Our semester trip this year was to drive down the Romantic Road in Germany, cross briefly into Austria and Switzerland before returning home. Our first stop was to be Cottbus, a town in eastern Germany:
Our first problem started before we even left Sweden... In order to be able to drive in a majority of towns in Germany we needed a green sticker - this is a sticker that shows that the car has reasonable emissions. Since we had a new car this was not going to be an issue, however it was a very new car and we hadn't received the full registration papers. I tried to buy the sticker online but had an email back stating that they wouldnt accept our preliminary registration papers, they needed the full paperwork. On the day we left we still hadn't received our rego papers. Fortunately we could buy the green sticker at any car service/repair company in Germany - but would they accept our papers?
At 8am we were packed and heading off - this was one of the few trips we were actually out of the door on time! First step was to cross the Oresund into Denmark - we were heading to Gedser to take our ferry across to Rostock in Germany.
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| Crossing into Denmark |
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| The Oresund Bridge |
I had booked our ferry for 1:30pm as I hadnt wanted to have to rush the morning to make it for the 11:30am ferry, but since we'd actually gotten out on time we arrived at Gedser just after 10am. Our ferry ticket guaranteed us a spot on the 1:30 ferry but we were able to board any other ferry on that date as long as they had room. We were directed to a waiting bay and told that we had a '95% chance' of getting on the earlier ferry.
Luckily we did get a spot and then we were on the HMS Copenhagen on the 2 hour trip across to Rostock:
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| "Did you see the pirate ship?", Tomas |
Once we landed in Rostock we needed to go on the hunt for the green sticker. I checked for the nearest TÜV SÜD site, as this is the name of the Germany car inspection agency. My phone found one nearby so we plugged in the directions. Firstly the directions took us through a toll tunnel (4.5 euro) and then it turned out that we ended up in some sort of technology park with no inspection company anywhere nearby. As we were heading out, defeated, we saw an Opel service center and decided to try there. Unfortunately none of the staff could speak more than a word or two of English and our German was not up to scratch. By a mix of German, English and Swedish and crazed gesturing we indicated that we wanted a green sticker. The lady at reception smiled as she finally understood what the crazy Australians were gibbering about, but then frowned as we handed her the only registration papers we had. She said "Dokument" a few times and we sadly nodded, agreeing that we had only what we provided. She played around on the computer for a while and then filled out the sticker. I'm not sure whether the documents we had were acceptable, or if she just wanted to get rid of us, but she was really helpful despite the language barrier.
With our fresh green sticker we then headed to Cottbus - straight back through the toll tunnel for another 4.5 euro.
Our drive was doing really well along the freeways until we hit the outskirts of Berlin and a burst pipe stopped us in our tracks. It took almost 45 minutes to get around Berlin:
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| When we finally escaped the grip of Berlin, these poor trucks were just heading in.. |
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| The roads in the towns around Cottbus made for an interesting change from the Freeways |
Dinner was nachos.
Travel time: 8hrs
Travel Distance: 600km
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