After a few great and spectaculair days in Berlin I set off to Hamburg where I should meet my mother. Unfortunately it didn’t go as planned.
We woke up at around 10 in the morning. Slept like 12 hours, pretty damn good.
My mother left around 1 because she had to drive back 5 hours to Haarlem. I could stay in the apartment for a few more hours and I wrote the last blog and started editing the Berlin video.
Speaking of video, I changed my “vloging” updates a bit. After doing this for two months I’ve found out that it’s just not really my thing. I always enjoyed making and editing movies but being in front of the camera is not what I like to do most. I believe I can express myself better with text and besides that it takes a huge amount of time to edit, render and upload the videos and with the other tasks I have to do it’s hard to keep up with. So from now on I will post a blog daily and it will be easier to follow me realtime. I will keep doing video but it will be on weekly basis and and in a different format.
Back to Hamburg. I left this city at around 5pm. I had to rearrange the car as my mother brought 4 new boxes of Doppers, I took 4 with me in the beginning but they didn’t fit all. As I’m going only farther away from home this was the last change to take them with me.
My next plugger was Uta in Gelting, a tiny place near the Baltic sea and the Danish border. Uta is the owner of Janbeck’s Fairhaus, she wrote me that she makes delicious cake’s so I couldn’t resist going there. Also she had been following me for a long time and I knew she was involved in the Wave Trophy as many people who I visited earlier mentioned here name.
Gelting was 160KM from Hamburg and it was a nice drive to this place, beautifully rustic. The Fairhaus is located next to a field and Uta and her husband Stephan where already waiting for me. It was around 7pm. That they care about the environment was clear from the beginning, they had a Zoë, a Think City (Danish e-car which I had never seen before) and they have this thing called the E-Wolf. They told me it’s a great car and they are going it to show me later.
Uta showed me my room, it was huge appartement and I thought I would share this with other people but I came to found out this is all mine! It really is the biggest place where I have stayed so far. Pretty luxurious too. It got a main bedroom and even another room with 2 single beds, enough to put my ego on.
Because Im going to stay here two nights it was not necessary to charge the car immediately and Stephan thought it would be better to do it tomorrow, as we could charge the car 100% on solar energy. The house has many sustainable aspects and they are going to tell me everything about that tomorrow.
This morning the sun woke me up in the car at 5.45AM, I slept pretty good after that long day. The car was charged to 70% which is normally enough to drive to remaining 108 kilometers to Hamburg. The car charged for about 9 hours on a 3.5KWh charging station at this Hyuandai dealer. I re-arranged the car from sleep mode to driving mode and drove to Hamburg where my mother was waiting for me. I should meet her the night before but you know what happened. It was no problem for her as she had a friend here who she visited.
It was nice to see her again and have someone with me who I already knew. Meeting new people everyday is great but after a while it’s nice to talk about different and deeper things (struggles etc).
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We explored hamburg which is really a beautiful city, it has a huge harbor (the third biggest in Europe) and it was build around the same time as Amsterdam and some buildings have similar styles. My favorite part is Speichelstadt where they have these old buildings surrounded by water. Water is everywhere in Hamburg and the city has more bridges then Venice & Amsterdam combined.
Sustainable city
Hamburg is home to 4.3 million people and the 2nd biggest city in Germany. 1.8 million people live in the city centre. The city was awarded European Green Capital in 2011 by the European Committee. They have an ambitious Climate Action Plan which covers more than 360 projects and measures to cut CO2-emissions by 2 million tons from 2007 – 2012 and to reduce the overall carbon footprint by 40% until 2020 (compared to baseline 1990). The city budget provides an additional annual funding of 25 m. Euro (approx. 120 m. Euro up to 2012).
E-mobility
Hamburg’s government has ambitious plans to make the city suitable for electric vehicles. This comes a bit late as the first public charging station was build only in April 2015 (source). In late 2016 a total of 600 charging stations must be installed, 70 of them will have DC fast charging possibilities. This allows taxi companies to do their business emission-free.
Back to our sightseeing tour. We went on a boat to explore the harbor. First we sailed through the old part, majestic buildings popped up everywhere and in of them fellow Dutchman Joop van den Ende had his Academy, that guy is everywhere. Then to the new modern part. It’s huge! Cranes, docks, containers and people everywhere. Windmills are placed throughout the harbor but I can’t imagine that this will power the whole area.
By foot we went to the city centre. The city has two faces, the old industrial but yet majestic part and the new impressive industrial side. I enjoy both of them. In the heart of the centre you can find many expensive clothing brands and of course, a Tesla store. I didn’t had the opportunity to visit one before, one of the employees was very interested in my story.
We had lunch next to an lake in the centre, we found it a bit to busy, went back to the car which was then 50% charged and went to a park to relax. Today I felt like a king as my mother treated me with ice creams, good food and even new clothes.
Later we went back to the apartment and I couldn’t charge my car on a normal household socket as it was on the fifth level. With the PlugSurfing app I found a station just 1.1KM from our location. The coverage is already very dense, I had many back-ups nearby if the station would have been occupied.
This is where I charged the car overnight in Hamburg.