5 June

Well, after 8 days in Sweden, we started for home.  We left Halmstad, headed for Malmo, crossed the long new bridge – expensive, again – and then headed south through Denmark. Very nice riding, very pretty.  A brief lunch – sandwiches, thanks to PC and Susan – at the ferry departure point.  Across the ferry to Germany, about 45 min.  Met a friendly guy from Sweden, on his way south to ride with friends in Vienna. Traffic near Hamburg came to a complete standstill, and after about 30 min of stop start, my bike started overheating.  Eventually two other bikes came past, riding between the lanes of traffic, so we followed them, and eventually we cleared the mess of traffic.

Late in the afternoon, we decided to look for a campsite, and the gps led us to a very nice place at Lauenbruck, a village of about 2000 people.  A very pretty campsite, with a moat, where the castle was destroyed in the 18^th century by lightening, this was the prettiest camp site that we had seen in Europe.  The camp manager was very excited to hear that we were from South Africa and when we got back from supper he asked us to have a beer with him and his boss, who has a niece in SA, Hans arrived and we started to chat and eventually we got to discuss flying, so we had to go to the local airfield which is on his property and have a look at all the different planes that were there, lots of different planes, including about five trikes.   We also met a guy by the name of Mike who had just returned from a trip to South Africa where he met a friend of ours, Andrew Strydom.  Just made us realize what a very small world we now live in.  After a couple of beers, yes even I had to have one, we left and what we had hoped to be an early night turned into a very pleasant late social evening.

The next morning we overslept and eventually got moving and back onto the bikes heading for Groningen and Johannes and his family to get the pallets sorted out for the bikes, we met a group of Harley riders and they warned us of rain further south.  The closer we got to our destination the colder it got, but we were very lucky the little bit of rain that did fall was only after we were comfortably inside.

The pallet for my bike has been sorted out and Larry and Johannes will start work on the pallet for his bike early tomorrow.  Both wheels off both bikes have been taken off and will be taken to the local tyre dealer to have the new tyres put on, we decided that there was still a fair amount of life left in the front tyres but not worth taking the chance of needing new tyres in the middle of nowhere in Africa.  23945km on this set, not bad!!!

So our return journey has started!!  We have also just heard of a bomb blast in the middle of Nairobi, welcome back to Africa!