Last Friday I made a longer trip with the 5er, so it has become a rather long journey (as a warning for those who get easily bored and cannot be bothered).
For those, who are actually interested, it is a drive from the lovely town of Papenburg back home to my hometown of Wilhelmshaven -- about 120 km all in all, containing country roads and Autobahn of course. If you have Google Earth on your PC, the drive starts at 53? 3'4.00"N 7?19'52.23"E and ends at 53?31'51.39"N 8? 6'24.87"E.
I chose to record the trip back home and not the journey there. Because when you drive from north to south, you have the sun against you all the way. From south to north, though, you have perfect lighting.
The journey starts in a suburb of Papenburg called Aschendorf, where I had stopped to clean the windscreen from crushed insects (they really went from 0 to 100 in a few sunny days last week) prior to recording.
I cut the whole trip into four pieces and will publish them one after the other, when they have finished uploading. Since it is meant to be a scenic drive to show the landscape of my current home turf and not so much a road test, I allowed myself to put some music in as a score. It's 1970's prog rock, the music I loved to listen to as a teenager. If you can't stand it, stop watching or cut down the volume but don't complain, since this is full of my childhood memories. So don't mess with me
Alright, first part is here:
I chose Papenburg as a starting point, because (as some of my fellow Germans will know), it is the town, where the currently most famous shipyard of Germany is located, the Meyer Werft. It's become famous for its top-of-the-line cruise ships and the fact, that those ships are made indoors in some of the biggest construction hangars in the world (up to 400 m long) and not at seaside or at a big river, where big shipards are usually located, but about 50 km inland at the rather small river Ems, which is often not wider than 90 meters.
The cruise ships are launched there and then manoeuvered carefully through this eye-of-a-needle river to the North Sea. The last cruise ships they launched there, was the 340 m long "Disney Dream" and the 252 m long "AIDASol".
The Meyer Werft's order book is quite packed at the moment:
2011 Celebrity Silhouette ("Solstice" Class), for Celebrity Cruises (USA)
2012 AIDAmar ("Sphinx"-Class), for AIDA Cruises (Germany)
2011 Disney Fantasy for Disney Cruise Line (USA)
2012 Celebrity Reflection ("Solstice"-Class) for Celebrity Cruise Line (USA)
2013 AIDA Sphinx VII / Ikarus IV ("Sphinx"-Class) for AIDA Cruises (Germany)
2013 Unknown name yet, 143.500 CT ship for Norwegian Cruise Line (USA)
2013 Unknown name yet, 143.500 CT ship for Norwegian Cruise Line (USA)
2014 Projekt "Sunshine", a 158.000 CT ship for Royal Caribbean Cruises (USA)
So if you are in the area, the Meyer Werft ist definetely worth a visit. They have guided tours and the launch of ships is a mega event each time, which hundreds of thousands of spectators are watching alongside the river Ems.
The first part ends in a traffic jam of Easter Weekend holidayers on their way to the North Sea coast.