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All packed! Energize!

15 hours of driving! Todays trip from Vechta to Vienna was hell! At 8 a.m. we started in beautiful sunshine. We packed our car full to the roof and left the apartment. One suitcase and my Schlumberger bag didn’t fit, so I left’em with the other 25 boxes in my apartment for later transport.

Right after leaving we listened to the radio – 30 car accidents in Lower Saxony since it began to snow this night. Not far from Vechta in the first construction site we saw a police car. On the fast lane was a mercedes car looking the wrong direction. The barriers for the construction site looked like he used them to brake. Luckily the guy was still in the car and didn’t look like he was hurt or anything.

Further south we heard on the North Rhine-Westphalia radio station that they had 150 (!!!) accidents in NRW last night! Great! In Hesse it was not as bad – only (?) 60 car accidents, only one with two severely injured people. But we were lucky – not much traffic, dry roads and sunshine. We would have the possibility to stay overnight in Bavaria at Isi’s place but we decided to drive all teh way through.

The moment we came to Bavaria the chaos started! The first clouds and snowfall and – of course – a little hill. That was too much! Uphills we saw the flashes of a police car, but nothing on our side so far. But the moment we went downhill it started on our side! The lanes were icy, the snow quite heavy and on the right side in the ditch was a car every now and then. We slowly drove with around 50 km/h without further problems.

After the hill the roads were still icy, so we couldn’t (and wouldn’t) go fater than 70 km/h. While I’m driving quite alone on the highway, I see a blue van coming from an on-ramp on my right side onto the highway. As the road is empty anyways I stay on the very left lane. Suddenly I see some snow dusting up in front of the van and then the van’s turning once around itself coming directly towards us! I didn’t have enough time to think, I was afraid to break because of the ice, so I just tried to stay as much left as I could and don’t accelerate anymore. Both David and I were staring at the van, while his backside barely scraped by our car without touching us. In my rear view mirror I watched him stop perpendicular to the lanes. David saw the emergency telephone and told me to stop there. While he talked to the person on the other end, the blue van came down the road and stopped behind us. He lost his license plate but didn’t have any more problems. It was a armoured car for money transport, so the guys were armed. As they were fine we continued our way with a bit higher adrenaline rate in our blood.

In Bavaria it snowed half of the time and parts of the highways were closed because of trucks blocking the road. Finally we made it to Austria and the weather got better. But around Linz the real chaos started! Heavy snowfall made the road markings invisible and we couldn’t drive more than 50 km/h. Around Haag is a small hill. In sunshiny weather we wouldn’t even bother and wouldn’t really call this a hill, but today on the fresh snow it was a disaster! Cars with summer tires and trucks were blocking the right two lanes, while the cars with winter tires or snow chains were in stop and go mode. But accelerating was not as easy! We saw cars with spinning wheels while the cars themselves were not going forward but backwards.

Nothing goes!

Snowy car

Some people put snow chains on their cars others pushed their cars. After the hill the traffic got better soon and after Ybbs the snow stopped falling. The final kilometers we were tired but happy to be home soon and happy that we could drive normally. In Klosterneuburg we had to unload our car before going to bed. What a day!