The Full Loop
Hamburg - 9th July
Today we are back in Hamburg where we first started our Scandinavian trip over two months ago.
However to complete the loop in Scandinavia we revisited Ribe, Denmark, the first place we stayed at. Not much had changed – the weather was still grey, the old buildings were still crooked, our car park at the church was still available, and the road works were still ongoing.
The only thing changed was our lunch venue – our 5th May healthy ploughman’s platter had been replaced by a chocolate sugar feast.
We stopped in Tonder, Denmark, on our way south to stretch our legs and find a geocache. Cache found we went to the Christ Church for a look and noticed a guy wearing a geocaching T-Shirt. I searched the website to see if there was a cache nearby and found that there was a geocaching Meet and Greet event being held at the exact spot and time we were there. We went over and introduced ourselves, signed his logbook, logged his travel bug and then left because he had very little English (he was German). From the expression on his face when he saw our log he looked quite excited to have New Zealanders attend his event, even though we didn’t fully participate.
We deliberately avoided the E45 and A7 motorways today and drove south closer to the west coast of Denmark and into Germany just after Tonder. The scenery is better and the traffic not as horrendous, however on the German side of the border we encountered more near misses on the road in 2 hours than we did on our whole trip. There was no avoiding the border patrol as they had set themselves up on the back roads. You also can’t miss the wind farms; they litter the flat agricultural lands.
Our next planned stop was Niebull, Germany, for a geocache that had a high difficulty rating, but the brains trust from Nelson soon had the cache in hand. You had to break into the signals box, find a code, undo a padlock, lower the signal lights and then find a small cache container. No trains were derailed or diverted in the process.
Today’s ABBA tribute is ‘When all is said and done’ (1981), simply for the end of our Scandinavian journey, no more driving and hurrying, just time to unwind before making the long flight home.
With nothing left untried
Standing calmly at the crossroads, no desire to run
There’s no hurry anymore when all is said and done
