“WELL IT’S NO USE, WE’LL HAVE TO POST SOME OF OUR LUGGAGE” said Nico as we drove out of London at some ungodly hour. ‘Rather that, than have to fix BiBi halfway across Europe.”

‘I’m sure it’ll all sort itself out once we switch sides’, I offered optomistically. I kept my eyes on the road, but the dubious cloud that eminated from nico’s side of the car was blurring my vision. Either that, or sleep deprivation was taking it’s toll.

We’d only just left London a few hours earlier, bursting out of the garage in a fury of noise and gas, proudly carried along in Bibi, our old fiat 500. For the last year, BiBi had been in the caring hands of Toto Bruccerleri, a short sicilian man who lives and breathes fiat 500’s. His obsession covers every floor of his house in, of all places, Tooting. She is a beautiful little car, one of the rare suicide door models, and had been running loyally right up until this moment.

‘It actually doesn’t sound too good does it’, I reluctantly exhaled as we went over another bump. ‘I guess I need to loose some weight on this trip.’
‘We both do’, added Nico.
I pondered our bursting wicker hamper, tied to a rack on the boot of the car when the crunching sound came again. We had concluded a few hours ago that this sound was an indicator that the front wheel arch was bounching off the tyre underneath. In short, we were too heavy. I did a quick figure 8 swerve to avoid two potholes, silently cursed the south england motorway maintenance group, whoever they may be, and thought about how suspicious we might look to a passing vehicle.

By the time we reached the eurotunnel, we’d almost forgotten our fears and the grinding sound had become just another part of the symphony of BiBi and we quietly shelved our mental note on the lack of Post Offices. The excitement about moving to another country had set in.

For the last 4 years we had been living in a converted school in Hackney, a place famous for it’s sunday football, cabs and, more recently, an olympic sized open-air swimming pool. It had seemed relatively easy to tie up all the loose ends of the existence we were about to abandon. The only amount of paperwork came in the form of reams of documents we needed to give us permission to take our beloved cat, Imola, along with us.

Now here we were, all sitting in BiBi, snuggled up to an SUV and Ford estate, rattling along in the concentration camp of a train towards Calais. Once on la terre francais, we refrained from entering the modern world by ignoring our TomTom and instead pulled out our table sized Michelin map of Europe accompanied with various arrays of printed directions alla Google Maps. We managed to bypass Calais completely and were engrossed in the glowing fields and slanting rays of early morning sunshine, when I suddenly realised we had no idea where we are.

‘Excusez-moi’, I blurted to an old Lady walking by the car, ‘how do we get to the D940?’. The look she gave me needed no translation, and we quickly blew away our traditional morals and reached for the TomTom. Miss TomTom then led us on one of the most unscenic routes I’ve encountered in my life, close second to the repetitive strip mall in Florida outside my Grandpa’s residence. However I cannot fault Miss Tomtom in her acuracy, and before long we were on the outskirts of Gent having an impromptu picnic by the side of the road.

Gent is one of my favourite cities and boasts a well balanced mixture of historical charm and modern creativity. It is also home of the country’s smallest pub, in which one can be seen, from head height, sitting on the second floor, enjoying a large glass of the delicious licoricy Kwak, while watching peoples shoulders pass by your window. Other reminants survive in the city as proof of it’s vertically challenged belgium inhabitants, such as the smallest house in Gent and the low stone street signs. However today was not a day for such silliness, as we had much more pressing matters to deal with, such as how to let the cat go to the toilet while hanging from a harness in a strange country.

It did not fail to impress my animal-loving soul how Imola adapted to her noisy and constantly changing environment. After a few bumps, she was an enjoyable travelling companion as anyone could hope for, and took to walks on her lead with agreeable concern.

‘Do you know of a hotel that accepts cats?’ I asked the barmaid at the aptly named Fleapit in Eindhoven.
‘I know of hotels…’
‘Yes, but do you know of any that would accept a cat for the night?’ I stammered.
‘Hang on, I go ask my friend.’
I silently cursed the fact that we hadn’t arranged accomodation in advance. In a fit of spontaniety, fuelled on by Nico’s lack of desire to think about future events, we had decided to do the road trip in proper style, and see where we ended up each night, living life ‘On the Road’. Of course, Jack Kerouac didn’t have a familiar in the form of a small black cat with him.

‘He says he don’t know, but you can try central station. Here is a tourist place. They can probably help.’
‘Danke danke’ I exclaimed as I rushed from the bar to tell Nico the good news. A tourist place that caters for cat owners - what luck! Cat loving tourist operators seem to close up early, probably so they can go home and feed their cats, and we found this out all to late as we rolled up to Eindhoven central station. Nico went off to investigate other options while BiBi and I opened our boots to cool down.

‘Ein fiat 500!! Oh I had one of those when I was younger!’
This was Klaus, a man who had been living in Eindhoven his whole life on the street just down from where we were standing and had recently joined the retired life of walking around the city, sitting on benches and striking up conversations with people on the subject of their fiat 500’s. Unfortunately Klaus could not offer any help on the situation of feline accommodation, and pretty much repeated the barmaid’s advice.

Nico saved the day and suggested we look for a wireless network. So we embraced technology once again and hooked onto Pit&Klara and found a hotel on the outskirts of Eindhoven that would welcome your cat at no extra charge. On we went towards our temporary abode, where we half smuggled imola up to our room, and let her out. She immediately jumped into the freshly laundered white bed mimicking our thoughts exactly.

We were a third of the way through. Four countries in one day, 600km and two 15l tanks of petrol. Not bad for a 46 year old lady. And we were the ones who were knackered!

–

I awoke Nico to chemically tasting coffee and a croissant reclaimed from the bottom of our hamper then went off to settle our account. When I returned, I looked down from our balcony to see Nico surrounded by our belongings. It is one of Nico’s favourite activities to organise and optimise his surroundings, and he is extremely good at it. I went in to retrieve Imola from the bed where she’d slept most of the night and tried to ignore the matt of black furr she’d left on the white sheets. Then we both trotted down to observe Nico in his element.

I was greeted by the satisfied sounds of a man who has succeeded in finding the perfect place for every piece of luggage and object we’d packed, down the very last tea towel. We set off on a wave of chemical-caffeine induced euphoria. This lasted for around 4 hours.

‘Shall we pull over and use the emergency fuel?’ Nico requested, prompted by the incessant blinking of the benzina light on BiBi’s minimalist dashboard. The charm of the Fiat 500’s is their human like features, and minimalist interior. I like imagining the thoughts that were going through the group of italian designers when they decided what were the essential requirements for a driver. A petrol gauge is not one of them. Instead, in the fiat 500, a light starts blinking when petrol is low. This blinking increases in earnest, the lower the fuel gets, which can actually get quite distressing when driving along a german motorway which hasn’t shown any sign of a petrol station for 100km.

No drama. We pulled over on the hard shoulder and gave BiBi a drink from the emergency plastic petrol tank we had tucked in the bonnet. Happy that we’d averted disaster, we sped off up the hard shoulder and out onto the motorway.
‘Hey shouldn’t that be telling you what speed you’re going?’
‘Yeah, and the kilometer seems to have stopped too’.
Our powers of observation were congratulated by a rattling sound coming from somewhere behind the dashboard.
‘The cable must have come loose,’ Nico declared. ‘It’s probably an easy fix.’

Over a burger king and pastrami sandwich, we mulled over how easy this fix could be when we were joined by a dutch and german couple who’d come to admire BiBi. They lived in Spain, but were on their way towards Flensburg for a holiday. ‘Oh is Flensburg nice?’ I asked, trying to squeeze some information as to it’s worth towards our next stop-over destination.
‘We don’t know, we’ve never been.’
Such facts Odysseus himself could not have plucked from the gods.

Despite the non-commital response, I decided Flensburg sounded like a nice place and was a good deal closer towards our next destination, Fredrickshavn. This would give us more time to enjoy, what we hoped, were good quality danish back roads.

After Bremen, we happened across one of those delightful experiences that occurs when you read a map wrongly. We’d decided to take a detour to avoid the rather scary road-kill appearance of Hamburg and travel to the enjoyably sounding, Wischhaven, where we would drive over the bridge to , the equally colloquial Gluckstadt. What was a bridge turned out to be a car ferry that was very pictoresque and brought BiBi more attention amongst our fellow drivers.

We ended the day in a rather kooky hotel outside of Flenburg that seemed to be ran solely by an old german man with white hair. He was german down to a T, all but lacking the fantastical white curly moutasche that, I have decided, all traditional germans should sport. Here we sampled the local Flensburger, a refreshing brisk german lager that is exactly what two thirsty travellers need after knocking down another 600km at a relatively constant 75km/hour.

Morning dawned, and BiBi was equally as thirsty as we had been the previous evening, and guzzled down 1 litre of oil. She was drinking quite heavily on this trip, and we were slightly concerned, but so far no side effects were showing so we gave her what she needed, packed up, and headed out into the danish horizon.

This part of the trip was pictoresque but uneventful. We passed through Kolding, a university town that is set is a pretty little inlet on the coast. As we climbed up the nobble of Jutland, our surroundings grew more and more rural, boasting rolling hills blanketed with ambers, emeralds and gold. We made it up to Fredrickshavn in good time and lolled around looking for a campsite but ended up in the cute and cosy Park hotel, just 5 minutes from the ferry port. We popped out for a spot of grub, and ended up in perhaps the most high-end eatery the town has, feasting on steak tartare and seafood chowder.

One of the most interesting things about Fredrickshavn, some could say the only interesting thing, is that the town is aiming to be completely sustained by renewable energy by 2015. In fact, it is seen as one of the leaders in this field, and the town hopes to be a blueprint for the future.

So there we were, showering in our sustainable shower, and eating food cooked from sustainable fuel, to only hop into our petrol fueled classic car and head towards the hulk of the Stena line ferry on route towards Göteborg.

Here the tale comes to a close and a new chapter begins as we reach the land that will be our home for at least the next two years. I’d like to finish this ending paragraph with a clever and appropriate swedish phrase, but I don’t know any, so instead I’ll leave you with my favourite swedish word to date: bröstvårta which means “nipple”.