Rat Race

What a crazy time it's been. Directly after moving into my new flat I had Hyung and his wife, Grace, over for a visit and then I had to leave them for a business trip on the continent. Although I've been traveling quite a bit for work already, I had some anxiety over this journey because it involved driving myself across several countries back on the right side of the road. I was also hoping to get my TomTom all setup for this trip (since it currently only has the UK and Ireland maps) so that I wouldn't have to be at the mercy of the car rental company for a sat nav system. Unfortunately though my TomTom barfed at the new SD card that I purchased so I had to rush to print out all the Google map directions before I left. Once printed I realized that this wasn't as useful as I'd hoped since I really couldn't read or decipher any of the street names.

Monday afternoon I started my journey by flying from London Heathrow to Brussels Airport. The flight was fine and I arrived on time. I made my way to the Avis counter and asked for a car with a sat nav. Since I would be returning the car in Germany, they only had one car that they could provide me, a Skoda station wagon. I decided first things first, test out the sat nav to ensure it could get me from Belgium to Holland to Germany. I put in my destination in Germany and it looked liked I was golden. I was about to pull out of the garage when I decided I should try the address that I had in Belgium as well. Lucky for me it turned out that I had a car registered in Germany that had a sat nav CD that only covered Germany. Since no other cars with a sat nav were available I had to make due with my Google map directions and head to Ghent. According to Google, my travel time should take about 1 hour and with a little bit of traffic I figured 1.5 to 2 hours. The directions looked simple enough but after driving around in circles for 3 hours I figured that I must be lost. Once I finally reached the hotel, 4 hours later, I realized that the detour signs leading me to the hotel stopped right before the exit that I was supposed to take.

Over the next few days my route consisted of driving from Ghent, Belgium to Maarssen, Netherlands to Duisburg, Germany to Eindhoven, Netherlands and back to Duisburg, Germany. Every night after I packed up the Altera booth, I had to ensure that I had someone else from the caravan to follow to the next city. This was no easy feat in my massive Skoda station wagon. (Skodas are not sold in the US because these cars are rubbish. They are poor imitations that contain the lowest end cheapest VW engines.) Thursday night I finally made my way to Dusseldorf Airport where I had a delayed flight back to London Heathrow due to the poor weather in Germany. Can you guess what was the first thing I did when I got into my car a bit past midnight? I merrily starting driving on the wrong side of the road into oncoming traffic. I narrowly escaped an accident. Lovely.