saab museum in Trollhattan

The day started very early (6:30AM) with a quick breakfast at the B&B. With Isaak fed, we were on the road, headed for Trollhattan some 45 minutes away from Goteburg, but due to extensive road work, we arrived in a little over an hour. The saab musuem houses pretty much every model ever built since 1945. It also features the experimental prototypes and the newest 9-5 and. 9-3 adaptations, but they were all locked ?! I figured it would be somewhat like a saab dealer plus an extended section to pay and visit the older cars. I must say i was pretty disappointed.

Remark #1: some of the older cars had flat tires

Remark #2: no sign of the phoenix concept car

Remark #3: sorry, no one cares about the failed 9-6, a subaru tribecca built in japan by fuji industries. Enough with the failed me too's !

Remark #4: all new cars locked. C'mon, i even paid to get in ... Is this really how you want to restart the brand? Everyone paying to get Loves saab's, we're not going to stick gum on the seats or slash the leather.

Remark #5: factory tours off till the fall. sorry you're no porsche or bmw, are you really hiding something top secret or ashamed of your empty factory?

Remark #6: why do you have little else but old leftovers of saab gear like shirts and stuff ?

Ok well besides the rants, there was some good. The 1945 saab 92 is gorgeous. There was lots of 900 and 9000 models and their respective engines. The toilets worked well, thanks, i had a nice relieve in your state of the art facilities!

One last note. The fellow who sold me entry tickets said the factory was not operating. I beg to differ. I did take a 15 min drive to see the factory with my own eyes, and the parking lots were full of saab employee cars, thousands of them!

Photos to come...

Location:Trollhattan Sweden

Grenen -- Denmark's fine tip

Today our journey took us to Grenen, minutes from the town of Skagen in northern Denmark. At this point, the North Sea meets the Baltic Sea, causing a swirl of sand formations.

Copenhagen Diverless metrocars

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Isaak disrupts silence of Frederik's dome church

Our little man did this on June 30, posting it now for the avid blog readers.

Location:Copenhagen

Copenhagen, what a town

Since stoooopid ipad does not have a card reader, i am stuck uploading some grainy photos ... Until i find a PC with a card reader ...

ICE train to Denmark

Lost Hamburgers

Contributed by Cathy

After leaving our dear friends in Braunsweig, we took the ICE to Hamburg. As I did not really have a chance to double check our hotel on google maps, I went with the old traditional way. . . an address and a map. Before I got on the train, Yvonne and I found a street with the name as our hotel's on the Hamburg map. The street was in the North Western part of town, this was a bit odd since I vaguely remember wanting to rent a hotel near the main train station to avoid travelling too far with our suitcases. But I blamed it on baby brains. We decoded to get off at a secondary station in order to be closer to our hotel. After getting off the ICE, we took 2 metros to get closer to the hotel in order to save a bit of cab fair. To our surprise there were no elevator to go to the lower platform to catch the metro. So we had, or should I say Nicolas, had to lug our lugguage 5 flights of stairs in two trips and then come back to help me with the baby and stroller, and this at least 4 times (due to transfers of metro). We got off at the Hoheluftbrueke station, after deciding in which direction to go, we opted to walk since the weather was so nice and our hotel was less than 1 kilometer away. The street we were on was to change name to Steindamm. After walking, I am sure more than 1km the street name finally changed from Hoheluftchaussee to Lokstedter Steindamm. It is then that I realised that Lokstedter was actually part of the street name. And not a third name for this street, therefore there we were walking on and on the wrong street, more specifically in the wrong neighborhood! Our hotel was not here, we looked at the map again, found another Steindamm street downtown, indeed our hotel was downtown near the main train station. At that point we hopped on the bus that would bring us to the main train station, hence near our hotel, passing right where we had started over 2 hours ago!
We finally found our hotel nestled between Turkish fruit stands, sex shops and peep shows. Overall our hotel was brand new, nice and safe. Needless to say that after this little map reading mishaps I am fired from giving directions, at least for now....

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Hamburg, Germany