Antwerp - Karlsruhe 477 Km , 9 hours 30
Thursday I travelled from Antwerp to Karlsruhe by car, I've been doing that for the past 3-4 years and mostly it taks us 4 to 4.5 hours including a couple of stops etc.
First problem was to conquer the Antwerp ring, with the work there we lost about an hour for the first 10 Km When restarting my engine on the ring after 10 minutes of full stop we tought "Ok, we had enough traffic jams on the way already so rather than 4.5 hours it will be 5.5 hours By 1500 we'll be in Karlsruhe". Then on the A4 direction Koln we got stuck in a 25-40 minute traffic jam because 2 trucks had an accident just before Kreuz Kerpen which was our exit to the A61. Finally reaching the A61 with a changed ETA to around 1600 we were happy that we could drive again .. for about 2 minutes.. then we had to stop, full stop, shut down the engine again and wait.
Everybody was walking around on the Autobahn chatting with the people in the other cars. Looking back and forth all we saw were cars and trucks, but no movement whatsoever. It seemed that 3Km before us there was an accident and the road was fully blocked. After about 1.5 hours we saw that cars behind us were returning in the opposite direction and were leaving the highway to the previous exit. We were told that the road would be blocked for the next 4 hours and we should do the same. So here I was driving on a piece of road where people do 160Km/h in normal circumstances , backwards.
Once of the highway the question was how do we get from here to Karlsruhe, I wanted to go back to the A4 in order to take the next big Autoway south A3, or so .. but the A4 was closed direction Koln, so I had to drive 1 exit further. From there we tried to find a way to join the A4 again, with the A61 closed and everybody trying to do the same that took us about an hour. Then from Koln via Bonn back south .. guess what .. just before Bonn, exactly .. accident & traffic jam another hallf hour. With 2 smaller trafficjams for the rest of the trip we eventually arrived in Karlsruhe around 19h30. About 9h30 after we left and 5 hours later than expected.
Luckily when we drove back on saturday the trip only took us 4h30 :)