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 Damian and Amy’s place is a pretty cool, 2 bedroom flat, in a quiet town called Heimscuh. It’s perfectly situated above the local mayor’s office and next door is a nice café and pub.
It wasn’t long after seeing Damo and Amz that we were all piled back into the Car and headed up into the mountainside to see the famous pub, Route 69, that Damo work at. We were driving through winding back roads, up over hills and around blind Corners for a fair while. Damo was driving and he was going pretty hard.
Obviously he was used to driving this stretch every night. He seemed to know The road that well that at one stage, he was flying around a corner, then
slowed Right down. I asked why he was slowing, and he said, "about 750 meters ahead Police sit in a pub drinking beers. They sit on a table with one beer in the
Hand and a radar gun in another" Sure enough, 750 meters later, there was some Austrian police doing just that.
We kept going a few more miles and then all of a sudden we had reached "Route 69" It was a cool looking pub. It had heaps of biking posters on the walls. Inside The pub there were Burn out marks on the floor, from where drunk bikers take their Harleys inside the pub and do burn outs, for all the other patrons in the place. We had a little bite to eat, then went back to Damian's place for the night
The next morning, Damo and I got up fairly early and decided to go for a run. It Was really nice to go jogging through the countryside of Austria. The air
was Really crisp and fresh, and the run we went on took us through some corn fields, Into the forest up a dirt track, and then on to a running creek with rapids,
all the way to a Beautiful lake. It was really good to get to run in some open space again, Instead of footpaths, like I do in England. It was also good to run with someone else.
We got back to the house, had some scrambled eggs and frankfurts for breakfast, which the girls had made for us. We packed everything into the van and prepared for our next adventure…..POLAND
Mum and Dad had organized for us to do a little bit of a road trip before we got to Oschersleben, where our next race meeting was. The plan was to drive to Poland viaSlovakia, check out Auschwitz, and then drive on to Oschersleben, in Germany, over the course of a few days.
We jumped in the rentavan- Damo as the pilot, and me as the wingman, giving him directions. It was an 8 hour drive to Poland From his house, so we were pretty keen to get on the road. We went through the mountainside of Austria, and after a few hours were at border control of Slovakia.
We pulled up to the border control and had a Slovakian tell us to give him our Passports and "park over there".After a fairly long wait, he wandered back over and said "here you go". We thought it was going to be a 20 questions set up, but it must have been close to knock off
time for him, and he let us straight into the country.
We had a Tom Tom GPS navigation system in the car, and I don’t think it had the latest map. It took us through some very back roads and into some very bad looking towns. We went through one town and I really don’t think it was for tourists. Everyone was staring at us as we were driving through, and a lot looked like some pretty hard, rough people, that wouldn’t take any crap.
Most of them were out on the streets, just sitting by the side of the road. We had been told by a lot of people to be careful about driving into some towns, as there are a lot of carjackers, that will just make you pull over and rob you and steal your car, and that they wouldn't be afraid to use whatever weapons they had on them. To be honest, it made the trip a lot more exciting, at least for me. We were driving through towns that looked like the best thing that happens there is the weekly illegal cock (rooster) fights! It was pretty fun driving into a town and stressing out
Whether or not you would come back out the other side! As it turned out, we were fine, and we didn’t get stopped by anyone. I
guess every Country you go to, you have to be careful about entering some towns. It’s not Just Slovakia. There are places like that back home in Australia too.
We kept on trucking and finally got to Auschwitz in Poland. We stayed the night at a hotel, and then early in the morning, we woke to go on a tour of Auschwitz 1 and Birkenau (Auschwitz 11). Some people are probably wondering why we wanted to go and see Auschwitz. It
sounds just like any other town. In fact, it’s a major part of history, and amajor part Of World War 2. It’s a place that was, at the time of WW11, ruled by the Germans and Adolph Hitler.
 Track leading in to the camp
There were two camps we visited that still hold a lot of importance. Auschwitz I is where the Nazis opened the first Auschwitz camps, for men
and women who were mostly political prisoners. This is where the Germans carried out the first experiments at using Zyklon B to put people to death and where they murdered the first mass transports of Jews, It was also where they conducted the first criminal experiments on prisoners
where they carried out most of the executions by shooting, where the central jail for prisoners from all over the camp complex was located in Block No. 11, and where the camp commandant's office and most of the SS offices were located. From here, the camp administration directed the further expansion of the camp complex. In the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, everything happened on a magnified scale.This is where the Nazis erected most of the machinery of mass extermination. in which they murdered approximately one million European Jews. At the same time, Birkenau was the largest concentration camp (with nearly 300 primitive barracks, most of them wooden). Over a hundred thousand prisoners at a time were here: Jews, Poles, Roma, and others. The site of this camp contains places that are still full of human ashes; the greatest portion of what remains of the Auschwitz complex is here. The vastness of the space, the primitive barracks for the prisoners, the ruins or remains of other structures, and the miles of camp fence and roads give a full sense of what cannot be conveyed in words: infinite baseness, cruelty, and human criminality, and the specific camp architecture that served one purpose alone: the destruction of human beings. Gates to Camp 2
Auschwitz camp was really a place of pure evil. It has a weird feeling when you are walking around the place. It was also strange that as we were walking around with the tour guide, she told us that no birds fly over the camp or around it. I don’t know why, but she was right. I think the birds may be able to sense it orSomething, because there wasn’t a single bird in sight. It also really does just put into prospective how good a life we have today. I couldn’t bear to imagine how these people lsurvived. Although it’s a place of bad times, it was something I think everybody should see in their life time. It is a real eye opener and something that I will never forget.
 Remians of the gas chamber After the days tour, we all once again piled into the van and headed for Germany.It was a 5 hour drive from Poland to Dresden in Germany. Mum had booked accommodation in Dresden for the night. The place was an old mansion of famous opera singer, Therese-Malten, The villa was on the banks of the River Elbe, and looks over the Schloss Pillnitz Palace, across the other bank on the opposite side of the river. It sounded like it was going to be a pretty sweet place. We had driven for over 4 hours, and then we found the place. It was late at night by the time we got there. It was around 11pm. We turned up to the front gates, and I have to say, it looked like the house out of the Rocky Horror movie.
We parked the car and Damo and I decided to go and check us in. We got to the front door, which was dark with no light. I knocked on the door and heard the echo of the knocker go for miles. It was like something out of one of those horror movies. We waited there for a while and then the door creaked open with a lady that said "YYYEEEAASSSSS". We said we had booked the night's stay, and were there to check in. She said " you may enter", like it was a password or something She then said, " I vill show you your rooms".
The first room she took us to was massive. It was a 2 bedroom apartment, basically on the top floor, with a marble bathroom. She then took us to the second room, which was like a dungeon. It was just cement walls with a little cabinet and a bed, and the toilet was down a million stairs in the darkness of the cellar. I quickly said "I bag’s the room upstairs". Damo drew the short straw and he and Amy were thrown into the "Torture room", whilst Amy and I, and Mum and Dad, went upstairs. I then went outside, to get my bags out of the van, as everyone else was inside. I
started to walk down the driveway to the van , when out of the corner of my eye I saw an old man wandering around the back yard in the darkness of night. He walked up to me with a blank look on his face and said "Hayden….Hayden is that You?" I replied with a "Nah Mate….Sorry". He then just stared at me and wandered back off saying. "Hayden…. Hayden where are you?". It was pretty weird, I must say. I don’t know who the hell Hayden was, but he obviously didn’t want to be found. We slept there with one eye open the whole night. When the sun came up, we ate breakfast and hightailed it out of there.  The Mansion
It was now time to head to Oschersleben . Oschersleben was the place of round 4 of the World Endurance Championships. As you have all read in my race report, the result there wasn’t too bad for me. It could have been better, had we not broken down, but we got some much needed
points in the championship.  Dad, Geoff, Mark at the finish of the 24 hour...Spot the Aussie The weekend of Oschersleben was also the weekend of my 21st birthday. It was great to get to spend my 21st at a race track with my family, across the other side of the world. The only person I missed was my sister Desi, who had stayed at home in Oz, to look after Mum and Dad's business. didn’t do any partying for my 21st, as I still had a 24 hour race coming up. I knew the party and the drinks could happen after the Race, especially if we had a good race.
Sunday night after the race, as you can imagine, we were pretty tired. Damo had managed to get a podium finish, so we all went along to the presentation. Damo received his trophy for 3rd, and then the party started. It was great fun, with a local German DJ, a few other racers, and my family and team all there, to celebrate finishing a 24 hour and my 21st.
The night was a pretty great night. At one point, I remember Igor Jerman (Damo’s team mate) coming over with a tray full of beers for us all. We were then pressured by everyone to see who could skull the drink the quickest. It was Leroy (Maco Moto Yamaha Rider) who came up trumps. The guy was on fire. He could drink a beer at double the speed of any of us.  Ready...Set....GO! Click this link to see the video.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2JY1QNN-tc (Warning... there is a little swearing) After that it was time to hit the dance floor It wasn’t long before ACDC's , Back in Black came on, and I heard a familiar voice bellowing out through the microphone. I looked up to see Damo standing on the table singing his best rendition of the ACDC song, with them singing along in the background. The songs didnt finsih there. Straight up after it was a bit of Queen. It sure was a funny night. My Dad's version of "the Lizard" had us all in stitches. I think he reached "hero" status that night. Damo wasn't the only one on fire! Many good times. Click this link to see the Video.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mqr_Zz4c2WM
We left the party at around midnight. When you think about it , it’s a long time with no sleep.
Damo and I had been up and out of bed the day before at 7am, to be at the circuit at 8am for morning warm up on Saturday, and didn’t get to bed until 1 am Monday morning. That’s 42 hours with no sleep, and also doing an endurance race on top of that. You can probably imagine how tired we were. But the sleep was short lived as we had planned to fly off to our next destination on Monday morning, and to do that, we had
to get to Frankfurt airport, which was a 5 hour drive from Oschersleben. To catch our Monday flight on time, we had to get up at 4am on Monday morning! That’s right. We had been awake for 42 hours and now would only get 3 hours sleep before a 5 hour drive. Man, were we tired or what!
We got to Frankfurt airport safe and sound and were now ready for our next adventure……. To Be Continued......................
I will give you a little clue about the next destination.......  "Are They Fangs?" |
