was sheet ice for 3 to 4 miles and only narrow clear lines between them.
One of the two accidents we saw had occurred on this section – a shunt between a 4×4 and a truck by the looks of it.
In places in Germany there were quite severe “ice ridges” on the road that were exciting to drive along, very similar to getting caught in a rut, with the tyres forced to follow the edge of the ice.
It wasn’t until we got to Denmark that there was much snow on the road, cars were still buzzing by at 80 though – my problem was being unsure as to which lane I was in and trying to take photos while driving (eek!).
Jenny has done fantastically but the engine is over revving again, and I have given up watching the fuel gauge go down. Having said that we have used 2.5 tanks of fuel and we have about 300 miles to go so overall so not to bad I guess. The snow conditions in Sweden are great, we had fun getting to our friends house driving on hard packed snow and 6 inches of lying snow alternately.
We start out again at about 0900 tomorrow and with a now fully charged phone hopefully will get some more updates out during the day.
Come back for regular updates as we report on the progress.
