After a night of light partying and bratwurst, and a relatively good nights sleep, we start the day with bacon rolls. What more does a growing lad need? Conveniently the GTO has a nice flat space on the boot exactly the right size for the gas cooker to fit on, so the fry-up was achieved with relative ease.
While the tents were dried off from the condensation I gave the GTO a once over, all looked ok so far. Then I took a wander around camp. A few members of one team were testing their euro-required breathalysers... they didn't pass... unsurprisingly.
While wandering, I came across Team BugSplat and their rather battle damaged MX-5. It seems they developed a rather explosive radiator, which emptied itself all over the engine bay. The net result being the requirement to fabricate a thermostat gasket out of cardboard and hope it held.
After packing the tents we rolled round to the main entrance to the camp to collect our route cards... but here is where we ran into a problem...
Crikey, its the rozzers!
The fairies do their best to placate them....
But the blockade holds firm.
There was some confusion with the local constabulary over the exact nature of the ScumRun event, and they were stopping us from "Racing" in the lovely city of Cologne. The mayors office was involved, and we even had a local TV reporter come down to film some of the shenanigans. Ultimately, whoever needed to be convinced changed their mind, and we were allowed on our way, albeit with a 2hr+ delay. They decided to let us go in groups. Not content with that, however, they also launched the police helicopter to ensure we had left the city limits without incident.
The route card for today takes us to the town of Hamlin (or Hameln) of Pied Piper fame. Second check point for the day is a Holocaust memorial, and then its off to the camp site just outside Berlin.
On the road to Hamlin...
After many miles on the road (and a possible flash from a camera when approaching some lights... oops) we arrive at Hamlin (Hameln). Its quite off the main drag to Berlin, so catching up with the other team will be a challenge in its self. More on that later :D
Johannes Gutenberg and a rat....
Hamlin train station.
On the way out of Hamlin there were some fantastic driving roads. Nice and smooth, little traffic, and you could see for miles. To top it off there were some awesome views of some very majestic wind turbines.
Seymore noticed that Axels of Evil were stopped in traffic so it was time to get the lead foot out, and regain some ground. Most of the German autobahns don't have speed limits so, traffic permitting, you can go as fast as your car will allow. As the roads we were on were relatively quiet we managed to squeeze a GPS verified 223kph (about 138mph) out of the old girl, but merging traffic meant we had to drop back to a more sedate 180kph (around 110mph). Surprisingly, despite her age, the GTO handled the speed without any drama what-so-ever. There was a slight vibration at about 190kph, but beyond that it was smooth sailing. Good to know for future land-speed attempts :)
We rock in to Berlin at around 7pm. Too late to actually visit the memorial site, but we got our photo taken by another team who had also just arrived.
After that we had a brief tour around the Berlin ring roads before heading for the camp site.
As we had opted to upgrade our tent space to a hostel room for the night there was no tent rigging required. We parked up, got our sleeping gear sorted in the rooms and then headed to Berlin for a night on the tiles...
Initially we were dropped off by coach at the Cassiopeia complex. This is a collection of pubs a clubs in a fairly bohemian part of town. We grabbed a quick beer and had a look around.
Right next to the bar there was a climbing centre completely open to the public. I guess there may be some rules / regs for climbing, but it looked for all intents and purposes as tho you could just jump on and start climbing, even if you didn't have any of the gear. Crazy. But also pretty cool.
The atmosphere in the complex was quite good, but it was mostly an outdoors thing and the temperature had dropped so we headed in search of a decent indoor restaurant. As it was almost 9:30pm by the time we had drunk our beer it was getting quite late, and finding food was looking problematic. We wandered around aimlessly for a bit while Adam consulted Trip advisor and Google looking for food. We found a random little steak house down a back street that was still open. They did the most fantastic steak and it seemed quite cheap too.
Several hours later we head back to the camp, ready for day 3, but where will that take us ? Who knows....
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