Motorhoming, autobahning and navigating

Our first experience of the German Autobahn was our taxi ride from the Mercure Frankfurt Airport Hotel to Friedberg to pick up our motorhome. Our taxi driver went over 170kms per hour, answered his mobile and made phone calls no less than ten times and during such calls would write taxi pickups in his diary, not even slowing down to do so. It was pure madness.

Thankfully we made it unscathed to Friedberg and, after an hour demonstration on how to use the motorhome, Matt was in the drivers seat and we were off. With no map, we picked what we thought was a quiet road and would take us safely out of Friedberg so Matt could get used to driving a left hand manual car on the wrong side of the road.

To our surprise, this seemingly quiet road turned into the main street of Friedberg with people everywhere, traffic lights, narrow streets and several fire trucks. We finally made it safely out of the town and in no time Matt was confidently zooming down the Autobahn. I have been so impressed with his driving skills and his ability to stay calm as BMWs and Mercedes zip past us.

My first go of driving the motorhome was less intense and we chose a carpark of a sports centre for me to get used to driving.

After driving around aimlessly in the towns of Wetzlar and Asslar for somewhere to stay Monday night we decided our best bet was to drive out of a town and find somewhere in the country side. Unfortunately the countryside is rather hard to find, as there is a town every 3-5 minutes along the road. We picked the little town of Biskirchen, pulled over next to a pub, had a few beers and went to bed.

On Tuesday I had my first go at driving on an Autobahn. The downside of me driving however meant Matt was now tasked with navigating us to Belgium. I was happily making my way along the autobahn when we were greeted with the sign “Niederlands”. This was slightly alarming as we had never intended to go to the Netherlands and, by our calculations, would not need to. So yes, we had accidentally driven into the wrong country. We pulled over at a rest stop and discovered the Netherlands has an unusual border, and there’s a tiny sliver of land between Germany and Belgium where we were crossing. We stayed on the same road and in no time were in Belgium. In just under two hours we had crossed the entire country and were in the lovely town of Bruges choosing a motorhome park just outside of the old city to stay the night.