The Fake Concorde at Flugausstellung P. Junior & Other Aircraft
It was another early start in Trier, up at half seven, quick shower and then down to breakfast. The hotels restaurant was large, open and light. It reminded me a bit of the Merton in Jersey, it was spacious enough to feel like you had your own table, but small enough for there to be a buzz about the place. They also had bacon and sausage, a theme which I continued to monitor over the course of the week. Alas, they didn’t have normal tea, but I’d taken some spare teabags down with me to mitigate this, so all was well.
The rest of the TVR group slowly appeared, including the boys and we munched away in amiable silence.
Dave manoeuvred the Cerbera around the horrific concrete 90 degrees to get out of the car park, and I took a few photos while we loaded the cars. Mark appeared in the Sag, all drama and noise – for a second, it seemed Trier stopped to mark the occasion and then he was gone; a blur of shiny blue into the distance.
After negotiating the one-way system we settled into the drive out of town past vineyards and climbed up into some foothills, the sun breaking through the clouds. The urban scenery gave way to sleepy rural towns, and as we headed down the other side of the hills into a forest, the mist enveloped the cars in a thoroughly atmospheric way. Every now and again the T350 in front would slip in and out of view as we negotiated bends then on the straights Dave would open up the Cerb’s V8, and we’d catch up at thunderous velocity.
We’d decided to grab some coffee at the first museum Ben Coombs had suggested visiting. The catchily named Flugausstellung P. Junior looked like it boasted a Concorde with a cafe in it so we headed there. On arrival, the single occupant of the car park (who was probably the guy in the ticket house) had kindly parked right in front of the plane. I mean, why? Why would you do this?
I managed to get a couple of shots of the TVRs with his shonky white car in the back, and then we headed inside to find out the cafe was closed. Flugausstellung P. Junior wasn’t exactly going up in my estimations at this point.
The Concorde is fake, by the way, it’s main giveaway is the shakily written ‘Concorde’ on the side in felt tip pen. The other giveaway is the nosecone, which is straight (Concorde’s is designed to dip). Still it looked impressive.
Inside the Flugausstellung P. Junior it reeked of mechanical engineering, mainly oil and engines. Not a bad smell, and very much in line with the museum in Machester. The boys spent quite a bit of time, solving engineering problems involving cogs and whatnot, so I headed outside to have a look at some of the aircraft the museum had bought.
If I’m being honest, it was good – my favourite being the Hind Gunship. It’s massive. I mean huge and must’ve been a terrifying sight to anyone who wasn’t on the side of it.
After getting a bunch of videos, I headed back inside to see the section section of the museum, which housed a number of cars and more domestic engineering. All in all, it was worth going to, but I can’t imagine anyone under 40 would appreciate it who wasn’t an engineer, and the lack of a cafe was a real issue.
So we left the Fake Concord and continued towards our next destination, the Speyer Technic museum, some 160km to our East. Whatever rain had potentially been coming our way hadn’t made it so it was blue skies as we hit the road.
All too soon, though, the cars needed refuelling so we pulled into a hand service station where John decided to throw the petrol all over the forecourt. In his defence, the T350 does have an odd fuelling mechanism and no real harm was done. On the plus side I did get over 3,000,000 views on Instagram for the video, so all was not lost.
We also needed fuelling up and the service station had a handy cafe attached to it. We parked the cars and headed inside. Thankfully, John’s German came into its own, and he ordered our drinks and chatted amiably with the waitress as we got some much-needed caffeine inside of us.
We weren’t too sure how the speed limits worked on the Autobahns. Obviously, German roads are famous for being the last refuge of red-blooded males and Audi Q3s full of kids doing 100mph. The waitress explained that most of the motorways were limited, but the best thing to do was to just keep up with the locals. One sign to watch out for though is “bei Nässe” which does limit the speed when it’s been raining, and to be honest this seemed to be pretty sensible.
Before leaving we headed for a comfort break, but M’s attempt at getting into the toilet for free was caught by the Stasi guard. Luckily he wasn’t punished other than having to pay the few euros.
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