Preparations for driving to Denmark and Germany

The beams of of cars with left hand drive operate very differently from ones with right hand drive, so when taking a British car into Europe the beams have to be modified. Somehow.

The car's instruction manual on this topic is rubbish, nobody at the sales end of the dealer's could make head nor tail of it, so it went into the workshop. Free of charge. This is the result - a large block of black tape with no relationship with the manual - so I photographed it for future reference.


Background information

This is the only photo taken close to our departure date, so I shall use this column to give context to the photos covering the next three weeks. Remember that this is a back-blip.

The trip was based around a fixed week's stay in Bremen. There was the option of flying there and back, but there was equally the opportunity to travel independently and lengthen the trip. We opted for the latter. We are both acquainted with a variety of sites in central and southern Germany, and have knowledge of German life and culture. On top of this, I speak the language.

We would drive. The initial plan was to take a car ferry from England to Germany. There is none, as I soon discovered. So instead, we would take a ferry from Harwich, the choice of destination being between Hook of Holland (in Holland) and Ejsberg (in Denmark). And our only experience of Denmark hitherto had been half a day in Copenhagen, so the decision was made.

Our first stay would comprise two nights in Odense: Denmark's third town, and the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen. We would then board a car ferry across the Baltic Sea to Northern Germany, taking the Rodbyhavn (Denhark) to Fehmarn (Germany) crossing. Initially I thought that we would have take the motorway route, crossing the spectacular Great Belt Bridge. When I had bought a decent map of Denmark, it became apparent that there was a much shorter cross-country route: drive from Odense to Spodsbjerg, thence taking a short ferry crossing to Tars, and a drive to Rodbyhavn.

Once in Germany, we would stay in two towns on the Baltic coast - Wismar and Stralsund, with three nights in each - before driving to the hotel in Bremen. These two Hanseatic (UNESCO World Heritage) towns were extremely attractive in themselves, and gave us access to other places of particular interest.

After the week in Bremen we would drive northwards, to Husum in Schleswig-Holstein and stay for two nights in an hotel abutting on a large sea dyke jutting out into the North Sea , before driving further north to Ejsberg and there reembarking for Harwich. (This hotel can reasonably be considered to be "the hotel at the end of the world".)


Research materials

This is not made easy for non-German speakers. Germany is not considered by the great British public to be a holiday destination; people without connections or family in Germany have little idea of what the country is like, and consequently there is an almost total lack of detailed holiday guides in the English language. We used the Rough Guide, excellent in many respects as an introduction to the country, but it is just impossible to encompass the size and variety of Germany in just 800 or so pages.

A further barrier is the fact that the east of the country which used to lie behind the Iron Curtain is a foreign country to most West Germans. The vanished physical barrier has bequeathed a mental barrier which is for the moment just as enduring. There are guides galore in German of the regions of western Germany, but very few of the east.

I was only able to locate one guide in German dedicated to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the north-eastern region of Germany to which Wismar and Stralsund belong. (In case you are interested, it is the Goldstadt Verlag Reisefuehrer "Mecklenburg-Vorpommern" written by Bernd Wurlitzer. Dry, very knowledgeable, excellent quality and presentation of information, but the route maps leave a lot to be desired. So get a decent map to complement it.)

If and when you go to Meklenburg-Vorpommern you will find that there are plenty of excellent local maps and brochures in Tourist Information Offices, both in German and in English. Hotels and B&Bs will also stock these

For the towns and regions in western Germany the very best small guides are by Dumont. Again, these are in German, but there will be a variety of guides, brochures &c in English.

For maps we used three Marco Polo maps at 1:200,000. These are very large fold-out maps with excellent detail which even enabled us to navigate remote country lanes accurately. They also include useful street maps of several principal cities and towns. The maps used are:
- Denmark
- Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
- Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, Bremen