Day 45: Saturday 26th September
It’s hit me (HP). I’ve had a lousy night – woke at 3am and not been back to sleep since – cold symptoms really coming out now. We have showers with our new abundance of water but it provides only temporary relief from the fatigue and yuckiness. After just forty-five minutes’ driving I’m ready for a snooze so we stop – and again an hour later – and again another hour later. We’ve crossed into Germany and I just feel very washed out and incapable of keeping my eyes open and concentration sharp – and now busy autobahns. They’re doing a lot of road-widening and stops and slow-downs are frequent – very tedious.
After lunch I’m beginning to pick up a bit but traffic is still heavy. Then it happens. We are in a contra-flow and have taken the middle lane of three as the outside lane is restricted to 2m maximum width. HGVs are in the nearside lane but we are within our allotted space when ‘WHACK’, a German white-van-man whizzes by in the outside lane, forcing our wing-mirror back round against the body. He stops, having little choice, and apologises. I don’t have the wit to point out that he should not be in the outside lane as his total width with mirrors must exceed 2 metres. And nothing seems broken apart, perhaps, from a bit of plastic. As we’re holding up the traffic and there is nowhere to pull off to the side I omit to study the bits that fell on to the road and later regret this as on examination everything is ok except that a plastic plug is missing from the top of the mounting. We make a note of his number and his firm’s email address from the side of the van with the intention of later sending them a complaint and a bill but never get round to it.
Right through this episode my main concern is about running out of diesel in the middle of the jam. Although we have stocks on board it would not please anyone if we had to refill in the middle of the road! Fortunately the traffic eases and we are able to find a lay-by where the operation can be performed. And ‘performed’ is the operative word – what a performance! The 20-litre plastic jerry-can weighs a ton and despite having a nozzle the diesel just does not flow freely – something to do with the position of the air vent in the filler nozzle. It must have taken about twenty minutes to complete the transfer but Jill is a star in assisting me with it.
A short while later we find an acceptable rest stop for the night. Just a little traffic noise but opportunities to dump grey in a drain and ‘green’ in the toilet block.
We really don’t seem to have seen or achieved much today.
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