Fri, 15 Aug 2003

author Tim	location St. Pauli, Hamburg, Deutschland
posted 12:18 CEST 21/08/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/Sverige/Sverige 2 ( all photos )

South from Stockholm ( 1 photo )
I was the one to do the manly thing and go and discover that the showers had no hot water this morning. Liz declined to find out for herself, taking my word for it.
Hitting the road, we found our way out of the confusing jumble of roads heading basically south-west towards Malmo along the E04.
By this stage of our trip, we had decided that we weren't going to take any side-trips unless they were really worth it. For one, we had already spent about two weeks longer in Scandy than originally intended (no real problem, but there is plenty more to see before we go home in November), but more worryingly, Rosie was starting to chuck wobblies at the wrong time - literally.
Several times she has started to shudder at speed, sometimes we can save it by pushing the clutch and trying to rev it back, but usually it is a stall. Not good at 100km/h. This is not really too suprising, since we have driven her about 20,000km since we bought her, and done nothing other than add water and a little oil. I suspect the fuel system is at least part of the problem, as the problem is much less apparent when we use high-octane (98) fuel instead of the normal 95 or even 91 stuff. As an aside, last I heard, 91 is the norm in Oz and 95 is the expensive premium unleaded. We don't really want to have to pay for 98 unless we really have to.
Although we pulled in to one small town when it was particularly bad and rang our insurance company, the general feeling was that we didn't want to be stuck in a crappy small town for days again, and would rather push our luck and try to make it to Hamburg.
It was a horrible rainy day, although we had some great views as we drove slong the shores of Vättern, a big inland lake north of Jönköping. It was a little lost on us, however, as we were more worried about the van suddenly deciding to die on us.
We dropped into a service station to gather some sausages, bacon and whatever we could manage to bbq for dinner.
Even though it was relatively early for us, we had come a long way and decided to pull in when Rosie was playing up on a single-lane road with no safe place to pull over should she stall.
We ended up cooking on the bbq and deciding to stay there in the road-side stop for the night, saving ourselves some money and having a reason to get up in the morning (the noise) as a bonus.

(customised)