Saturday 22nd May
At 6am the ship woke us up, informing us we had an hour until docking. I felt like I'd just put my head on the pillow and Daz hadn't been able to sleep at all so he was very tired.
We had a quick breakfast and then packed and went to our bikes. We were off the boat for around 8.30am. Weather was nice - not warm, but dry and clear.
At first riding on the wrong side of the road was very intimidating, but we soon got into it. Within half and hour or so we had settled into a good rhythm and made very good progress. The radios worked very well and we managed to navigate with no real problems.
One thing that did surprise us though was how fast the Dutch drove. Then we got to Germany and they made the Dutch seem slow. We were doing 80-90mph and we were the slowest people on the road other than the lorries!
At around 3pm I had a funny moment at one of the junction, I put it down to being tired, and decided to take it at the last moment. Daz had no time to follow and we got separated. As I had left one autobahn to join another, we very soon got out of range of the radios. I had to stop and ring Daz on his mobile phone - hoping he'd done the same. Luckily he had and we soon got back together.
At 4pm we decided to call it a day and look for a camp site. We pulled off the autobahn into a place called Mainz. We asked at a petrol station if they knew were any campsites were and they directed us to one near by. The camp site was a very strange place - one field was full of gypsies who looked like there were living there and another was full of Asian families, again who looked well settled in, not there for a short stay.
I found an Asian man who spoke English and asked him if the campsite accepted tourers – he said yes and took me to a big house next to the field which was surrounded by a big wall with high security gates and an intercom outside. He pushed the button and told us to 'Speak to the boss'.
We waited 3 or 4 minutes before a very tired sounding voice said something in German. I asked if we could camp for the night. 'Nein' was the reply and then nothing else was said! We waited a few more minutes, pressed the button again and then decided the place was far too weird to stop at anyway!
We rode back into Mainz and got lost in a housing estate. I saw a family getting out of an Audi, so we stopped and I went and asked them if they spoke English. The man driving the Audi spoke very good English so we asked him for directions to a camp site. After a fairly lengthy debate with his family in German he said 'Follow me - I'll take you there”, and jumped in his car. He took us across the city to a lovely camp site in a wooded area, and then he asked if he could help in any other way. I think we found the nicest most helpful person in Mainz!
By this time we were both very tired - we pitched the tents and then started discussing the journey tomorrow. Halfway through the conversation Daz actually fell asleep! I spent the rest of the night sorting my stuff out and then went for a walk - it was a very nice place we were camping in, but I forgot to take my camera so no pictures unfortunately.
Daz woke up about 9.45pm. I'd bough a couple of beers by then and I think he smelt them. We had the beers and finished the night with a cup of hot chocolate. Born to be wild us!