THE A7

There's basically only one road out of Scandinavia, and that's the motorway from Jutland down through Schleswig-Holstein (OK, if you're in Finland, then you can hop across the border to Russia, but that's not recommended if you are in a hurry). Known in Germany as the A7, it goes straight down the middle of the country for almost 1,000km, passing through Hamburg, Hannover, Kassel, Würtzburg, Ulm, and Kempten before ending at the Austrian border.

Denmark relies a lot on trade, and Germany is its biggest trading partner by far. So there's a lot of traffic on the A7, particularly the section before the Elbe Tunnel in Hamburg, after which you can keep going towards the south, turn right for Bremen, Holland and the Ruhr, or left for Berlin. Motorists crossing the Danish frontier keep an anxious ear on German radio for sounds of the dreaded word "Stau", meaning a traffic jam, usually followed by some horrible number of km. Hamburg in particular is a real bottleneck, since there is really only one way through; and even though they manage the tunnels as efficiently as they can, switching the direction of lanes and so on, 10km queues there are quite common.

On our trip to Basel last week, we drove up and down the A7 for nearly all of its length, thankfully without experiencing a major queue. Two things were noticeable. First, there is an awful lot of motorway building, resurfacing and maintenance going on in Germany at the moment. Out of a distance of 1,100 km, we must have travelled at least 100km on the opposite side of the motorway, in those narrow lanes where you have to concentrate in order to avoid hitting the crash barriers. Secondly, there are a lot of solar panels, not just on the roofs of individual houses, but whole fields of them. Germany doesn't strike me as a particularly sunny place, but they seem to have taken to solar power with gusto. My badminton partners, who are big solar panel fans, tell me that cooler climes are in fact better, since the panels don't overheat. I am not sure that I am convinced that it would be a sensible thing to do, if there were no subsidy.

If Denmark is following Germany in subsidising solar power, then there is another area where they most definitely are not. German motorway folk work on Saturdays, as we discovered; there's no way their equivalent in Denmark would do that.

Walter Blotscher