Thursday, 8 April 2010

 

Start: Graz: 09:30

Arrival: Strassen: 20:15

Total: 937 km

 

 

After a fantastic breakfast, we set out for Germany. Today we would be driving almost 1,000 kilometers, with only short breaks in between.

 

Somewhere around Regensburg, Sonia pointed out a curious building to our right. Amid the sloping hills of Bavaria, far off the highway, stood a huge Greek temple. Its white marble sparkled in the sun and far from being a crumbling, ancient ruin, this building looked brandnew. Had we somehow fallen through a wormhole and time travelled to Ancient Greece? Were these the cheap styrofoam props from a movie set, looking deceptively real from afar? Or were we quite simply hallucinating this landmark? It looked a bit like a Fata Morgana, so surreal. Soon, a road sign enlightened us. It announced an exit for "Walhalla". We must have made a wrong turn somewhere. What would be next, Asgard? But the Rainbow Bridge did not appear, just a quite ordinary sign for Nuremberg. We decided that the temple was maybe not the resting place of the mighty German warriors after all. We came up with all sorts of wild speculations: the residence of a crazy American billionnaire, a beautifully restored Roman landmark that we had never heard off ... Back at home, omniscient Wikipedia informed us that Walhalla was quite simply a 19th century museum displaying busts of famous German thinkers, writers and heroes. We decided that we had to visit this place one day. And two years later, on our way to the Ukraine, the Walhalla became our first stop. But that is a different story.

 

For the moment, we were speeding along the German highway, signs for Heilbronn, Mannheim and Kaiserslautern flew by. In short, we were almost home. Shortly before Trier, it became very foggy, almost eerily so. Strange, as we had had wonderful weather throughout the trip. We later reasoned that it might have been ash from Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano that was currently erupting in Island, bringing air travel all over Europe to a standstill. Good thing we were driving and thus not dependent on airplanes.

 

Around 8 o'clock, we were back in our own sweet country, tired and glad to be back home, but also happy to have made such a wonderful trip and learnt so many interesting new things. Before, I had been driving through the USA, down to Portugal and up into Scotland and Denmark, but this was the first car journey to a region that many of my friends thought of "very adventurous". Well, it certainly had been, but in a good way. And probably a lot less adventurous than it might have been only a few years back, with the Balkan Wars and without the boon of the internet. Europe is rapidly moving closer together in all aspects, and that is a good thing. This trip whetted our appetite to see more of Central and Eastern Europe, and so, two years later, we embarked on a car journey to the Ukraine. In retrospect, I think it was good that I had done the Balkans first. Road conditions in Northern Romania are pretty interesting, and so is the traffic in Moldova's capital Chisinau. And the border crossing into Transnistria was definitely more noteworthy than the one into Albania. So all in all, this trip had prepared us well: 15 days, 5030 kilometers, 11 countries and countless wonderful memories.