We booked every hotel/apartment the same day online
It never was a problem to find an accommodation
Rooms are affordable, Petersberg offered 5 star luxury for 3 star cost
Hotels might close already at 8 pm, call early
Hotels and especially cabins might have no restaurant and the next place to eat could be an hour away, have some canned food and cookies with you
Roads and car:
A lot of snow and ice
Conditions can change within seconds and with pure ice just around the corner
Spikes do make sense and are common (from Sweden to the Baltics)
4-wheel makes sense
Small bluetooth speaker is great for music and audio books
Clothes:
Be prepared for a wide range of temperature, you might have +15 C in Hamburg,
0 C on the Lofoten Islands and -30 C somewhere in Finland
A warm fur hat makes a lot of sense (especially with my hairstyle)
Lined warm trousers are great
We never needed our super warm gloves
The super warm boots were needed only a few times, but good to have
Our super warm jacket was great
As long as you plan no extensive outdoor activity, you don’t need to much warm stuff, but keep in mind that your car might break down … for that reason we had as well polar sleeping bags
Saturday, March 10th, 2018
Distance covered: 360 km
Driving: 10 am – 2 pm
Weather: Grey day
Lowest temperature: 4C
Border crossing: one, Poland – Germany
The last day, the last kilometres. The trip was great, but by now every story was told, the butt aching and we were really happy to be back home soon. Though the Autobahn was allowed on the last day of the rallye, we decided on less distance but a bit longer ride and drove on a straight line from Stettin to Hamburg through Brandenburg. Having a lot of fun with playing again and again the Rainald Grebe song (and not sure if our guest David enjoyed it as much as we did.)
And while Poland felt quite populated and while Scandinavia offered great 4G coverage in the most remote forest, we were now driving offline during an empty Brandenburg.
After a quick photo stop at Schloss Rheinsberg,
we took the good old German Autobahn to make the last kilometres to Hamburg.
Grande Finale
During the next hours, all remaining teams arrived at the Fischmarkt, meeting with family and friends and celebrating the success.
We headed to our hotel (my beloved “25h Hafencity“, had a proper dinner and joined the Farewell party and and winner celebration (well deserved for team “Quick & Dirty“) at Eier Carl.
A big THANK YOU again to all of our supporters, who made Team Champagne Supernova the Charity Winner.
Friday, March 9th, 2018
Distance covered: 613 km
Driving: 9 am – 7 pm
Weather: Grey day
Lowest temperature: 2C
Border crossing: none
After breakfast we realised, that an additional seat for David, who joined us the night before, was actually missing. But: “leave no man behind!”. Within half an hour of extreme luggage tetris of the two cars, we made space for David in our Touareg, while Debbie stay in the G-Class of Team 68.
We started a long drive and a boring day: The beauty of white ice, snow and empty landscape was replaced by a grey and brown and far too many small towns with frequent speed traps along the street. Well, Poland has 38 Million inhabitants and a density of 123/km2 while Finland has 5,6 Million inhabitants and a density of 16/km2 (Germany has a density of 232/km2).
As a first quick stop we visited the location of the former Tannenberg monument, that was build in 1924 to remember the Battle of Tannenberg during Word War One. Later it was redesigned by the Nazis and used as a grave for Generalfeldmarschall Paul von Hindenburg. In 1945, with the Red Army quickly approaching, the remains of Hindenburg were moved to the West and the monument got blown up. Not much to see these days.
We had a quick McDonalds lunch in Marienburg, took a picture of the massive castle and drove further west.
Driving on, more small villages, brown woods and fields.
Only other highlight of the drive: a T-34 tank, a couple of WWII canons and a sign on the Pommernstellung right in the middle of nowhere.
While we initially planned to spend the night in Kolberg, we decided in the afternoon to drive further west and stay in Stettin, just at the German border. We reached the city in the dark, checked into our unremarkable hotel and had a Polish Pirogi–dinner in the small but nice city center.
Thursday, March 8th, 2018
Distance covered: 572 km
Driving: 7 am – 6 pm
Weather: Grey day
Lowest temperature: -2C
Border crossing: 2, Latvia – Lithuania – Poland (no checkpoints)
We started the day with a healthy Latvian breakfast of eggs and bacon and visited some perfectly renovated rooms and halls of the Mezotne Palace.
As bridges are scarce in the region, we had to start with some extra kilometres on our way to Lithuania and the Hill of the Crosses
Crossing the border to the last Balic State was again smooth and without any checkpoint. We soon reached the Lithuanian national monument “Hill of Crosses“. It was destroyed several times by the Soviets, but got quickly rebuild every time and still collects new crosses every day from visitors from all over the world.
The landscape now changed from forests to fields and the colours from white to grey and brown. With no more snow and ice on the streets, we changed back to regular winter tires in Kaunas and continued further west. A bit later we crossed the small corridor between Russia (Königsberg / Kaliningrad) in the north and White Russia in the South to enter Poland.
We enjoyed being alone at this very special place. Especially, as the area is not run as a museum, but more as a theme park with fun rides, tank driving and very irritating offers in the souvenir shop. A “Wolfsschanze” towel and teddy bear, really?
It was getting dark, when we finally reached our hotel in Giżycko. The St. Bruno hotel is located in an old monastery, with nice rooms, a bar with bowling and a great restaurant, as we found.
Initially we had planned to have dinner in town, but Team 68 arrived a bit later at the hotel, saw our car and Isabelle knew where to find us: the hotel bar. The food in the hotel restaurant was really good. And later in the evening we met again “our” photographer David. His partner Debbie joined the rallye in Tallin and was riding with Team 68, while David was with the Drift Chicks, but couldn’t resist a fun night with vodka and bowling.
Wednesday, March 7th, 2018
Distance covered: 490km
Driving: 9am – 7pm
Weather: Sunny
Lowest temperature: -7C
Border crossing: Estonia – Latvia (no checkpoints)
The night was short, sleep was light, but with a sunny and cold morning, we quickly got back to life and into the car, with a first stop only one kilometre away at the “Gut Kolga” manor house. This used to be the biggest noble property in Estonia, for centuries in the hands of the Stenbock family, but now got sold to a new owner.
Within an hour, we reached Talinn, had breakfast and did a walk through this beautiful medieval town towards the concrete socialistic ruin of the Linnahall.
The next stop was the task of the day: to find the ruins of former soviet prison and labor camp at a quarry. It was a great adventure to climb the wall, wander through abandoned buildings and across the frozen lake with houses standing in the ice. In summer, this is now a hotspot for swimming, beach parties and diving and throughout the year a great motive for photographers and even became the set of the apocalyptic movie “Beautiful Day“.
The location in summer:
As most of the other teams, we drove south along the shore of the frozen baltic sea and crossed the border from Estonia to Latvia without any controls: Europe is great!
As every day, we started to look for the hotel for the night during the afternoon. We initially planned to stay in Riga, but found a hotel in a great looking manor house, a bit smaller but definitely in better shape than “Gut Kolga” in the morning.
Mezotne Palace was formerly used as the state guest house of Latvia and only recently was turned into a private hotel. As usual, we called the hotel some hours before we got there, to check if there was a restaurant. “Hello? …. Ah, you are the guests! … You want eat? Next restaurant is 30 km away. I will call kitchen master!” After driving the last 20 km on a dirt road, we got – as the only guests – to this remote and beautiful place. The receptionist was wearing joggers and informed us about the menu options: “You want pork or chicken or fish?” We chose pork, were invited to the dining room in an hour and moved into our nice rooms (the windows with lights on the second floor).
For dinner, the joggers got changed into black trousers and a white shirt and we enjoyed the easy but good food, alone in the large dining room. The rest of the evening we spent upstairs and posted a last call for donations for our charity project: drilling a well in Uganda. By now, we were quite close to make our initially stretched goal of 7.000,- €. Thanks to our great friends, the final gap of 324,- € got not only closed within minutes, but even more money was donated. This clearly asked for some celebration with Champagne and Oasis music.
