Thursday August 12th
Not too early a start today. The plan was to travel towards Hannover. They set out at about 10.30 and did a little grocery shop at Aldi, (which turned out to be a great move) and then set the Tom Tom. The intended buying petrol in the town at the first service station they came to. As it turned out they had to get onto the motorway before they found any, which is a shame as it costs more but in turning off the motorway to buy petrol they averted a disaster.
Suddenly the traffic ground to a halt, but there was the service area ahead so Mary managed to get me over into the off lane. By this time the traffic was at an absolute standstill. People were getting out of their cars on the motorway. They filled me up and then were lucky enough to find a park. It was obvious that there was no point joining the queue to get back onto the motorway as it would be stressful and wasteful of fuel, and hot! I get very hot idling in traffic and was happy that they chose to wait it out with lots of other people mainly from the Netherlands. A police car was travelling up the hard shoulder with a loud hailer saying something they didn’t understand. They were grateful that they had me to rest in with food (bought earlier) and shelter.
They went over to the toilets and found it cost 70c but they got a ticket for 50c off a coffee as part of it, so brought the coffee back to drink in the van. The smell of fuel was intense; with so many vehicles idling in the traffic it was like you were inhaling pure gasoline. As time went by the traffic was still not moving and more people had pulled into the layby to try and park and be able to get out of their vehicles. They made lunch and after that got out the Yahtzee and had a few games. Mary was sure that she would have been nearly having a breakdown if she had been in the traffic jam. They spent 3 hours waiting for the traffic to move and finally decided to attempt to get back onto the motorway about 2.30. The traffic was moving albeit very slowly. There had been an accident but it was all cleared up. Further along there were lots of road works and three lanes going into two so it was very slow travelling. Of course there were trucks everywhere and three little kiwis sat on the back seat with beaks clenched as the big trucks over took me one by one.
Alan had decided that he would pull over at the last possible service area before reaching Hanover to reprogramme the Tom Tom for a campsite. They took the opportunity to replenish my petrol tank as well. Over €100 spent on petrol today! They will never moan about the cost of petrol in NZ again.
While he was doing this Mary wandered off to the toilet and saw a sign. So when she came back to me, she told Alan that she had found a sign pointing to a campsite. So they decided to try it and see and it was only about 1 km away from where they were parked. Alan said that if there was public transport into Hanover they would stay two nights and if not one night and they would flag Hanover altogether. Fortunately the man at the office spoke really good English and explained it was only a short walk to a bus that took you to the tram that took you straight into the centre of town, so they have booked in for two nights here. It is right on a lake front and there is a mechanical water skiing contraption like a ski lift in the lake and people are having great fun being towed around.
I have a good lakeside view and will be quite happy to stay parked up here for two nights while they go and explore Hanover tomorrow.
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