I woke up the day after my accident with an aching neck and shoulders. The swelling in my leg had gone down, but it was still pretty sore. As long as I walked slowly it didn’t hurt too much.

We had a short walk around Szczecin, snapping a few photos of buildings and stuff, then caught the train back to Gryfino to pick up the car. Catching the train was no easy feat when you can’t speak even a scrap of Polish. The bike accident had knocked my confidence quite a bit, but we got there in the end, after missing the first train.

On the way back the deraillieur on my bike snapped and I couldn’t even wheel my bike. At least it waited until we got back. It was a hot day as we unpacked our panniers and repacked our backpacks on Kasia’s parents driveway. People walked passed looking at us like we were weirdos. Finally, the car all packed up, we clunked our way out of Poland and onto the smoother roads of Germany.

We drove along the autobahn towards Rostock. The autobahn has an unlimited speed limit and we were doing about 120 km/hr. We saw a cop parked on the side of the motorway. I said to Mike, “I wonder what he is doing there? Surely he’s not trying to book someone for speeding?”

We drove on a bit further and I noticed the cop was sitting behind us. I said to Mike, “Do you think he’s checking out our foreign plates?”

Mike said, “You’re just being paranoid.”

“Nah, I reckon he’s checking out our plates.”

“Whatever.” he replied as he slowed down to 108 km/h just in case.

After a few minutes the cop pulled out to overtake us.

“See,” said Mike, “He’s not following us. You were just being paranoid.”

Up ahead I noticed a parking area in 1000m. I said to Mike, “I bet they will pull us off the motorway.”

“Don’t be silly,” he replied.

After a while, some German words flashed in the rear window of the cop car in front of us. We had no idea what it said. I said to Mike, “See, told you so!”

“Told me what so?

“I reckon he wants you to follow him.”

“No, I don’t think so.” Mike said.

“Well I am pretty sure that’s what he wants, we should follow him.”

Mike ummed and ahhed a bit and decided it couldn’t hurt. So we followed the cop car off the motorway, wondering if we were doing the right thing. He led us to a parking area where a police van was parked and policemen stood around wearing flak jackets and holding machine guns. I wondered what they could want with us? Were our bikes not on the car correctly? Perhaps they were obsuring our indicators or something.

“Shit, I’m glad we didn’t try to smuggle that home-made vodka across the border.”

Kasia had offered us some of her brothers home made Vodka, which was really nice, but apparently we weren’t allowed to take it across borders. She thought we would probably be ok as we were driving, not flying, but I’m a bit nervous about such things. As we pulled in next to the policemen, I had a terrible thought. We had 3 bottles of Vodka and half a dozen beers floating around on the back seat. “Is this like America where you are not allowed booze in the back of the car?” I asked Mike. He had no idea.

We parked up and the policeman knocked on my window. This was probably because I was sitting in the drivers seat even though I’m not driving. (It’s a British car and the steering wheel is on the other side to those in Germany.) I reached for the window button but Mike had already turned the ignition off. “Quick Mike, turn it back on, I need to open the window.” I didn’t want the cop getting madder than he already was.

Finally we got the windows open and the cop said was, “Passport control, can we see your passports and car documents.”

Phew. I spent about 5 minutes rummaging in my backpack for our passports and we were good to go.

We found a nice hotel in Rostock for the evening and had the best meal in ages.