At Teched Europe with a car
As I mentioned earlier, we were at Amsterdam together with my family by car. Family means my wife and our two daughters (2 and 5 years). Here's a brief overview of the trip.
This is roughly the route we followed in central europe (excluding Finland and central Sweden from the map):
We started off on June 30 from Kirkkonummi with a short ride to Hanko, Finland. From there we boarded
Superfast VII to Rostock. After 21 hours we were in Germany heading towards Amsterdam.
Between Rostock and Amsterdam we spent two nights, one in Wismar and the other in Syke (near Bremen). After a week in Amsterdam (I was at work mo-fri at RAI) we continued towards Luxemburg. We have friends living there, and we spent a couple of days with them exploring both the city and countryside of Luxemburg.
After Luxemburg, we visited Köln briefly. After Köln we headed for Wolfsburg and spent half a day in
Autostadt (an exhibition area of Volkswagen). It is located just around the corner of Volkswagen headqurters and factory. It was amazing to see how they produce cars (there was a possibility to visit the factory with a "werktour" train). Seeing the assembly of cars reminded me a lot of Software Factories initiative which is an analogy for assembling software. The factory area is about the size of Monaco with e.g. cargo trains running inside the buildings and a power station of its own. Impressive. And definitely worth a visit if you happen to be in the area.
Speaking of cars, after Autostadt I decided to test what is the max speed of our 2003 model Peugeot 307 SW 2.0. Here's the result with a full load of baggage and 2+2 passengers:
Generally, we held the speed of about 150-160 km/h set in the cruise control when traffic conditions and speed limits allowed it.
After Germany, we drove home through Denmark and Sweden. In Denmark we naturally visited
Legoland in Billund, which was an amazing experience also for an adult. There's tons of excellent miniatures of different locations of the world, all assembled together from lego bricks. If you have children under 10 years of age, it is a perfect place to visit! Thanks to Rasmus for helping to find a place to stay in Denmark!
From Sweden we boarded
Silja Serenade and were home in Helsinki after about 4000 km of driving.
A few random notes about driving/visiting central europe:
- The people in the Netherlands all speak excellent english, almost like native speakers
- The people in Germany and Luxemburg speak surprisingly little english, we met several people along the way who didn't speak english at all
- Credit cards are not accepted nearly as widely as in Finland. Notably, all McDonalds' that we visited declined VISA and Amex alltogether. This was a surprise, since I am used to paying everything with either a bank card or a credit card here in Finland and it can happen that I don't have any cash with me for several months. Here it was all different :)
- Toilets cost money in petrol stations. Almost everywhere there was a policy that you were expected hand out 30-50 cents to a person taking care of the toilets when you were finished. This was a pain for me, since for several years now I have used to not carrying any coins with me at all. So, I had to disappoint the toilet polices a few times :)
- The roads in Germany are generally well built and traveling with a car is fast, provided that there are no accidents generating queues. Luckily, we managed to avoid them with the exception of one in A7 on the way to Wolfsburg :)
- I had a bluetooth GPS receiver with me (thanks Ilija!) that I hooked up to a Pocket PC (and occasionally also to a laptop). Combined with AutoRoute 2005 and Pocket Streets, it provided an invaluable experience, we never had to ask for advice nor search for hotels extensively. Typically, we arrived straight to the target with minimal fuss. The level of detail in the maps were excellent and although it doesn't include any real navigation features it is still way much better than ordinary maps. I never leave for a similar trip without a GPS device any more!
