As the new delivery date was June, 8th and I know how German and Austrian bureaucracy works, I started preparing my trip the week before.
Initial plan was to travel via train to Bremerhaven, pick up the car, drive it to Hannover, load it onto the train and enjoy the overnight transfer to Vienna. As I said, this was the initial plan.
In reality however, when I went to buy a train ticket to Bremerhaven, suddenly the price was 4 times higher than it was stated in the brochure and at the information counter 2 weeks ago. Unfortunatelly, what nobody told me was, that I have to book at least 3 days in advance to get this cheap price. Well, f*** it I thought, didn't buy the ticket and went to work.
After talking to LiZ (my GF) who offered to drive me to Bremerhaven to pick up the car, everything was set up for the ride.
Luckily, since I had a very bad feeling about this, I talked to one colleague who told me to quickly check the miles and more homepage for bargain flights to Germany.
And there it was, a very cheap flight to Bremen and me, who got a lots of miles to spend. I instantly bought 2 one way tickets for me and LiZ and the flight was on the next (Wednesday) day at 6 a.m.
At home, I started packing my bags. I thought of really everything. I even took the car jack, 2 litres of oil, spark plugs, lots of tools incl. a drill, race tape and a lots of other things with me. Altogether, the weight of those 2 bags was more than 35 kg which was alright if 2 people are flying.
To cut the story short, we arrived at the shipping agency in Bremerhaven at approximately 3 p.m. and since I called there 3 times the week before, they were expecting me and everything went quickly.
After me, some guys came to pick up their supra which was apparently on the same boat.
The shipping agency guy was very nice, so he gave as a lift to the customs where all the cars are kept.
After 10 more minutes of waiting, first the supra arrived and then my car was brought to me.
My first reaction was unfortunately not joy and pride as expected - it was hate because some of those jerks on board managed to steal my fog lights. I mean, I didn't like them anyway, but still they would have brought me some money! Apparently, after a quick check of the supra we've seen that he had the same fog lights and someone started to unmounted them but apparently they failed and backed up!
I would love to say they didn't warn us NOT to stop our cars, but they did! They also mentioned that they were really struggling to get one of those to start but they couldn't tell us which one of those two was meant. We were about to find out in a minute.
The thing was that in order to unlock the boot, I had to get the only key out of the ignition lock. So, I was forced to stop the car. I really needed all the space that I had for the luggage i brought with me.
So after stopping the car, it wouldn't want to start again. Offcourse, after 2 months on the ship without disconnecting the battery, it was empty. I asked the guys with the supra to help me jump start it and they had a spare battery with them. Nevertheless, the battery was empty.
So, he drove with his Supra to my car in order to jump start it, somehow managed to switch on the A/C and the engine died. After trying to start his car back up again, I went back to the customs office and asked for help.
10 minutes later we knew, which car they've struggled to get started. It was the supra because there was a problem with the turbo timer, which apparently had a short circuit in it and started to smoking.
In the meantime, we started my car and I was off to the customs billing office, since I had only 15 minutes left to pay the customs ad drive home.
I explained to the officer that no matter what, I can't stop the car because I won't get it started again. So he gave me few minutes to load the battery and then I had to open the boot because he wanted to check if I'm trying to smuggle something! Luckily, I wasn't and the car started back again without any problems. Some time later I have payed my debt and was off to the next gas station to check the tire pressure, oil level and everything else which had to be checked.
I also brought my new steering wheel with me because the old one seemed to be very uncomfortable and really ugly. I really tried hard driving with this wheel, but it was too much. So it was time for a change.
Now, this was a nice view and also very nice to drive like this!
Offcourse, since I was at the gas station, we also needed to refill so my GF made a picture of the first "feeding".
So before driving to Hamburg i decided to call our train service in Austria and to make a reservation for the car transport. Unfortunately I didn't expect that the bureaucrats here at the railway services are this incompetent. It was no problem to reserve a ticket, but he told me that it doesn't make any sense, because I couldn't pick it up. After asking him why not, because I could pick it up in Hamburg at the station, he said, that they don't have a Austrian ticket counter in Hamburg. The discussion went on for a few minutes, because I insisted to have the ticket sent by e-mail, which apparently is not the policy of the Austrian railway services and he couldn't do it. Since this time I really wasn't surprised by this, I just hang up the phone and we decided to travel by car.
On the first evening we stayed in Duisburg for a decent dinner this day and to stay a night in the Hotel.
On the next morning the trip started at 9 a.m. and I was driving for the first few kilometers to warm up the car and to see how it behaves in a cold condition. Everything was perfect. After that, my GF took over the racing... aehm... steering wheel.
The decision was easy because I knew that she wouldn't push it hard. In the end we've seen that the fuel consumption while I was driving was at nearly 15 l/100km and while she was driving it was at 12. So, for a trip this long this was a really important decision :D :D
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| Lunch somwhere near Stuttgart - we saw some really nice cars in the parking lot and decided to have a lunch here |
As we were going on, the traffic jams startet to get more and more. Until finally, somewhere near Munich, we were forced to stop completely. Perfect time for some pictures.
Shortly before home, we were stopped by the local police here in Austria (note, it was Friday and it was 1.30 a.m.). They were 5 men, standing on the side of the road and stopping every moving car. I guess they were bored!
And I guess they didn't like the fact that I mounted my number plate behind the windshield.
In the end I had to stick the license plate to the front of the vehicle because "the radars in Austria are not capable of taking a picture of you if the license plate is behind the windscreen". What a pity i thought to myself. I really really wanted to be photographed by those guys badly.
Anyway after a short discussion, we were at home on Friday at 2 a.m. without any problems with the car or the engine!
