Semester Trip 2024 (11 - 31 Jul 24) - 1 - Ferry from Trelleborg to Rostock

We spent a bit of time playing around with what we would do for our big holiday this year, knowing that it would likely be our last big European holiday before we headed home at the end of the year.  We toyed with heading the Greece, but the temperatures had been really high and we weren't keen on a repeat of our 42 degree Rome trip. We couldn't really afford our usual trip to America, so in the end we looked at Europe and where we hadn't been:

Above is a a (very badly done) markup of where in Europe we had travelled. We'd spent a lot of time in the Nordic countries and Germany, as well as Great Britain. We'd recently done a chunk of northwest France and of Poland. We did consider southern France or Spain, they were a bit too far out of comfortable driving range (Malmo to Barcelona is about 24hrs driving). I'd been interested in revisiting Prague and Vienna as the last time we had rushed through at the end of the trip, and my memories were all jumbled. The memories I had of Vienna were actually Salzburg. There were a few other countries I was keen to see nearby, so we settled for Slovakia, Slovenia and Northern Croatia. We originally planned to catch a ferry over from Rodby to Puttgarden, but I found that we could take the Stena line overnight from Trelleborg (20 min south of Malmo) to Rostock, arriving at 6am. This would leave us free to drive. There were tickets available for Thursday night, so we booked those in. Since I'd originally planned on starting Saturday morning, this gave us a couple of free days, so we decided to use those to check out the couple of castles we'd missed in southwest Poland.

So it was all coming together - Ferry from Trelleborg to Rostock and drive to Lesna in Poland. Then a day there to see the castle, a couple of days in Czechia (Czech Republic), a couple in Vienna, a few days in Austria and a visit to Slovakia, Slovenia and Croatia. That then gave the problem of how did we get back? I didn't really want to hammer out one long return drive (it would be about 14hrs), so we managed to slot in a stop in Venice, one in Salzburg and one in Leipzig. Pefect.

Our ferry was due to leave Trelleborg at 10:50pm, with boarding closing at 9:50, so we packed the car, picked up some dinner and headed down to the ferry terminal for 9pm.

Our ferry coming in

Our rooms weren't ready until we actually departed, so we grabbed a drink and a snack and then took some pictures from the deck:

We left the port and I then got an interesting SMS:

We had the option to connect to a Satellite network on our phones. The cost was only 99 SEK per MB. Since an average photo Kristine takes is about 5Mb, that would be almost 500sek (or Aud$70) to download one picture! At first we were worried and turned off all mobile data, but it needed an  account created to use it. I could just picture the kids using their usual 1Gb of data and us receiving a 9900Sek ( AUD$1400 bill each).

We were in our rooms just after 11:30 and got some sleep (about 4hrs) before the call to wake up came through the loudspeaker at 5am to let us know that we'd be docking in an hour and needed to be ready to go.

Tired, but excited we got through the shower, packed and got to the car - disembarking around 6:30 in Rostock.