We’ve spent the last 3 nights in Stade in Germany. It’s a pretty little town with a canal/river running through and the usual pretty timber-framed buildings in the old part of town.
It took us best part of 6 hours to get here, a lot longer drive than I would have wanted. According to the sat nav we were within 15 minutes of arriving when we came to a road that was closed to traffic going in our direction. I took another turn thinking the sat nav would recalculate and find another way. Instead it tried to send us back to the route we couldn’t use on account of the road closure. Eventually I looked at the map and had to pick another location to head for so that we could approach Stade from a different direction. That worked ok except it meant driving an extra 20 or so kilometres.
When we got to the camp site in Stade the check in system was self-serve and a bit complicated. We eventually figured it out though, you just drive to a pitch then got to the machine and book however many nights you want and load a card up with money to cover electricity costs.
When we walked into town the first night we came across a Mexican restaurant and couldn’t resist. Mexican food, few beers, what could be better?
It turns out the Satellite system is now redundant as it seems we’re out of range already. From what I can work out we can only get reception from 1 satellite and that only covers as far as the edge of Holland which is far behind us now!
I’ve fired off emails to Oyster and the dealer who installed the system, lets see if any of them come back to me.
Second night in Stade we walked into town and did some photography during the blue hour. There’s a little area that looks like a harbour and a boat with some weird blue figures on it. No idea what that’s all about. If you look to the left of the photo you’ll see a Marilyn Monroe figure in the window with the wind blowing her skirt up!
On the day we left we were driving through the camp site and there was an older German van just reversing out of his pitch. His wife saw us coming and went to tell him. At that point I expected him to wait while we went past. Unexpectedly he shot out instead and drove off. I soon realised why when we got to the queue for the grey water dumping space. He couldn’t wait to get out so as to be in front of us in the queue. The couple at the front took so long over everything we eventually had to wait 20 minutes or more to spend our two minutes dumping water! Very frustrating!
Wandering Wildman 