Zagan is a Green Van in Kaltenkirchen, Germany
Zagan the motorhome is parked with several fellow motorhomes in a free aire in the small town of Kaltenkirchen just north of Hamburg (N53.83785, E9.94636). Across the road from him there’s a huge spa complex, and at €16 for a couple of hours in the pools and saunas it is tempting. However, so far I have only seen families coming out of the place, and heard screaming from within. I don’t think it is school holidays here at the moment, but it isn’t feeling conducive for a relaxing afternoon.
This morning we woke to a find a misty fog blanket wrapped around us. We’d planned to go for a run along the waterfront we walked yesterday, but in the afternoon I managed to twist something in my knee while shifting my legs off the couch – serves me right for lying in front of the TV. Only when something hurts to turn it, do you realised how much you twist and turn to get around the small space of a camper. A couple of ibuprofen and it was feeling much better this morning, but still not top form so instead we opted to move on.
This little chap was hanging out with the ducks this morning, any ideas what he is?
First call was a huge retail park, on the motorway junction after the border with Denmark. There is a motorhome dealer there and we thought we’d have a nosey at the price of leisure batteries, as ours are on their way out. In reality we’ll probably get starter batteries to replace our leisure batteries, but as we have a long list of bits and pieces we need to fettle Zagan, when we get home we thought we’d price a few things up.
I think we might get one of these to transport pampered pooch about
The first thing that struck us as we entered the aptly names ‘Scandinavia Park’ was a huge motorhome and caravan parking area – yes you can drive here, get drunk on cheap beer and stay the night. The massive supermarket would supply the beer, but the trollies we saw leaving were mainly full of cans of pop – one chap had two trays full of Nutella, Jay had to stop me from following him back to his car.
The thing that really caught our attention at the park was the Beate Uhse shop. If you are from Germany you’ll know what these shops sell, so you’ll know why we, as Brits, were amazed to see one on a retail park. If, like us, you’d never heard of them before, think Ann Summers but with a much better background story. The reason we first noticed the shop was because the name crept up yesterday when Jay was doing research into Flensburg for his blog post (you don’t seriously think we know everything we write about?). We’d discovered that Beate Uhse was a the only female stunt pilot in Germany in the 1930’s and in 1962, she put Flensburg on the map, when she opened a “speciality store for marital hygiene” – the first ‘Adult Shop’ in the world. We pondered how strange it is that ‘straight-laced’ Germany holds this honour and not somewhere more openly passionate like Spain or Italy. I guess the strong Catholic religion would have put a stop to it? With the company listed on the German Stock Exchange since 1999, I guess all things in fifty shades of grey are more widely accepted here than in the UK.
Our trip to the motorhome dealers proved unfruitful, not a leisure battery in sight. We still spent a good while wandering around the place looking at all the accessories though, our kind of Adult Shop – melamine dinner sets, plastic glasses, spare toilet cassettes and rubber tubing for back-filling the gas system!
As we hit the autobahn, satnav stopped telling us the speed limit, because there isn’t one, ah the joys of Germany. Of course Zagan never crept much above 80 kph, as took it in turns to drive along, we aren’t in a rush and by driving slowly Jay can save enough money for a few more beers. Fields of solar panels and wind farms ushered us along to our destination and we were soon parked up in Kaltenkirchen and plugged into the electric hook-up to refresh our tired batteries.
Looks like someone has a nice Christmas present being made by a boat builder on the Nord Otsee Canal
I love these signs across Germany letting you know how fast your tank can go when crossing it!
After a spot of lunch we wandered over to the spa to see how much it was (around €16 per person for two hours in the pools and saunas) before setting off for a walk into town. I had taken Zagan’s documents with us as we were hoping to get an umweltzone sticker for him. Many Germany cities have an umweltzone in them, a bit like London’s congestion charge, it is to reduce emissions by stopping old and dirty vehicles from entering them. Cities in the scheme have a sign as you enter them telling you what colour sticker you need to be able to drive in. Green is the best (at the moment I think, with technology moving on there may be another colour coming out) and with that you can get in everywhere. The yellow, then red then no sticker. Dave, our previous motorhome, had no sticker, so it was squeaky bum time when we had to drive into the umweltzone to collect a part from a motorhome dealer inDortmund.
Knowing that a sticker was €5, but with no idea where we could one from, the website just said authorised garages, I wandered into the first dealership I saw and tried out my schoolgirl German. For reasons that will become clear I won’t name them, but at first they were shocked that I wanted a sticker, assuming foreign vehicles don’t need them. I explained that I had looked it up and we did need one, so they tried their best to help, but sadly the UK documents don’t have the information they needed to be able to assign a colour of sticker to us. After much discussion, between me and three of their staff they asked if we had a particle filter on Zagan. I popped outside to ask Jay (who was watching Charlie) and like me, he had no idea, so all we could say was that nothing had been fitted after Zagan was made. With this they smiled, probably realising how much time they had spent on this and how they were going to get nowhere, and sold us a green sticker. So no more squeaky bum time as we approach cities – yipee!
We’re Green – how happy are we?
After a look around the rest of the town, we headed back to Zagan and cracked open a beer and some wine to celebrate. Happy days.
Ju x
You’ll be fine in the German spa, no noisy children in the spa side but you’ll have to take all your kit off to get in! Go on give it a go, you’ll be surprised how natural it feels after 5 minutes.
Thanks for the tip! After the saunas in Finland we’d be OK with that, but we’ll have to leave it for another time as we’re heading further south again today.
It’s school holidays in Hamburg, so there will no peace in the pool! Check http://www.schulferien.org for details of all school holidays across Germany. Being organized, Germany makes sure all the different Bundeslaender have staggered holidays to avoid overloading roads and airports, etc. Greetings from the Czech Republic, on the border with Saxony in Germany, which does not have school holidays.
That is organised and makes perfect sense. Shame they don’t do something similar in the UK. We loved our time in the Czech Republic and were just talking about it the other day – mainly about how the beer tastes so much better there!
Will you please get proper deep cycle leisure batteries and not skimp on a cheap starter battery. They provide power in very different ways. x
Hi Phil. On our two year tour our leisure battery died early on, after a week or two. We couldn’t find a suitable deep cycle battery and in the end just got a budget starter one to keep us going. Two years later it was still performing as well as it did on day 1. I can only guess our relatively low power use meant we were getting nowhere near even 50% capacity at any point (although we did totally flatten it once in Southern Italy), and we’d quickly recharge through the alternator, solar or hook up. The additional cost of a ‘proper’ leisure battery makes no sense for us under these circumstances? Appreciate the heads-up of course. Cheers, Jay
Hey welcome to Germany,
its nice to read u’re view about getting to our home country. Last time we returned form Denmark we stopped at the Scandinavianpark too. The Beate Uhse shop was a bit strange for us too. And we know her.
In case of u’re battery problem take a look at http://www.autobatterienbilliger.de they deliver very fast and have cheap prices. We bought ours there (AGM Deep Cycle). If u guys still in the Hamburg are u can try to get in touch with the Boat & Yachting suppliers they should also have „leisure“ batteries for u. Another place u might get some success is a hardware store called Bauhaus (https://www.bauhaus.info/) look for the Nautik department.
A little correction about yellow signs: The signs are about Load of tanks am military vehicles and not about speed. In english = MLC (Military Load Classification) ;-)
if u need the Umweltzonen sticker next time u can order the sticker previously at umwelt-plakette.de . The site supports most European languages. If u don’t have one u have to paid 40€. in my private car the sticker is since 3 years in the glove box an i dint paid anything!
In case u have any questions, need some help or translation in Germany feel free to contact us.
Have a save trip
Gabi & Vasco
Cheers Vasco, nice to hear from you and thanks a lot for the information! Jay
Good job with the Green sticker! I always wondered how my old S555 ( 1994) ended up with one, I thought it was much more ” efficient” shall we say! By the way on another matter I sent you a pm on facebook about another matter. It may be in your junk/other folders, would you mind checking it ? Cheers
It’s strange to read so much of your accounts with Jay’s masculine voice in my head only to find out, way into the text, it’s Jules “speaking”.
Do you keep track of your Battery/Solar performance? Since we bought our Solar Panel I’ve only used it twice. We start with 144Ahr (full) and overnight the heating fan took us down to 126Ahr on board. A sunny October day got us back to 142Ahr so it seems that winter would have us slowly losing power until we drove somewhere or hooked-up.
2Ahr a day isn’t much of a loss but it was a sunny day and a mild night. What sort of daily loss of power do you experience when “off-grid”?
Lee @ Go Humberto!
Hi Lee, nah, we don’t track it other than eyeballing the current meter so see input, and checking battery voltage for an indicator of capacity (we have nothing to tell us how many Amp-hours we have left). The whole calculation gets horribly complex very quickly. Our alternator puts 10A into the leisure batteries once its has recharged the starter (which takes only a few mins after starting the engine). Solar output varies wildly with latitude, weather, shading and season. Current use varies with season and loads of other factors. In general I’d say solar alone wouldn’t last long in winter, it’s just part of the overall generation approach we find ourselves using. Cheers! Jay
Ah, I assumed we may have the same controller display. Ours shows how many Amp-hours are left in the batteries.
It’s really only the 12v heating fan that bothers me. No Fan = Ho heating (I guess we could turn the cooker on). The main lights are all LED and the only other real drain is USB devices charging.
Hopefully we can time Autumn and Winter with being somewhere warm and sunny. I know Hymers are well insulated but I can live without actually finding out just how well.
Easy on using the cooker mate, you might overdo the carbon monoxide in your van and that would be very bad indeed fir your health! Please get a CO alarm if you haven’t already, might be your best purchase yet.
Yeah, we have the same problem with heating and electricity. You could get a genny, but they make a racket and aren’t widely used outside the winter skiing areas. Alternatively, plan ahead for hook up in winter, which isn’t always as easy as it sounds (ski aires with electricity get rammed in school hols in France, as we found out this year!). Getting south in winter makes a lot of sense, warmer, more light, less rain = happy travellers.
Cheers, Jay
We are a bit preoccupied with the currently 19% devaluation of the £ against the euro as you would understand, did I miss it or haven’t you as yet made a comment how this massive fall in value of your income has affected you?
You are superb at sticking rigidly to your planned budget and I think it’s a major tenent of how and why you tour, so this must have dramatically affected your lifestyle and affected others in the same position touring within Europe (or anywhere at the moment). Can you explain how it’s affected you?
Hi Jamie, it’s a great point. 19% of our £15k budget is a loss of £2850 a year, no small amount. We’ve not commented on it as, selfishly, it doesn’t really impact us at the moment. Why? Well, a few reasons I guess. We deliberately don’t run on a rock-bottom budget, so can flex our costs by not eating out, staying in cheaper countries, free camping more, not drinking so much lager etc. Fuel costs are low at the moment, which is helping offset the currency fluctuation costs. We have a healthy emergency fund, enough to allow us to increase our costs if we had to over the next decade. And, of course, we could just pull our fingers out, find and do some paid work to make up the shortfall.
I feel for you guys and anyone else trying to live off sterling income and sell into the UK. Just the first effects of Brexit? What comes next? Who knows, interesting times (Terry Pratchet wrote a book about the topic as I recall, ‘may you live in interesting times’ was a curse he used).
Cheers, Jay
“Getting south in winter makes a lot of sense, warmer, more light, less rain = happy travellers”
I’ll drink to that!!
Cheers!…Kindest…Wayne in Montenegro.
Ooooh, Montenegro, can’t wait to read about it! Cool up here in Germany, just a few degrees at night, but we’re getting some sunlight. Ferry home on Monday, eeek. Cheers, Jay
Thanks Jay, but maybe I didn’t phrase the question correctly. It wasn’t affordability (most people have some form of reserves to draw on) but how you approach a future with a strict budget that either can’t be lived within any longer or how you may have to modify your lifestyle to fit your new 19% lower budget. Or will you just increase your budget by 19%?
Hi Jamie. It’s a good question, and key to what we’re doing. We’re deliberately accepting uncertainty in order to do what we do. Currency fluctuations are just one variable which will affect our financial future and associated lifestyle. Inflation, deflation, interest rates, equity market valuations, UK residential housing market values, you name it. What options do we have to cope with lower income? We have enough in reserve to increase our budget. We could opt to do some work. We could go live in India or Indonesia. We could sell an asset and accept greater long term financial risk. We could spend winters on a campsite in Greece or Sicily. Or we could just go home, sell the van and work for a couple of years. For all we know 19% is just the start, or the pound could quickly rebound. We don’t know, we can’t control it, we can only watch, monitor our costs and react if we foresee a long term problem. Cheers, Jay
hi always following trip and not managing to find enough passive money to start ! a thought on batteries I wouldn’t personally fit starter batteries inside a vehicle unless sealed boxed and vented to the outside world. we have a 1999 hymer b544 and I fitted the varta 2 100ah from tayna batteries they fit in easy enough and are a sealed use inside item I can proberly get the number if it helps realatively they wernt that expensive good luck with life regards steve
Hi Guys, just read about you getting hold of a Green sticker! I applied formally to the head office for my 2004 Fiat Ducato 2.8jtd. They were very polite but said no way, you can’t come in our Umweltzone, sorry.
I will have to try your method!
Great blog guys.
Regards
Mike
Haha, cheers Mike, definitely worth trying the ‘sit down and wait’ method of getting something done, hope it works for you too, cheers, Jay
Eider Duck, known as Cuddy Duck in the north east. Make a nice duvet :)
Only recently found your blog, since when I’ve spent many hours engrossed reading it – great stuff!
Dave