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We left Holland and headed for Germany, steadily driving along at
Bertha’s 90 km/hr pace. Once we reached the autobahns of Germany we
really felt like we were just crawling along. Seeing as we had spent a little
too much money over the last week and the huge fuel bill that Bertha the camper
van was racking it up for the others, we decided to just find ourselves a spot
where we could park up for the night. We found ourselves a nice little spot on
the edge of some woods that did very nicely. The next day we had planned to
head for Berlin,
but Cindy still hadn’t heard back from her friend that lives there. So we thought
it best to give Berlin
a miss, as we figured it may not be too camper friendly. Instead we headed for
the South of Germany, toward Wurzburg,
where the Romantic Road
begins. Only 400 kilometres, surely not too much of a stretch for us to drive
in a day we thought. But as the roads began to ascend Bertha’s speed declined
and it seemed the fuel gauge was travelling faster than our small convoy. We only
made it 200 kilometres that day. We found ourselves a spot to pull up for the
night out the front of a farmer’s paddock. The farmer came along a few minutes
later and through some hand signalling gave us the okay to stay there. He then
led us to his place so that we could fill up our water bottles. That night
Brett, Rick and Cindy decided that Bertha had to go. The fuel bill was costing
them their daily budget alone (about 220 klms from a tank of fuel that cost
50euros or $100 aus) and travelling along a German autobahn at 40km/hr up the
inclines isn’t the safest way to travel. So the decision was made to try and
trade Bertha in for a car and tent.
In the
morning we took off for Wurzburg
where we thought they might be able to find a place to trade Bertha in, being a
larger city. We made it about 50klms along the road before we had to pull in
for a toilet break at a service station. As we went to leave the car park Bertha made the
chance of trade in a little more difficult. It seemed that Bertha was sick of
being bad-mouthed and wasn’t going to take them any further. She did manage to
cough her engine alive, in the smokey way that we had become used to, but Cindy
found it impossible to get it into gear as the clutch had gone “kaput” as the
road side assistance guy put it. So we pulled out Bertha’s awning and waited
around the back of the servo for about 4 hours for the tow truck to arrive.
Bertha was winched on the back of the truck and Brett and Cindy then had to
climb into the campervan, as there was only enough room for Rick inside the tow
truck. With us following in our car behind the truck, we made our way gingerly
to the mechanics. The news got even worse once there, about 600 euros to fix
the clutch and a lot of laughs from the mechanics as they took a peek under the
van. It seemed that a turn of events had forced the Camper Trio into a dismal
decision, Bertha had to be CRUSHED!
So Candice
and I went and set our tent up at a nearby camping grounds, then made a trip
back to the mechanics to pick up the homeless trio and some of their gear. The
next day we went into town for Cindy to get a plane ticket back to London so that she could
buy them a new car. They also got themselves a tent so that Brett and Rick had
a place of their own to stay while we spent our time waiting by the little
stream in the small town of Kothen, in a beautiful
part of Germany.
And a week
after we dropped Cindy off at Frankfurt
Airport, here we find
ourselves still at the little stream, enjoying the subtleties of getting to
know a small foreign village and the locals and more importantly the beer.
