Hallo again, so now we are back for good, carrying on from yesterday, we awoke this morning, all somewhat knackered and hungover, a couple of brave souls from the team actually wandered off to the sea and had a refreshing early morning swim (well got wet at least).
The last day, packed and unpacked as usual, had by now finally, eaten, drunk, thrown away enough, that packing was vaguely easy, and off we went, only to turn back 5 minutes later to pick up a forgotten jacket, which very unfortunately seemed to have vanished. A real shame, but not a lot that could be done about it, so we were off again, last day so we were allowed to use motorways, which was good as we needed to be at the finish line in Hamburg between 16-17:00, and it was now about 11:00 and we were still in the middle of Poland.
Time to get moving, found a major looking road and drove to Szczecin, change of driver and onward, got over the border and as a welcome back to Germany, got immediately caught in a traffic jam caused by some road works, this was not helping our schedule at all. Finally passed them, decided to test exactly how fast the roof box could really cope with, officially it was 130 km/h, in tests we did not loose it with 160 km/h, so about 16:00 and we were on the outskirts of Hamburg, toilet breaks, and smoking pauses had been cancelled for this part of the tour.
And yes at about 16:30 we turned into the beach club and crossed the official finish line, we had succeeded, no one was dead, or even seriously injured, a huge success. There was even a welcoming committee, some people had in fact noticed we had been missing for the last 16 days. Found our other team friends, our welcoming committee and had beer.
Decided we had been living too much of a vegetarian life for the last weeks, and what we needed was meat, so off to the Greek, for ouzo and meat, even after 2 weeks shut in a small metal box for most of the day, the team was still talking to each other, quite impressive.
Anyway a lot of ouzo, and laughter, and sharing of memories, the night was over.
End of the rally, now just need a holiday to get over it.