Norse Saga
Well its time to tell the tale of our trip from the Icy North to Le-Mans in 2011.
Myself and Roar aka John set off from Norway at 4.30am on the Saturday before Le-Mans,
I had just had the car inspected by NAF (the Norwegian Auto mobile club) and been given a full clean bill of health with no findings, so we hoped for a smooth trip down.
All went great we arrived at our ferry from Larvik to Denmark with good time to spare, booked Business class seats so we could relax and get some sleep for a few hours.
Thats when things started to go wrong, the next people to take there seats where a polish couple with a small boy, who seemed to have a broken volume control and promptly kept everyone awake for the next 3 hours and only when the father wanted to sleep did the mother take the kid outside to the play area. Sensing my chance for revenge I thought now would be a goo time to play Angry Birds on my phone with the sound on :-)
Arriving in Denmark we soon made rapid progress towards the German Border and country no 3 on our travels.
We had so much time to arrive in France and be the first of our group to arrive that we kept the car 10km under the speed limit as to not over stress the car, soon passing Hamburg, stopping for a break to stretch our legs and drain some of the fluids we had consumed. Setting off again we planned to take our next stop for dinner around 6pm, that's when the car started to run on 3 cylinders and bellow black smoke, we pulled into the next lay-by and called NAF our breakdown company, that informed us someone would be along soon to help us out.
Being keen motor sports fans and both having our own race cars, we whipped out the trusty Haynes manual and started to diagnose the problem while we waited and both came to the same conclusion that the no 3 injector had failed. When the ADAC truck arrived he listened to our description of the problem, the just said NEED SERVICE Audi Village or Audi City, so thinking it would be less busy we opted for Audi Village.
Arriving 10 minutes after they had closed, he just unloaded us and the car drove of pointing HOTEL over there and left us there.
So we had 2 days until the garage opened, so we set off looking for a Hotel after calling NAF and being informed that they would cover up too 120 euro per night. The first Hotel in the village was full and of the 2 people that ran it the Wife spoke some English and the Husband not a word, so after pushing his wife out of the way the man took charge of giving us directions in German that neither of us understood, but at least he supplied a map of the Village. As it turned out all hotels full, so we decided to eat dinner then find a hotel after.
So having stopped right in the middle of the part in Germany that was the centre of a food based E coli outbreak we took the decision to avoid salads and ordered Pepper Steak with fries thining his would be a safe option. When the meal arrived the first plate the put down was a lovely prpared and presented Salad that myself and Roar looked at as if they had just placed a severed head on the table :-) pushing his to one side we ate a nice meal and walked back to the car to use the gps to find a hotel, found one at Bremmen airport and called for a taxi, when asked do you speak English they replied No, but Autohaus Brandt and Airport seemed to be understood and the phone hung up, so we waited with baited breath to see if the Taxi arrived, it did and we made it finally to a hotel. The next day we spent enjoying the city of Bremmen.
