Every new adventure starts with the first few turns of the wheels

In our case that meant leaving Norrköping at 5.30 am aiming for Trelleborg in South Sweden where the ferry to Sassnitz on Rügen was supposed to leave at 12.45 pm. We managed to be there in good time despite a nice little building site on the road around Malmö. London filtering skills came in handy and revving the engine a bit we moved through there swiftly.

Waiting at the ferry to Sassnitz in Trelleborg. A 4 hours break ahead.

Happy faces 🙂

Crossing by ferry took about 4 hours. We used the time for lunch and conquering a nice place on deck where we could doze off a bit. And study other people on holidays, including the ones that were studying us curiously, since we apparently were the only motorcyclists on board.

Regarding tying the motorcycle aboard I’d like to say, yes, there were belts available, but no dedicated motorcycle places. Two-wheelers are obviously not that common on this connection that the ferry company feels a need catering for these. All went well and everything was manageable, though.

On Rügen, we rode to Bergen which is the main city there and situated in the middle of Germany’s said to be most sunny island. Most sunny, yes, but most “Allee” as well. An “Allee” is a road where you have left a right (and above) a lot of trees and leaves which makes it often really hard to see other cars and motorcycles.

Like in most European countries, motorcycles must have their headlights on in Germany. Not so the cars, though. There it is a recommendation to switch on the light, and this recommendation gets emphasized on Rügen because of the “Allee”-roads. Which of course is ignored by half of the drivers. This combined with vehicles flying your way at 100 km/h + on the clock, on sometimes tight country roads, is something we had to get accustomed to. Cars were all of a sudden faster than motorcycles! And that big times during the next days on the Autobahn, as we will see. We were not used to that.

In Bergen we were lucky enough to find a room quickly, so the bikes did not have to roll too long on the nice old cobble streets. These are clearly nice, but certainly no vehicle’s preference if you’d ask any of them.

The evening we spent in the football-crazy little town of Bergen – Germany won over Argentina with 4:0 and kicked them out of the world cup. We watched car convoys and happy people from a nice table at the small restaurant Bibo Ergo Sum (“I drink, therefore I am”). Great food, nice local beer, simply all you need after a good first day of traveling in sunny weather.

We stayed with Familie Heise in a great room (nice breakfast included!), and the motorcycles were even allowed to sleep in the garage! 50 Euros a night for both of us. Very decent. Master of the premises clearly was Yorkshire terrier Rocky. Like all terriers he forgets about his size and behaves like a Schäfer. But a good watch dog definitely. When we came back into the house from the garage next day, where we tightened the bags onto the bikes, he’d already forgotten that we were still guests and barked at us as if we were total strangers. Short dog, short memory 😉 .