Through the Netherlands in a Jiffy...and looking for tyres in Germany

Well, Paddy the stick insect was fine. Into his glass jar he got the required two squirts a day of water to provide the humidity of the habitat in his native India. Plenty of bramble leaves still to eat Paddy was looking forward to this leg on the continent.

We Drove off the ship on this beautiful Friday morning and headed the route the GPS suggested through Utrecht and Groningen towards Germany and Oldenburg, Bremen, Hamburg. The traffic flowed quite nicely in the flatlands of Holland. About 150 miles into this leg we stopped to refuel and to buy some water to drink as the weather was quite warm. As we drove, at lower speeds, we kept the sunroof open and some times the door windows too, which was nice. Overall we had a very uneventful passage through the Netherlands. Roads were in reasonable condition and the traffic was not too heavy even if it was Friday.

As we had looked at changing tyres in England and not had the time, we decided to have a look at the prices of the same tyres on the continent and possibly change here if the price was right. We now had a couple of hours to play with as we needed to spend the night in Sweden anyway, before heading to the ferry terminal in Stockholm.

The World Wide Web on the Iphone could tell us that Falken were sold in various places in Germany. Time-wise the best option en route for us was clearly Oldenburg – arriving at around 1400 businesses were still open and there would be time to wait to get the job done. The GPS took us directly to one of the three listed retailers/tyre shops, where my rusty school German was put to a test: Ich möchte ein Paar Falken Reifen, vor, kaufen, bitte. The friendly tyre Teuton thought my German was fine and happily explained in his own lingo that the type of 225-45-17 that was required would need to be ordered in, which we did not have time for. As the next dealer was close we tried them too with similar results. They tried to be helpful too but must have thought we were millionaires and sent us to the local Porsche dealership.