The situation was basically straight out of the start of a horror film. Two travelers park their car by the side of a long dark road in the pouring rain. They think they’re alone…they are wrong. Which is true we weren’t as alone as we thought we were. The forest was eerily silent apart from the sound of rain and the sound of us messing around while cooking dinner. If there was a killer lurking in the pitch black forest we were making enough noise to draw them towards us. Before settling down in our cold, and now very wet, car for the night I went to go to use the facilities and stumbled upon a huge barbed wire fence in the darkness. The fence was a bit over-enforced for a campsite but maybe they had a problem with guests trying to escape before paying.

 

Once we got in the car and went to sleep we were awoken an hour later by a knock on the window. The disturbance awoke me from my slumber but it didn’t stir a sleepy Chris. I peered out the window into the darkness and saw nothing. For a moment there was no sound in the forest but the pitter of rain, then another knock broke the silence. I whipped around in response to the sound which was now at Chris’s side but saw nothing but the rain falling on the window and Chris asleep, but becoming increasingly worried I quickly woke him up. I whispered that there was someone out there knocking on the windows but he didn’t believe me. That is until there was another knock, a very slow deliberate knock on the rear window. We both sat petrified in the car listening to the darkness.

 

Ignoring the sound of our increasingly rapid heartbeats there was a quiet noise. Perhaps it was just the creak of the trees moving in the breeze, or perhaps the sound of wet sticks cracking beneath footsteps. Chris was sure it was nothing but the sound of the forest, but I was convinced something was out there lurking in the darkness. To prove that there was nothing out there he put on his sodden rain coat, picked up his head torch, opened the door, and stepped out into the dark. I watched as his light flickered on, passing through a variety of pointless settings all head torches have, but revealed nothing but trees then he ventured out of view.

 

I jumped at a loud knock on the window beside me, and turned to see an illuminated Chris grinning moronically through the window. Muffled through the window he confirmed there was nothing out in the rain, but since he was now awake and outside he was going to the toilet. After an uncomfortable wait alone in the car the silence of the forest was interrupted by a scream abruptly cut short echoing through the trees. To be honest I wasn’t that worried, it was most likely just Chris having a laugh at my expense. I waited another 10 minutes but he still hadn’t returned to the car. I waited in the car by myself in the cold silence until the handle of the drive’s door moved.

 

I’m no fool so I had locked the door after Chris had left to use the facilities, so I would have to lean over and open the door from the inside. The scream in the forest might not have scared me, but the lack of response when I called out “just a minute” was a creepy touch. Before I had even leant halfway across the car something ran past the window behind me and this time the sound definitely wasn’t branches in the wind. Now that I was fully leant across the car I flicked on the car’s headlights and illuminated the dark straight road in front of us. There in the light stood a dark figure. If it was a man it was a tall man perhaps 8 foot, too tall to possibly be Chris. Despite standing in the headlights I still couldn’t make out any features on the face. I sat in the car unable to move from fear but helpless to watch as the figure slowly raised its long arms into the beam. Clutched in the hand was Chris’ head an expression of terror frozen in time on the face, the fresh blood glistened in the light.

 

Alright maybe that didn’t happen. Maybe I made most of that up, apart from Chris getting dicapitated. Maybe nothing happened in that forest overnight besides a cramped wet sleep in the car. In the morning we were both mostly still alive and Chris’ head was somewhat attached to his torso right where it had always been. Before we left in the morning I went back to where I had found the fence in the forest. There was a sign attached to the chain-link fence but it was in German so was unreadable to a person who doesn’t know German such as myself. Behind the fence I had seen last night was another fence of equally proportions on the other side of a 5m wide stretch of sand which looked ominously similar to a mine-field. I told Chris once I returned to the car but we concluded it was probably nothing. Before we left our home from the night I went on a mini adventure on the other side of the road but found no similar fence.

 

On the way back to the car I decided to scream a bit and amuse myself with the natural auditorium with impeccable acoustics. Why did I decide to do that? Because why the hell not, that’s why. Chris had heard me coming from a mile off, so we set up the cameras to fuck around a bit before normal motorway life resumed. If you’ve seen our YouTube video you have probably seen the footage we recorded. The video doesn’t do justice to the roar of the car without its exhaust as Chris floored it through the forest.

 

Our clever plan to find a campsite this side of Berlin had the added perk that we were close enough to have breakfast there. We drove into the city center and parked up at the only parking lot worthy of our car - The basement of a 5-star hotel. Our filthy broken Peugeot looked slightly out of place parked amongst a huge number of Ferraris, Porsches and Bentleys. Equally filthy and broken from the night sleeping in the car, we looked even more out of place as we left through the lobby of the hotel to find some breakfast. Just around the corner from the Brandenburg Gate we had a huge plate of currywurst and chips – a breakfast fit for champions such as ourselves. We walked around the area nearby wondering why there were so many new buildings, until we remembered that the brits had bombed a lot of it. We even saw the Berlin wall, in fact we saw a lot of them. Most buildings in Berlin actually have Berlin walls.

 

Before leaving Berlin we needed to remortgage our houses, alright our parent’s houses, to pay the extortionate fee for our luxurious parking. The cost was so high we couldn’t scrape together enough Euros between us to pay for it. By the time we had found an ATM and returned we almost didn’t have enough to pay for the increased total. This was in no way helped by the policeman we asked to assist us in our quest to acquire currency. He spent well over 20 minutes hmm-ing and haa-ing over which of the ATMs would technically be closer to our current location. Fortunately we had predicted that the cost would have increased thanks to P.C Indecisive and took out enough Euros to cover any additional expenses we might encounter over the next few days in Europe. Then spent a few minutes roaring our way around the streets of Berlin much to the amusement of the tourists lining the streets, who I can only assume came to Berlin just to see us drive by.

 

Despite spending the rest of the day on the Autobahn we didn’t push the car to its absolute limits as we had on our first encounter with the German roads. It wasn’t because we didn’t think our mighty Peugeot couldn’t reach those speeds any more, if anything it was now more light-weight and improved. It was more because if we apply the break nowadays the steering wheel judders like a crack addict going cold turkey. Should the front wheel decide to separate from the group and try to release a solo album while we are driving at 115mph we’d probably suffer from a mild case of death which would be very unfortunate. It was clear we were never going to make the ferry today, after all we had spent most of the day arseing around in the forest and Berlin, so we pulled over to book the ferry for tomorrow and get some dinner. Now you might think we’ve lost our minds here and turned our back on the thing we once loved, but the petrol station in Germany did even better sausage roads than our beloved Russian brand. We got as close enough to make the drive in time for the ferry tomorrow before calling it a night in Rotterdam. The days of sleeping in the car were over, tonight we would stay in a hotel, tomorrow we would be in the UK and the day after tomorrow was a fantastic film. I mean we would be home in our own beds in two days.