A road trip for first secondment of
my PhD from Aalborg to Lausanne ~1455 kilometres
Just to have some fun and explore more of Europe I decided
to take a road trip instead of flight from Aalborg (North Denmark) for my
secondment in EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland). Otherwise, an international PhD
program like INFRASTAR will have busy schedule and lot of travelling.
Planning of road trip was itself exiting to me, as I never
drive in Europe out of Denmark; my international licence was helpful for this
purpose. As I have to travel with my wife and 23 months daughter, I have to
make a good plan so that small one does not get tired and still we can manage
to drive approx. 1455 kms.
Source: maps.google.com
Some homework was done in order to know general speed limits
and countries I am crossing
·
290 kms in Denmark
·
970 kms in Germany
·
~200 kms in Switzerland
Source: https://www.wikipedia.org/
Benchmark planning was made to follow timeline during travel
and a booking through AIRBNB is made to stay near Kassel Germany.
Tentative plan was as below:
·
Start by 6:00 from home earlier is better
·
Lunch in Hamburg which is 450 kms from home
o
Time required would be 5 hours maximum (it would
be 11 to 11:30)
·
Stay in Kassel which is again 400 kms from
Hamburg (then we covered 850kms)
o
Further time required would be again 5-5:30
hours (it would be 6:30 to 7:00)
o
Remaining 610 kms for next day.
·
Start after breakfast and enter Switzerland ASAP
approx. 300 kms from Frankfurt
·
Spend some time in Switzerland on the way for
lunch and dinner
·
Reach home in Lausanne for sleeping
Actual travel started earlier by 5:45 from Denmark, it was
full rainy weather and dark day we could see first sunshine only in Germany
after 14:30 hoursL. As
we can see in google map above lot of roadworks going on in Germany may be its
normal during summer, which took a lot of time than expected. Good part is I
can see a lot wind turbines, wind farms all over Denmark, a lot them in North
Germany near to highway A7. In addition, a lot of nice architectural bridges in
Germany so a lot of scope for INFRASTAR ESRs to work upon in future.
Finally we reached our mid halt in a small German village
named Fuldabrück around 19:00 hrs. It was nice to communicate with people who
does not know your languageJ
(they did not know any English word and they were trying to explain everything
with expressions). However, it was nice hospitality by those village people and
with nice dinner.
Second day early morning started again for Lausanne. It was good
sunny day and I could use the highways efficiently with good speed as no work
was planned on those sections.
Finally I entered Switzerland around 13:00 hrs and it was nice
to see well-managed traffic, nicely constructed roads. Not much wind turbines
as Denmark and Germany but I could lot of bridges and again future scope of
works for INFRASTAR ESRs.
Hope you liked my blog and keep reading for more for getting
to know on how is my experience with EPFL. Now you can also consult me for
planning long road trips, other than fatigue reliability :P.
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