Day 25: Travel Day
Nau mai
Yesterday we drove to Berlin.
Shower Door Daily was met with a challenge in this space saving bathroom yesterday morning. The elegant, curved shape of the rail doesn’t do much to help the fact that a battleship grey, nylon curtain is the only thing standing between you and having a wet toilet. I was pleasantly surprised at how little water escaped below the drape length of this device though. It did feel quite claustrophobic inside the shower space once the curtain was drawn.
“⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️”
We left at the comfortable hour of 9:30am, feeling slightly more refreshed than usual after a solid six hours of sleep. Our destination was the port of Gedser, right at the southeastern tip of Denmark on the island of Falster, the departure point for a ferry route that crosses a 50km stretch of the western Baltic. We pulled into the terminal and parked up in the queue, noting that a few vehicles ahead of us was the Dateline campervan, their dashing young guitarist Reuben standing outside the door with a cup of tea in his hand and not a small amount of swagger in his stance. The kettle went on and at least one member of The Beths managed to score a cuppa before it was time to board the ship.
It was overcast but calm as the MV Copenhagen set sail with our van stowed safely in the hold. We immediately headed to the restaurant to eat, where I picked out a sandwich with salmon, lettuce, and mayonnaise.
At some point we noticed a tall rapidly spinning mast atop our vessel. We speculated as to its function for minutes until the chief scientist and researcher for The Beths came to us with the answer. Here is what the big spinny pole is, explained by Jonathan Pearce.
My friend Simon told me “you have a WAP on that vessel”, and when this image loaded, I was glad to see it was SFW, but I was still pretty sure it was AI:
In fact, this Wind Assisted Propulsion system is real, and fascinating. Like cricketing pillar Daniel Vettori drifting one in to the stumps from outside-off, this 30-metre Flettner Rotor uses the Magnus Effect.
Air particles are accelerated around the spinning cylinder. This force changes the wind’s path around the ‘sail’, and Newton’s Third Law tells us that the wind will exert an equal and opposite force. Bernoulli’s Principle of pressure differentials also describes this force, and I invite the reader to lose themselves in the debate over whether this applies to aerodynamic lift or not.
1926 - “The Rotoryacht proved to be faster”
It was pleasant couple of hours aboard this Baltic cruise. We drove out the stern of our ship and were not troubled at the German border, immediately beginning south on Autobahn 17 towards Berlin.
Tristan indulges in some self-care with a three minute truck stop massage.
In a couple of hours, we reached the capital and joined the thick spread of commuters trying to make their way home through the rush hour traffic. I enjoyed some light sightseeing out of the van windows as we crawled towards the hotel and it was a nice way to end this long day of travel.