This is it, the destination for this curly wurly route of a trip! Essen in Germany!
The route from just north of Hamburg to Essen is pretty straightforward. Basically just motorways (or, the famous autobahn) so an easy day, right?
First off, the day looked cloudy, so I layered up for wet weather. I set up the Sat Nav and headed off south. I thought I’d ride through Hamburg, a little detour but one I thought would be worth it.
Hamburg centre was pretty easy to get to by following the road signs.
From a quick pause next to a big lake I could see the Jungfernstieg Promenade (I looked up the name later) which looked fabulous. The Alsterfontäne (Alster fountain) looked brilliant too. I immediately knew that Hamburg would be a city worth exploring. But not on this trip!
Riding back out of the city was really cool. There are so many interesting buildings. I will have to come back!
I headed back towards the motorway. Another Sat Nav delight as unexpected roadworks meant a little extra detour 😂 To be fair to the Sat Nav, it doesn’t have live traffic information so I’ll let it off 😂
Eventually, back on the motorway I headed towards Bremen. I’ve been there before, you know 😝
Shortly, signs start appearing on the overhead digital displays. It looked like perhaps the motorway was closed. I filtered through some of the traffic and found that traffic was being advised to leave at the nearest slip road. However, there was a gap after the junction and then more stationary traffic.
So, I persisted to filter. For ages. There was so much stationary traffic. By which I mean, people were out of their cars. Dogs were being walked. Had I encountered the apocalypse?
Eventually, I filtered across and off onto a parking area, where there were toilets. As I pulled up, a man said something to me in German and then “ein stunde”…an hour wait. Crikey.
After addressing a call of nature, I checked the Sat Nav on my phone. There was an accident of some sort on the motorway, with an expected delay of at least half an hour. Crikey.
So, I decided to see how far I could get. The apocalyptic feel continued as cars and lorries were parked on the exit slip road onto the motorway.
I slowly filtered through all of the stationary vehicles. Again, dogs, children, men going for a pee, women holding babies….
Eventually, I reached the end of the queue. It was tricky to work out what had happened but there was a big container lorry with multiple shredded tyres. It looked like someone had dropped it from a height as part of the substructure looked like it had collapsed. There was a big section of road covered in sand; soaking up some sort of spillage I assumed.
I was now at the front of the queue. A police lady waved me through, indicating to ride slowly over the sand, and I was through. The motorway ahead was completely empty.
What a bizarre experience.
Onwards I went a few miles down the road to get some fuel. I also grabbed some fuel for me.
As I was eating, a guy turned up on a Honda Hornet motorbike. He’s German and was asking what it’s like to ride in Scotland as it’s his dream to do it. I couldn’t recommend it enough!
The guy, whose name turned out to be Martin, asked me how easy it is to transport a motorbike to Germany. When I said I didn’t know, he looked confused. He then asked how I got my bike to Germany. He seemed quite surprised that I rode it there 😂
Off I went, with about another 135 miles ahead of me. It wasn’t the most exciting stretches of road, but it was great to arrive in Essen!
Time to swap headgear for a few days!
So that’s 410.3 kilometres today. That brings the total trip to 4,653km (or 2,891 miles).
The next four days will be spent at Spiel the biggest boardgame event in the world. It’s going to be odd not being on the bike 😂
Thank you for reading Day 17!
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