I know that this post has absolutely nothing to do with Jayco Expandas, nor the merest hint of any relationship with caravans or camping but does have relevance as a travel related story, so basically qualifies under my own rules of compliance. It is reasonably current, quite funny now and is a tale worth telling.
Sit back, relax and I will begin:-
I had a business meeting arranged in Germany last week, arriving in Frankfurt from Heathrow on Tuesday evening just as the light was fading. My contact could not pick me up as he was in Stuttgart for an unforeseen visit, so the company hired me a car to drive down to the factory in. What a comedy of errors. Once we found the car hire place, which seemed like a route march away from the arrivals terminal dragging suitcases that were packed for our month away and far too heavy to be taken across to Germany for such a short trip and the paperwork was done, we followed the mud map to the parking garage where the cars were kept.
After having issues with the lift and finally arriving at the right section in front of the correct parking spot that the paperwork showed, constant pressing of daft buttons on car keys did not produce the beeping sounds or flashing indicators that would show we were at the vehicle that was allotted to us. I wandered back to see the attendant several sections away, whose command of the English language was equivalent to my understanding of Outer Mongolian toad sexing practices of the 13th century. Still, he was friendly enough and the sign language had him striding to where I had left the wife and the two aforementioned gargantuan suitcases. He did the same exercise as me - no amount of button pressing could get this Skoda thing to do what was necessary and Open Sesame. Admitting defeat and calling someone named Mr. Dumb Kopf fit to burn, he grunted something incoherent with a couple of English words that were barely understandable, we then watched him as he walked away beckoning us to follow. Turning the corner, mein host pointed to a rather nice black and brand new Audi A4, much more expensive than the poverty pack Czech station wagon thing which was ordered. It looked acceptable enough, and he thrust a set of keys at me that made the right noises and results when the daft buttons were pressed once again. Problem # 1. Cases do not fit in the boot. No matter, one did and the other went on the back seat - Easy. This foreign driving mullarkey will be a doddle. Oh how those thoughts would come back to haunt me.
We get in the car. It's a bloody manual and not an automatic as was organised. That was Problem # 2. Problem #3 evolved quickly - they had no more automatics to swap with, so it was shank’s pony or play a tune on a left hand drive manual gearbox. Hobson’s choice. Anyway, I did not relish the thought that I was driving in the dark on unknown streets in an unfamiliar vehicle on the wrong side of the road, but on the premise that faint heart never fornicated with fair lady, ( a phrase cleaned up for mixed company on this thread, but you get my drift) decided to live with it. Okay, now let's set the inbuilt GPS for our prearranged destination. Problem # 4 - it was an I-drive system similar to BMW's that needs the manual dexterity of a brain surgeon and the knowledge of a bloody Electronics major to operate. I am gifted with neither of these skills. Now if swilling cold beer, partaking of Indian food and being able to belch at will is a skillset, I have it in copious quantities. Unfortunately this does not qualify under these circumstances as being of any positive value.
After twiddling the big shiny knob that only produced words and speech prompts in German, I gave up and went to find my old mate Adolf the amiable car attendant. More sign language and broken English/German produced a system that operated and gave me English instructions uttered by an impossibly and perhaps anachronistically British sounding female voice. Problem # 4. The road that the hotel was on, did not compute on the system. Cases out of boot and my steam driven GPS I had brought from home that did very well in Merry Olde England just a few days before was fished out from underneath a mix of the last few days washing and the normal detritus that only packing in a hurry that morning could produce. Success! My old GPS picked up exactly where we needed to go, so decided to run the two systems in parallel with mine on silent until we got within coo-ee of proposed destination in case there were any deviations from the route plan, as my old box of tricks had not been updated for ages. I ask you, who actually spends $100 updating maps when you can buy a new bloody GPS for the same price for Gawd’s sake? Not me evidently, which sees the cheapskate in me routinely do 5 miles when I only ever need to do 2 had I had the right version of the software, but that is another story. I am nothing if not the product of a frugal North Eastern England Council House parental upbringing and it is a hard habit to shake.
We finally get the car seat adjusted, deep breaths taken, nervous glances exchanged and we back out from a tight spot with me very mindful that I am sat in the normal passenger seat if I was at home and had to get used to everything being " a about f" (cleaned up once again, but you knew that by now) in a short space of time whilst negotiating my way around stationary objects that up until a moment before bore no threat to life, limb or shiny black paintwork. We get into now quite fading daylight and I glance over to a very stressed wife and ask for the paperwork we were given to enable us to get through the barrier. Problem #5 - it had been filed away in one of the backpacks, as my missus is extraordinarily organised and neat and she does that kind of thing just to annoy me. I stop the car with an annoyed and disgruntled slam of the brakes, we commence the game of remembering where the paperwork is, retrieve it as it had been filed “expeditiously". We then spend another few minutes in rapidly disappearing and valuable light, packing the bloody backpack up neatly in the boot just to get back at me for obnoxiously rolling the eyes when she told me where I can stick my opinions. Paperwork in my hot little mitt sees me then feeding the e-ticket into the machine. The barrier rises and we are off gingerly, at a pace that would see a thalidomide-affected snail overtake us twice before the first of many sets of traffic lights.
Now I don't know if you have ever driven from Frankfurt airport, but the exit route is a 10 minute serpentine circuit that sees you negotiate roads with multiple entry and exit points that,in a strange country, in an unfamiliar car and being sat in the wrong seat trying to take in foreign language signs and instructions whilst watching two GPS units and attempting to avoid bouncing off things that move, or perhaps don't move until you actually collide with them - all done in twilight, then it becomes natures own laxative when the "please turn right in 50m" turns out to be 10m and you sail past the exit in a hail of expletives.
Problem # 6, not only is it getting dark, it starts to rain.
Eventually we get on the right road, we accelerate onto the autobahn that purportedly takes us in the direction we want to go and I find that any ramp speed less than warp factor 10 has German juggernauts up your clacker so fast that you become a bonnet ornament very quickly. The undipped 5 million watt truck high beam lights turning my newly shorn pate, done for my nieces wedding in England the week before, into coiled and tight curls from the heat. In the interests of keeping my sphincter from sucking up the nice new car seat material in fright, I floored it and the lovely Audi dutifully complied - in spades. Vorsprung Durch very much Technik indeed.
Problem # 6(a) - The heavens open further, the sun goes to bed and it is just me and half of Germany's finest lunatics in lashing rain with windscreen wipers barely keeping up with the torrent. I just wanted to survive the next three hours. They seemed determined that this ex Englishman should pay in kind for all of the bombs my ancestors dropped on Dresden and for beating their team in the World Cup final in 1966! The childish chant " Two world wars and one world cup doo-dah, doo-dah" drunkenly sang in a bar on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg in my fresh faced merchant navy days so as to irk the locals came back to haunt me inappropriately. I accelerate and try to blend in and pretend I don't care. I did care - a lot....
Problem #7. It seems that the Germans also have the same propensity for roadworks as the rest of the free world and they chose this month to dig up every piece of tarmac within 300 miles of Frankfurt with characteristic Teutonic efficiency and they all happened to be on my intended route. So, here's the deal. Autobahn speed is unlimited and most vehicles except mine are testing the upper levels of their engines performance, decelerating down to 70km to negotiate the roadwork obstacles in what seemed a ridiculously short distance but was, perhaps, in fact just the right amount with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight and accelerating away at the pace of a man with diahorroea that has a zip in his pants that won’t come down. After the 15th one of these manoeuvres I was just getting immune to the stress of it all and, wallop! Contraflow traffic on the wrong side of the autobahn was thrown into the mix, just to make it interesting. None of those Australian pussy type plastic cone thingies - oh no. Ze Chermans do zis mit ze concrete. A most definite and frightening twist to the proceedings of the evening and as the blood drained away from hands that were tightly gripping the steering wheel as if it was going to save me from impending doom, I started to regret the journey I had started some 30 minutes previously. Right on cue it started to rain harder, as if that was possible.
This leads me quite swiftly onto Problem #8, which is just one digit away from #7 but an even shorter transition to problem #9 as I am about to find out. More roadworks. No biggie, been through loads of them now and with the wondrous dexterity of Michael Schumacher before he fell over in snow and banged his bonce, I gaze through the rain torrent, decelerate to around 60kph because I am a wuss, flick the car left in a controlled manner, skillfully negotiating this lovely car away from the concrete barrier to my right by some 500mm and the copiously numbered and weighted striped lane guidance poles to my left at a slightly wider gap than the aforementioned. I dextrously straighten her u and press on the go pedal, there is a bang! I have run over something very solid and very hard sat in the middle of the lane that looks like it had been strategically placed to see us career out of control into obstacles both stationary and mobile. I successfully control the car and miss the lot, still expecting to hear a louder and sicker thud that did not eventuate thankfully, however,there is a very audible thumpety, thumpety, thump coming from one or more of the wheels. That is all I need. As if by magic/divine intervention or just plain luck, the rain slacks off to a medium monsoon and I have to pilot the now crippled and hitherto brand new shiny black Audi off to the temporary hard shoulder, but had to negotiate a terrifying couple of hundred metres in lane as there was nowhere to go. The impatient traffic was piling up behind me and I was not able to stop without causing World War 3. Knowing the Germans propensity for a stoush and not wanting the situation to be the modern day equivalent of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip that heralded the commencement of WW1’s fun and games, nor was I wanting similarities with the Invasion of Poland that sparked the festivities of WW2, hence I cautiously drove on relentlessly whilst expecting the axles to fly off at any second and urged the now mortally wounded vehicle into a makeshift hard shoulder not much wider than the car itself. There was traffic. Oh don't be rude was there traffic. I gauge my extrication from the vehicle within an inch of my life and manage to open the door and sprint to the back of the car before being cleaned up by some huge truck with Polish writing down the side and the picture of a comical character munching on a sausage. Have head tell of stories that time slows down when life and limb are in danger and the brain takes in an awful lot of stimuli at the one time when you feel you are about to meet the Great Architect of the Universe. For some they see their life stretched out before them played out in slow-mo. For mine, I saw some cartoon numpty eating a sausage - go figure. The sitrep showed that the damage was, thankfully, limited to the front drivers side wheel only. The tyre was as flat as a witch's mammary to quote a slightly modified and oft used cliché by members of the population of the country of my birth. The rear one that also ran over what ever had fallen off the back of Heinrich Steptoe's cart, that caused the incident in the first place, seemed pretty much intact.
Problems #9-14 became just a blur and started with safety triangles that would not stand up on their own that had to be propped up by a red Samsonite purchased some years before in Vegas and now employed as the support of choice for the device for letting following traffic know that the walking wounded were just up ahead and stationary. (big sentence – bad grammar, but has the required dramatic affect). The idea being that it might be better for vehicles yet to come by and laugh at the spectacle, that they would be alerted by said safety triangle to slow down a bit to prevent me from being killed outright or at a some point in time later in a painfully lingering death at a German Krankenhaus after being dismembered by a truck, was the other distinct possibility (same comment as previous bracket as I should have listened more intently in English composition back at Grammar school a million years ago and I would not have to excuse my lack of knowledge in this area of expertise by making stupid comments like this one). Pig's arse. These buggers were out for blood. I was a casualty of vicious vehicular warfare and I had better heed the warning signs.
There was no torch with which to see and no autobahn lighting emitting lumens of any intensity to speak of. The handbook is in German, the spare is a speed limited space saver, the jack is an assemble-it-yourself retracting handle affair that had been devised by the inventor of the Rubik's cube evidently. All of the wheel removal and replacement had to be done in the dark as if in some SAS graduation test on weapons disassembly /assembly conducted in blackness some extremely short distance away from a situation that would see me possibly collecting my promised 24 virgins if I was of the Muslim persuasion and was slightly careless with my pink and hairy ample arse that by now was hanging out in scary lines of traffic.
Amongst other issues, the busted wheel (yes it was well buckled not just a flat tyre) would not fit in the boot with a suitcase as well. Problem # 15. Major relocation of baggage to backseat in the pouring rain. We are both drenched and punch-drunk with stress and wondering why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only locations for Atom bombs ever being dropped on previous enemy territories. This place by now was a strong contender for airborne induced carnage if I had been a trigger-happy, Atom bomb toting Enola Gay B-29 pilot as a profession in a former life. In my temporarily twisted mind, it would appear that had the yanks done the job properly in this location some 80 years previously, then I wouldn’t be sat up to my arse in water with a spare wheel in my hand playing footsie with 18 wheelers. Anyway after much trepidation, the odd harsh word 'tween spouse and I, we are ready to roll.
Problem # 16. We are sat motionless in a makeshift hard shoulder. We are on an 80kph speed restricted skinny and smaller front wheel and we have to accelerate to beyond 130kph to prevent being run over by a catalogue of Europe's finest heavy vehicles and then have to brake heavily for more bloody roadworks should we be lucky enough to thread the traffic needle unscathed. The rain persists, I floor it and we live to tell the tale. I then settle down to my sedentary 80kph and slowly become accustomed to angry German drivers wondering what the hell I was going so slow for and showing their annoyance by firstly frying the paint on the back of the vehicle with what seemed like million watt spotlights, before careering out past me like a seagull after a chip at a million miles an hour and then repeating that manoeuvre in reverse as they dextrously, and quite successfully as it happens, attempted to put the fear of God in me by abruptly cutting in front to show their annoyance. My heart rate drops, I start to feign a smile and utter the now known to be stupidly optimistic phrase " we will laugh about this tomorrow" to an obviously traumatised spouse who now resembles Medusa with her locks plastered to her head from the rain, who just nods compliantly in the incandescent glow of the Audi's Blackpool illuminations.
10km further on, the traffic dies down, I am feeling no pain and I am well aware that I have survived several things that could have killed me, her and probably the both of us together. I am feeling comfortably numb, if not relaxed. I gaze at the road in front and the rain has stopped as if God himself was requesting forgiveness for the test he had just foisted upon us. I am about to utter the words " Well the worst is behind us and what else can now go wrong? ". The first syllable had barely left my lips when the dashboard lit up further, if that was at all possible, like a Belisha Beacon with accompanying alarm noise, that whilst not alarm-ing is enough to let you know that you have, unceremoniously, just hit Problem #17. This is a bloody low tyre pressure alarm, you have used your only spare, you are 130km from your destination and it is 22.00hrs. The hotel lobby, from previous experience of another disaster some 17 years prior (long and interesting comical tale of woe too that almost culminated in a case of frostbite induced exposure but wont go into that one) closes at 23.30 hrs. Mrs. God makes it rain again as if on cue........
Pull over, kick the tyres. There seems to be no problem. Re-tension the front wheel nuts again. No problem. Pull out the German car manual that may as well have been written in hieroglyphics for all it mattered to me as I gaze for a tyre pressure, suddenly realising that my fundamentals of the German language amounted to ordering beers and requesting the bill. I had chosen the wrong time to realise that the German word for tyre (which I now somewhat belatedly and uselessly understand to be "reifen") was unknown to me – but if it ever should happen again I will be prepared.
We sat for a while cogitating the further possibilities of imminent demise and decided to drive even more slowly to the nearest service station some 10km away to seek out air and fill up what I knew was not going to be a flat tyre issue. Thinking as I drove, this was most likely a sensor that now was picking up, or in fact not picking up, a signal from the space saver tyre and defaulting to say that the original wheel was low on air, the ever-so-clever system of German Engineering Excellence induced yet another elevated personal stress level as we somewhat hobbled into the Services some 15 minutes later. Checking of the pressures, which I could not find a recommended Kpa rating for because of the aforementioned lack of German vocabulary relative to motor vehicles, I just gave them a bit more that should see the tyre wear enhanced to an extent that they will all require replacement when the middle section goes baldy in the next 1000km of use. I since have found out that my synopsis of the clever-dick tyre alarm system was correct. Full marks for engineering skills that are proof positive that sleep-learning as a scientific fact is kosher. It must be, as most Friday afternoons back in Blighty in the seventies myself and Dave Ashton from Lytham sat at the back of a boring Marine Engineering Practice class room only half awake after 5 pints and a pie at lunchtime. I was 18, I didn’t know any better. I am now 56 and still don’t. Dave is now something very high up in HR circles at BAE Systems and from his postings on Farcebook is still just as daft as me if, not dafter.
It was here the problems just about sorted themselves out and the Big Fella Upstairs that sees and influences all, had stopped rolling around clouds slapping his thighs in mirth at the Pythonesque antics of the previous 2-hour test of endurance that had been set out for us by a a higher being. Well not quite, as it happens. Obviously perturbed, my lovely lady who had put up with my stress induced tantrums in a way only she knows how to do, decided that we needed a drink of something and wandered into the Service Station to purchase a beverage that the Germans pass off as cold but is in fact drank luke-warm over there. I digress yet again.
The middle aged female German attendant in hideous multi-hued pinny, with no English other than "no", which should, by the look on her face, have been accompanied with a suffix of "f***ing way", as it appeared later. Frau Kranky had decided that this was one transaction that would not happen, this lifetime and this evening in her world. Our major transgression was to arrive just after she had totted up the till for the night and was about to close. The last thing she wanted was to change a Eu50 note at that time of night that would bugger up her figures. She did not reckon with the mad scouser, who calmly uncorked the bottle of tepid Coke Zero and with a smirk that would have rivaled a madman on crack cocaine, took a big swig, opened up her purse to show a mixed array of English Pounds, funny Australian money and the same high denomination Euro notes and said "up to you Fraulein whatchagonnadoaboutit?" or something equally derisory. She changed the 50, we had our warmish drink and we were on our way safe in the knowledge that the pinny wearing sourpuss thought we were Brits
She was only half right.
The rest of the tale is basically boring and uneventful twaddle. We rolled into the hotel 3 hours later than planned and were greeted by an impossibly German speaking Vietnamese lady in as remote a part of Germany that could be possible, who carried up one of the heavy suitcases with her equally svelte German born female companion whilst the Dragon looked on and let them. It’s a funny old world.
Calamities such as this seem to follow me wherever I go. Is it just Karma or does it happen to normal people too? Am I alone, please tell me I am not…………
Sit back, relax and I will begin:-
I had a business meeting arranged in Germany last week, arriving in Frankfurt from Heathrow on Tuesday evening just as the light was fading. My contact could not pick me up as he was in Stuttgart for an unforeseen visit, so the company hired me a car to drive down to the factory in. What a comedy of errors. Once we found the car hire place, which seemed like a route march away from the arrivals terminal dragging suitcases that were packed for our month away and far too heavy to be taken across to Germany for such a short trip and the paperwork was done, we followed the mud map to the parking garage where the cars were kept.
After having issues with the lift and finally arriving at the right section in front of the correct parking spot that the paperwork showed, constant pressing of daft buttons on car keys did not produce the beeping sounds or flashing indicators that would show we were at the vehicle that was allotted to us. I wandered back to see the attendant several sections away, whose command of the English language was equivalent to my understanding of Outer Mongolian toad sexing practices of the 13th century. Still, he was friendly enough and the sign language had him striding to where I had left the wife and the two aforementioned gargantuan suitcases. He did the same exercise as me - no amount of button pressing could get this Skoda thing to do what was necessary and Open Sesame. Admitting defeat and calling someone named Mr. Dumb Kopf fit to burn, he grunted something incoherent with a couple of English words that were barely understandable, we then watched him as he walked away beckoning us to follow. Turning the corner, mein host pointed to a rather nice black and brand new Audi A4, much more expensive than the poverty pack Czech station wagon thing which was ordered. It looked acceptable enough, and he thrust a set of keys at me that made the right noises and results when the daft buttons were pressed once again. Problem # 1. Cases do not fit in the boot. No matter, one did and the other went on the back seat - Easy. This foreign driving mullarkey will be a doddle. Oh how those thoughts would come back to haunt me.
We get in the car. It's a bloody manual and not an automatic as was organised. That was Problem # 2. Problem #3 evolved quickly - they had no more automatics to swap with, so it was shank’s pony or play a tune on a left hand drive manual gearbox. Hobson’s choice. Anyway, I did not relish the thought that I was driving in the dark on unknown streets in an unfamiliar vehicle on the wrong side of the road, but on the premise that faint heart never fornicated with fair lady, ( a phrase cleaned up for mixed company on this thread, but you get my drift) decided to live with it. Okay, now let's set the inbuilt GPS for our prearranged destination. Problem # 4 - it was an I-drive system similar to BMW's that needs the manual dexterity of a brain surgeon and the knowledge of a bloody Electronics major to operate. I am gifted with neither of these skills. Now if swilling cold beer, partaking of Indian food and being able to belch at will is a skillset, I have it in copious quantities. Unfortunately this does not qualify under these circumstances as being of any positive value.
After twiddling the big shiny knob that only produced words and speech prompts in German, I gave up and went to find my old mate Adolf the amiable car attendant. More sign language and broken English/German produced a system that operated and gave me English instructions uttered by an impossibly and perhaps anachronistically British sounding female voice. Problem # 4. The road that the hotel was on, did not compute on the system. Cases out of boot and my steam driven GPS I had brought from home that did very well in Merry Olde England just a few days before was fished out from underneath a mix of the last few days washing and the normal detritus that only packing in a hurry that morning could produce. Success! My old GPS picked up exactly where we needed to go, so decided to run the two systems in parallel with mine on silent until we got within coo-ee of proposed destination in case there were any deviations from the route plan, as my old box of tricks had not been updated for ages. I ask you, who actually spends $100 updating maps when you can buy a new bloody GPS for the same price for Gawd’s sake? Not me evidently, which sees the cheapskate in me routinely do 5 miles when I only ever need to do 2 had I had the right version of the software, but that is another story. I am nothing if not the product of a frugal North Eastern England Council House parental upbringing and it is a hard habit to shake.
We finally get the car seat adjusted, deep breaths taken, nervous glances exchanged and we back out from a tight spot with me very mindful that I am sat in the normal passenger seat if I was at home and had to get used to everything being " a about f" (cleaned up once again, but you knew that by now) in a short space of time whilst negotiating my way around stationary objects that up until a moment before bore no threat to life, limb or shiny black paintwork. We get into now quite fading daylight and I glance over to a very stressed wife and ask for the paperwork we were given to enable us to get through the barrier. Problem #5 - it had been filed away in one of the backpacks, as my missus is extraordinarily organised and neat and she does that kind of thing just to annoy me. I stop the car with an annoyed and disgruntled slam of the brakes, we commence the game of remembering where the paperwork is, retrieve it as it had been filed “expeditiously". We then spend another few minutes in rapidly disappearing and valuable light, packing the bloody backpack up neatly in the boot just to get back at me for obnoxiously rolling the eyes when she told me where I can stick my opinions. Paperwork in my hot little mitt sees me then feeding the e-ticket into the machine. The barrier rises and we are off gingerly, at a pace that would see a thalidomide-affected snail overtake us twice before the first of many sets of traffic lights.
Now I don't know if you have ever driven from Frankfurt airport, but the exit route is a 10 minute serpentine circuit that sees you negotiate roads with multiple entry and exit points that,in a strange country, in an unfamiliar car and being sat in the wrong seat trying to take in foreign language signs and instructions whilst watching two GPS units and attempting to avoid bouncing off things that move, or perhaps don't move until you actually collide with them - all done in twilight, then it becomes natures own laxative when the "please turn right in 50m" turns out to be 10m and you sail past the exit in a hail of expletives.
Problem # 6, not only is it getting dark, it starts to rain.
Eventually we get on the right road, we accelerate onto the autobahn that purportedly takes us in the direction we want to go and I find that any ramp speed less than warp factor 10 has German juggernauts up your clacker so fast that you become a bonnet ornament very quickly. The undipped 5 million watt truck high beam lights turning my newly shorn pate, done for my nieces wedding in England the week before, into coiled and tight curls from the heat. In the interests of keeping my sphincter from sucking up the nice new car seat material in fright, I floored it and the lovely Audi dutifully complied - in spades. Vorsprung Durch very much Technik indeed.
Problem # 6(a) - The heavens open further, the sun goes to bed and it is just me and half of Germany's finest lunatics in lashing rain with windscreen wipers barely keeping up with the torrent. I just wanted to survive the next three hours. They seemed determined that this ex Englishman should pay in kind for all of the bombs my ancestors dropped on Dresden and for beating their team in the World Cup final in 1966! The childish chant " Two world wars and one world cup doo-dah, doo-dah" drunkenly sang in a bar on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg in my fresh faced merchant navy days so as to irk the locals came back to haunt me inappropriately. I accelerate and try to blend in and pretend I don't care. I did care - a lot....
Problem #7. It seems that the Germans also have the same propensity for roadworks as the rest of the free world and they chose this month to dig up every piece of tarmac within 300 miles of Frankfurt with characteristic Teutonic efficiency and they all happened to be on my intended route. So, here's the deal. Autobahn speed is unlimited and most vehicles except mine are testing the upper levels of their engines performance, decelerating down to 70km to negotiate the roadwork obstacles in what seemed a ridiculously short distance but was, perhaps, in fact just the right amount with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight and accelerating away at the pace of a man with diahorroea that has a zip in his pants that won’t come down. After the 15th one of these manoeuvres I was just getting immune to the stress of it all and, wallop! Contraflow traffic on the wrong side of the autobahn was thrown into the mix, just to make it interesting. None of those Australian pussy type plastic cone thingies - oh no. Ze Chermans do zis mit ze concrete. A most definite and frightening twist to the proceedings of the evening and as the blood drained away from hands that were tightly gripping the steering wheel as if it was going to save me from impending doom, I started to regret the journey I had started some 30 minutes previously. Right on cue it started to rain harder, as if that was possible.
This leads me quite swiftly onto Problem #8, which is just one digit away from #7 but an even shorter transition to problem #9 as I am about to find out. More roadworks. No biggie, been through loads of them now and with the wondrous dexterity of Michael Schumacher before he fell over in snow and banged his bonce, I gaze through the rain torrent, decelerate to around 60kph because I am a wuss, flick the car left in a controlled manner, skillfully negotiating this lovely car away from the concrete barrier to my right by some 500mm and the copiously numbered and weighted striped lane guidance poles to my left at a slightly wider gap than the aforementioned. I dextrously straighten her u and press on the go pedal, there is a bang! I have run over something very solid and very hard sat in the middle of the lane that looks like it had been strategically placed to see us career out of control into obstacles both stationary and mobile. I successfully control the car and miss the lot, still expecting to hear a louder and sicker thud that did not eventuate thankfully, however,there is a very audible thumpety, thumpety, thump coming from one or more of the wheels. That is all I need. As if by magic/divine intervention or just plain luck, the rain slacks off to a medium monsoon and I have to pilot the now crippled and hitherto brand new shiny black Audi off to the temporary hard shoulder, but had to negotiate a terrifying couple of hundred metres in lane as there was nowhere to go. The impatient traffic was piling up behind me and I was not able to stop without causing World War 3. Knowing the Germans propensity for a stoush and not wanting the situation to be the modern day equivalent of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip that heralded the commencement of WW1’s fun and games, nor was I wanting similarities with the Invasion of Poland that sparked the festivities of WW2, hence I cautiously drove on relentlessly whilst expecting the axles to fly off at any second and urged the now mortally wounded vehicle into a makeshift hard shoulder not much wider than the car itself. There was traffic. Oh don't be rude was there traffic. I gauge my extrication from the vehicle within an inch of my life and manage to open the door and sprint to the back of the car before being cleaned up by some huge truck with Polish writing down the side and the picture of a comical character munching on a sausage. Have head tell of stories that time slows down when life and limb are in danger and the brain takes in an awful lot of stimuli at the one time when you feel you are about to meet the Great Architect of the Universe. For some they see their life stretched out before them played out in slow-mo. For mine, I saw some cartoon numpty eating a sausage - go figure. The sitrep showed that the damage was, thankfully, limited to the front drivers side wheel only. The tyre was as flat as a witch's mammary to quote a slightly modified and oft used cliché by members of the population of the country of my birth. The rear one that also ran over what ever had fallen off the back of Heinrich Steptoe's cart, that caused the incident in the first place, seemed pretty much intact.
Problems #9-14 became just a blur and started with safety triangles that would not stand up on their own that had to be propped up by a red Samsonite purchased some years before in Vegas and now employed as the support of choice for the device for letting following traffic know that the walking wounded were just up ahead and stationary. (big sentence – bad grammar, but has the required dramatic affect). The idea being that it might be better for vehicles yet to come by and laugh at the spectacle, that they would be alerted by said safety triangle to slow down a bit to prevent me from being killed outright or at a some point in time later in a painfully lingering death at a German Krankenhaus after being dismembered by a truck, was the other distinct possibility (same comment as previous bracket as I should have listened more intently in English composition back at Grammar school a million years ago and I would not have to excuse my lack of knowledge in this area of expertise by making stupid comments like this one). Pig's arse. These buggers were out for blood. I was a casualty of vicious vehicular warfare and I had better heed the warning signs.
There was no torch with which to see and no autobahn lighting emitting lumens of any intensity to speak of. The handbook is in German, the spare is a speed limited space saver, the jack is an assemble-it-yourself retracting handle affair that had been devised by the inventor of the Rubik's cube evidently. All of the wheel removal and replacement had to be done in the dark as if in some SAS graduation test on weapons disassembly /assembly conducted in blackness some extremely short distance away from a situation that would see me possibly collecting my promised 24 virgins if I was of the Muslim persuasion and was slightly careless with my pink and hairy ample arse that by now was hanging out in scary lines of traffic.
Amongst other issues, the busted wheel (yes it was well buckled not just a flat tyre) would not fit in the boot with a suitcase as well. Problem # 15. Major relocation of baggage to backseat in the pouring rain. We are both drenched and punch-drunk with stress and wondering why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only locations for Atom bombs ever being dropped on previous enemy territories. This place by now was a strong contender for airborne induced carnage if I had been a trigger-happy, Atom bomb toting Enola Gay B-29 pilot as a profession in a former life. In my temporarily twisted mind, it would appear that had the yanks done the job properly in this location some 80 years previously, then I wouldn’t be sat up to my arse in water with a spare wheel in my hand playing footsie with 18 wheelers. Anyway after much trepidation, the odd harsh word 'tween spouse and I, we are ready to roll.
Problem # 16. We are sat motionless in a makeshift hard shoulder. We are on an 80kph speed restricted skinny and smaller front wheel and we have to accelerate to beyond 130kph to prevent being run over by a catalogue of Europe's finest heavy vehicles and then have to brake heavily for more bloody roadworks should we be lucky enough to thread the traffic needle unscathed. The rain persists, I floor it and we live to tell the tale. I then settle down to my sedentary 80kph and slowly become accustomed to angry German drivers wondering what the hell I was going so slow for and showing their annoyance by firstly frying the paint on the back of the vehicle with what seemed like million watt spotlights, before careering out past me like a seagull after a chip at a million miles an hour and then repeating that manoeuvre in reverse as they dextrously, and quite successfully as it happens, attempted to put the fear of God in me by abruptly cutting in front to show their annoyance. My heart rate drops, I start to feign a smile and utter the now known to be stupidly optimistic phrase " we will laugh about this tomorrow" to an obviously traumatised spouse who now resembles Medusa with her locks plastered to her head from the rain, who just nods compliantly in the incandescent glow of the Audi's Blackpool illuminations.
10km further on, the traffic dies down, I am feeling no pain and I am well aware that I have survived several things that could have killed me, her and probably the both of us together. I am feeling comfortably numb, if not relaxed. I gaze at the road in front and the rain has stopped as if God himself was requesting forgiveness for the test he had just foisted upon us. I am about to utter the words " Well the worst is behind us and what else can now go wrong? ". The first syllable had barely left my lips when the dashboard lit up further, if that was at all possible, like a Belisha Beacon with accompanying alarm noise, that whilst not alarm-ing is enough to let you know that you have, unceremoniously, just hit Problem #17. This is a bloody low tyre pressure alarm, you have used your only spare, you are 130km from your destination and it is 22.00hrs. The hotel lobby, from previous experience of another disaster some 17 years prior (long and interesting comical tale of woe too that almost culminated in a case of frostbite induced exposure but wont go into that one) closes at 23.30 hrs. Mrs. God makes it rain again as if on cue........
Pull over, kick the tyres. There seems to be no problem. Re-tension the front wheel nuts again. No problem. Pull out the German car manual that may as well have been written in hieroglyphics for all it mattered to me as I gaze for a tyre pressure, suddenly realising that my fundamentals of the German language amounted to ordering beers and requesting the bill. I had chosen the wrong time to realise that the German word for tyre (which I now somewhat belatedly and uselessly understand to be "reifen") was unknown to me – but if it ever should happen again I will be prepared.
We sat for a while cogitating the further possibilities of imminent demise and decided to drive even more slowly to the nearest service station some 10km away to seek out air and fill up what I knew was not going to be a flat tyre issue. Thinking as I drove, this was most likely a sensor that now was picking up, or in fact not picking up, a signal from the space saver tyre and defaulting to say that the original wheel was low on air, the ever-so-clever system of German Engineering Excellence induced yet another elevated personal stress level as we somewhat hobbled into the Services some 15 minutes later. Checking of the pressures, which I could not find a recommended Kpa rating for because of the aforementioned lack of German vocabulary relative to motor vehicles, I just gave them a bit more that should see the tyre wear enhanced to an extent that they will all require replacement when the middle section goes baldy in the next 1000km of use. I since have found out that my synopsis of the clever-dick tyre alarm system was correct. Full marks for engineering skills that are proof positive that sleep-learning as a scientific fact is kosher. It must be, as most Friday afternoons back in Blighty in the seventies myself and Dave Ashton from Lytham sat at the back of a boring Marine Engineering Practice class room only half awake after 5 pints and a pie at lunchtime. I was 18, I didn’t know any better. I am now 56 and still don’t. Dave is now something very high up in HR circles at BAE Systems and from his postings on Farcebook is still just as daft as me if, not dafter.
It was here the problems just about sorted themselves out and the Big Fella Upstairs that sees and influences all, had stopped rolling around clouds slapping his thighs in mirth at the Pythonesque antics of the previous 2-hour test of endurance that had been set out for us by a a higher being. Well not quite, as it happens. Obviously perturbed, my lovely lady who had put up with my stress induced tantrums in a way only she knows how to do, decided that we needed a drink of something and wandered into the Service Station to purchase a beverage that the Germans pass off as cold but is in fact drank luke-warm over there. I digress yet again.
The middle aged female German attendant in hideous multi-hued pinny, with no English other than "no", which should, by the look on her face, have been accompanied with a suffix of "f***ing way", as it appeared later. Frau Kranky had decided that this was one transaction that would not happen, this lifetime and this evening in her world. Our major transgression was to arrive just after she had totted up the till for the night and was about to close. The last thing she wanted was to change a Eu50 note at that time of night that would bugger up her figures. She did not reckon with the mad scouser, who calmly uncorked the bottle of tepid Coke Zero and with a smirk that would have rivaled a madman on crack cocaine, took a big swig, opened up her purse to show a mixed array of English Pounds, funny Australian money and the same high denomination Euro notes and said "up to you Fraulein whatchagonnadoaboutit?" or something equally derisory. She changed the 50, we had our warmish drink and we were on our way safe in the knowledge that the pinny wearing sourpuss thought we were Brits
She was only half right.The rest of the tale is basically boring and uneventful twaddle. We rolled into the hotel 3 hours later than planned and were greeted by an impossibly German speaking Vietnamese lady in as remote a part of Germany that could be possible, who carried up one of the heavy suitcases with her equally svelte German born female companion whilst the Dragon looked on and let them. It’s a funny old world.
Calamities such as this seem to follow me wherever I go. Is it just Karma or does it happen to normal people too? Am I alone, please tell me I am not…………
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