As
planned previousely I did go to Debconf15 with my new car. It was a completely new
experience for me. The longest car trip that had completed before this was
a 600 km drive after Debconf14 from Portland, Oregon, USA to Vancouver,
Canada and back and that was just a couple days with just under 6 hours of
max driving in one of the days. This was to be much, much more than that.
As the initial plan to take someone with me from Riga to Debconf15 fizzled
out, I decided on a short-cut and started my journey with a 26 hour ferry
ride from Liepaja to Travemunde. I arrived a couple hours before the
departure, checked in and got a bunch of passes. They waved my car past
the gate and then a worker waved me up to top deck. That was a good thing
as I found out later, because the lower deck is locked for the night, but
you can still try to get to your car on the upper deck, if you forgot
something there. The deck hands expertly maneuvered me in the car to a
very tight corner and put blocks under the wheels. At this point you would
want to fold your mirrors, put on a parking break and pick up everything
that you will need trought the night and go to your cabin. I sucked at
planing this enough in advance, so I did not have cabin - just a seat in a
common seating area.
That is something that I do not wish to repeat, ever. Imagine around 20
people in a small room filled with around 40 airplane type seats. There
are lockers there to put your stuff in, but that is it. You are supposed
to bring your own blanket. I brought a sleeping bag, that was a good move
as I was not cold at least. But I didn't get a good night's sleep either.
The ferry was full of Estonian, Latvian and Russian long haul truck
drivers who also used the ferry as a shortcut for the long road and also
as a 26 hour break from work where they could drink and party as much as
they wanted to. That went on to at least 4 am. The sleeping room was dark,
but there was noise leaking in both from engines and from the truckers and
when they simmered down, then another noise started - some drunk or maybe
even crazy guy was there in the room constantly talking to himself for
hours. No One could get him to stop. I did fall asleep in the end, but
that was not a fun ride. There was food on board (3 meals included) and
that was actually very nicely made, above common diner standard. And there
was no Internet there - the ship was out of reach of the coastal mobile
networks for most of the trip. I read a couple books in Kindle over that
trip.
One noteworthy detail is how tight they manage to
pack the cars onto the ship
- there is barely enough space to squeese between the cars sideways and
even that is sometimes impossible between the large trucks. For many cars
there was definitely not enough space to open the doors. This adds to the
need to pick up everything that you will need overnight from the car
immediately. Unless you have a Tesla Model X that is :).
It took nearly an hour after docking in Travemunde before the first batch
of trucks inched off the ferry before I could drive off and start moving
too. And as soon as I got off, I immediately got lost. I was using the
build-in navigation of the car so that I don't use up all the limited
mobile traffic for Wase, but as that navigation data was not updated for a
couple of years (car makers want you to pay insane money for map updates,
like over 250€ every time you want to bring you maps up to date) it routed
me to a dead end - to a street that no longer existed due to ongoing
reconstruction. The map picked up traffic and weather information from a
local radio transmitter just fine, but not map updates. Had to just drive
randomly in the general direction of where I wanted to go for a while
before the navigator rerouted itself along actually existing roads.
Then I drove to Hamburg and then the next morning continued down to
Koblenz, where I decided to stay for a couple of nights so that I could enjoy
more of the city and have less of a just-drive mode as well as to be able
to enjoy some local wines. The Mosel Rieslings are amazing white wines
with very reasonable prices. In the drive there was my first experience of
the motorways and the first experience of road sections with no speed
limit. I am not a risk taker, but on the perfect German autobahns when the
road is dry and the sun is shining it feels perfectly comfortable to drive
at 160-180 km/h. Even in a heavy downpour the speeds dropped to merely 120
km/h and it still felt perfectly safe. People were predictable and aware
of their surroundings. That is one type of road where you have to look in
your rearview mirror almost as often as looking forward. If you are going
160 on the middle lane and are coming up to a "slowpoke" doing only 140
there and you start to think about overtaking him using the third lane,
then you must first check very carefully, because there can easily be a
Lamborghini flying past at 220. And, by German road rules, the slow car
gives way in such situation. At this point of the trip there were only a
few unlimited sections along my way and I only felt comfortable increasing
my speed to 200 km/h two times for a very short period. It took a lot of
attention to drive at such speeds and it took a free road.
Just before I left for Germany one of the tires of my car started to let
out air. Nothing much, but like 0.5 atm in a week. So I brought it into
service. They pulled out a 8 cm long rusted screw out of the tire. They
fixed the tire with a thread and a plug. Some experts warned me against
using the autobahn to the full speed with such "fixed" tire, but after
testing the waters with some high speed driving and regular pressure
checks on the first days I can now say with certainty - if you tyre is
repaired correctly, then there is no problem going with full speed on the
autobahn. Maybe the tires would not hold their full W rating anymore, but
200 km/h they held without any issues.
After Debconf15 I picked up a passenger and moved on. The rest of the trip
was planned in detail with hotels pre-booked and rough plan for every day
ahead. The plans basically worked. Each day was similar to the next - wake
up, breakfast, get in the car, drive between 5 and 8 hours with a lunch
stop in the middle, get to destination, have diner, look around, sleep,
repeat. For some places this worked, for others it did not.
On the first day I was still driving mostly through Germany, but this time
going strictly down south. The roads were empty and thus faster. This was
the place where I found the top speed of my car. It was 218 km/h. The car
hit its electronic limiter and did not go any faster even if I felt that
there was some more power to give. My car is basically the weakest
Mercedes C class of 2012, but even with that there was plenty of power
even for fun autobahn drives. You might get better acceleration at speeds
over 90 km/h if you get a C220 CDI that adds a second turbine to the
engine, but unless you do live in Germany that is really a useless feature
as the slow speed turbine in C180 CDI gives it plenty of power at the
sub-80 speeds where most people of the world really need it. Or rather
really want it. The feeling of driving safely over 215 km/h is quite
amazing even if it is very taxing to both mind and to the car. If normally
the car ate 4.5l per 100km at 90 km/h and barely over 5.5l per 100km at
140 km/h, then upon reaching 215 km/h the fuel meter was alarmingly stuck
at over 15l per 100km. Fun is not cheap.
Another non-cheap thing is driving through Swiss alps. The highway
vignette there costs 40 CHF, which is basically 40€. Now I would actually
pay that without a second thought if I were to plan going through there,
but it was not in my plans. my plan was to simply drive into the border
town of Basel, rest there overnight and drive out towards France. Here a
fun feature of the in-car navigation save me a lot of time. There is a lot
of options about what roads to avoid: highways, toll roads, tunnels and
vignette roads. Typically one would use this to drive on vignette roads,
but avoid roads with extra tolls, but for this part I switched it around
and had the car guide me to the hotel with non-vignette roads only. That
worked like a charm.
What didn't work was Basel. Maybe it is a nice city, but it is not a city
where one can see much of anything if you just drive into it in the
evening. Everything is closed and there are basically no people in the
streets. Even the streets were pretty boring with just an ocasional
old tram
passing by.
We left Basel behind and went into France. Destination: Lyon. Immediately
after leaving Basel we started hunting for some nice breakfast place. It
took a couple hours of diving around small coutry roads and passing trough
all the small villages before there finally was a
bakery
that was open in the morning. And judging from the amount of people coming
there, it was the only one for some larger area. At least we had a nice,
french breakfast
there. Lyon was cloudy, but most of the rain was behind us in Germany. The
city of Lyon was far more conductive to evening strolls and drive-by
sightseeing. There was a very pretty river with riverside open
swimming pools. There was a cozy
restoraunt street
with a very nice sushi place. And there was pretty church on a hill with a
sprawling park that looked
amazing
even in the falling darkness of the summer night. Add a bit of backlit
bridge
spiderweb
or a full moon by a nicely lit up
hill
and you have a great setup for an amazing evening.
After Lyon my plan called for something truly special. This time the
destination was not the most important bit, the most important part in
that day was the drive. That was because the plan was to drive via the
highest paved road in Europe. Even before reaching the actual scenic road, the presceeding roads were
magnificent. After hitting the first foothills of the Alps the roads
became very, very fun. The regular country roads mixed with narrow
mountain roads and serpantines. Very often on such roads exchanging with
an oncoming vehicle was only possible if one of the vehicles stopped on a
side of the road and only on some parts of the road. I drove rather slow
there while the locals easily did 90 km/h on the narrow mountain roads.
That did look exactly as crazy as it sounds. It was especially crazy as
there was a lot of fog, rain and clowds all around us as we were
climbing the Alps. But sometimes it took only a few minutes and the
fog
was
gone. And when that happened
the sights
were just amazing. As we went on and went higher, the weather just
improved. The clouds were
never too far but as we started the climb in the mountain pass itself, they
parted around us
in perfect sun bursts. As the elevation went over 2000 meters, trees
disapeared and by 2300 meters only moss remained on the
ground with some sheep
eating it. The views were breathtakingly huge and only the small dots of
sheep and cars
on the
only road
around gave some semblance of scale.
My car
fit in here well. I was starting to feel the shortness of breath and the
car was a bit heavier to start off as well, but still it kept moving and
kept us warm as the outside temperature plunged as we
went up. After reaching the
highest point
that one could drive to, there was still a place to go. There is a
footpath to climb the remaining 70 meters to the very top of the Bonette
mountain to
2862 meters. There is almost nothing there, but some information stands and an
observation platform, but it is worth it. We saw the
views
for a few minutes before the clouds decided that we had enough luck and
started rolling over the mountain with
force. It was also getting dark already.
The way down was faster, darker, wetter and slightly scary. In less than
an hour we went from 2862 meters and almost zero to sea level and +27 with
high humidity. There was dew forming on the cold car as we were coming
down the hill. I switched the transmission to manual as recommended in the
manual and went downhill in the first two gears, breaking with the engine.
The drive was fun and I wish there was more time and more light and also
more driving experience for me to be able to enjoy that road more as the
tight hairpin turns there are just amazing.
And after all that we arrived in Nice on the
Coast de Azure, the famous seaside of the rich. I dipped into the sea there in the
morning. It was an interesting experience, especially on a
stony beach
with very strong waves. I got a couple bruises, but I was quite happy with
some swimming done in the Med sea.
(to be continued with Italy, Austria and Poland)
