Driving and Decisions

After our successful day at Lauwersoog we woke up to a beautiful morning and it was a tough place to leave, but we needed to get further along the road. So after a leisurely breakfast a chat to our new neighbours in the campsite and final cabin checks we got going at around 10:40am. The weather was warm but there was a harr plaguing the coastal areas. We headed south east towards Gronnigen, a city we would love to explore, one of our good friends worked there and said good things about it but today was for getting some miles under our belt so after a wrong turn and a reroute we were soon onto the motorways heading towards Bremen and Hamburg. Strangely we didn't see any signs saying Welcome to Germany when we crossed the border, just the obligatory speed limit signs and a change on the road marking and signs. We had considered the ferry north of Bremerhaven across the Elbe but a fortuitous search for a timetable told us the ferry no longer ran so the A1 to Hamburg it was. It was a hot day and it's hard to keep cool in the van as Bessie has no air conditioning. So we had a few stops to get some fresh air and have lunch.

I was keen to get north of Hamburg as we still have a lot of miles to do up through Denmark and we want to spend a bit of time there also. There was another motorway mix up and we ended up staying on the A1 and skirting Hamburg on the east rather than our intended route up the A7, but it was easily fixed further up the road once we realised our mistake, its no fun if it all goes like clockwork....thats what I keep telling myself anyway. The motorhome is pretty slow on the road, we tend to stick to around 60mph even on the motorways as economy suffers if you push it harder so it interesting on the autobahn to have cars battering past at some pretty high speeds, you need to check carefully what's coming from the rear if your thinking about pulling out to overtake.

Joyce checked our Park4Night App and found a couple of campsites about 20km south west of Keil and that's where we have ended up. It's fine and was only 15euro including electric and showers. We will have a poke about the area in the morning before we get moving again. Callum and Logan were on the whole good today, it's a long day for them sat in their chairs and barr some minor arguing and kicking each other we managed to keep them amused for the day. They don't yet quite understand the concept of I Spy, but hopefully after a few more days they will realise that after they say the letter they don't have to tell you the answer straight away, they are quite amusing sometimes. We didn't get to the campsite until 6:15pm and we have covered about 280miles, so that's not much fun for them. We have had a look at the map and there's still a lot of miles to Hirtshals but we don't want to just shoot up the motorway and not see a bit of the place. 

So after tea Joyce and myself sat down and worked out a rough plan for the next few days. We hadn't booked our ferry ticket to Norway as we didn't know how long this stage of the journey would take and now I am glad we didn't as I would have probably booked it for Tuesday.......and we now know that would have been too soon and too much driving. So executive decisions made and ferry is now booked for Friday 24th in the morning. That gives us 4 nights in Denmark, the first of which tomorrow will be somewhere round about Billund and the following day a trip we hope the boys will enjoy. We'll then head up the west coast of Denmark and hopefully get some half decent weather as the beaches there look nice.