Day 42+22 weeks: Braunschweig - Freiburg

Here comes the real finishing photo for my Beijing to Freiburg roadtrip! End of May, I had to use a rented GTI as a stand-in for the C-Trek, but today I could finally get the original car to its original destination on a beautiful autumn day — 196 days after leaving Beijing on a similarly beautiful spring day.

On my 1200 km weekend ride trough Germany I caught everything from confused looks to big smiles when people saw my here unknown car with its Chinese numberplate. An excited group of young Chinese tourists almost forgot to steer their rental car through the motorway traffic when they saw the probably first car from their home country here in Germany…

However, before closing this roadtrip story, I first had to obtain my customs release for the car and unload all the luggage we had to leave behind in Kashgar. Plus, I spent a bit of time and work on getting rid of the dust the car had collected over its journey… Especially the inside hadn’t seen a vacuum cleaner for most of the journey, and especially the super fine desert sand of the Taklamakan is really good at sticking really everywhere.

This second finishing photo is also somehow the end of this roadtrip slightly more than half a year after its start — and it has been a wonderful experience. And also, since two weeks work has got me back at being busy…

从北京到弗赖堡 / cóng běi jīng dào fú lài bǎo / from Beijing to Freiburg / von Peking nach Freiburg

Day 58: Ashgabat - Istanbul - Frankfurt - Freiburg

Our last day of this trip started without real sleep as our flight left Ashgabat around 3 am. Our stopover in Istanbul was a light rush... We still made it but not our luggage not which we learned later in Frankfurt. Here Andreas and I bid each other farewell after three weeks together on the road - thanks a lot, that was a great journey!

While Andreas took the train to the North, I headed south in a rental car to complete the ‘...to Freiburg’ part of this slightly shortened road trip. Avis did its best in trying to compensate for the C-Trek with a GTI which also had to stand in for the finishing photo in Freiburg and a short race up to Schauinsland in the Black Forest. 

 弗赖堡到了 - fú lài bǎo dào le - finally in Freiburg!