Episode 21: Sunday, Bloody Sunday II, or: we did not learn from history and are doomed to repeat it.

So, apparently our struggles in Bremen should have been a warning: Germany as a whole just doesn't work Sundays. Bars and restaurants are allowed to open but shops either aren't allowed to or just don't. Obviously, this is an example of how even some of the more fiscally conservative European countries look after workers and as a worker and committed socialist I'm glad that my fellows get such a better deal here than I do. I just wish someone had warned us that Sundays would be a wash-out.

You might think it's no big deal, really. And you'd be right, except that the car park where we left the car last night is attached to a shopping centre and that doesn't open today either. So, we're stuck in Aachen. This means several things: 1) we can't get to the final of the football tournament this evening in Enschede, 2) we can't get to the hotel we booked in Antwerp tonight, 3) that's going to be a very expensive carpark stay, both in itself and due to wasted expenditure on the match and the hotel and 4) we've ruined our plan of being in a different city every day. Granted we didn't see much of Aachen yesterday and we wouldn't have had time to see Antwerp tomorrow but it's the principle of the thing. 22 cities in 22 days was part of the point, it was a challenge.

We managed to get a room for tonight in the same hotel we were in yesterday so that's no problem but with the car and the match and thinking I'd lost my glasses (found 'em, thankfully) and a host of other niggling little annoyances, today has been the worst of the trip.

Thankfully we should be able to make it to the channel tunnel in time for the train back to England tomorrow and I really can't wait to get home now but today has sort of soured the whole experience. It was supposed to be the culmination of the tour: the final game, being in three cities in three countries over the course of about 10 hours. Instead we're stranded with nothing to do and the knowledge that tomorrow's massive trek back home leads only to our first days back at work on Tuesday. Once I've got some emotional distance from it, today won't have spoiled the whole thing, of course, but it's hard to look at things that way just now.

Anyway, we got a bit of a look around Aachen's historic buildings today and they were nice. It's hard to be enthusiastic but if I was currently part-way to Enschede, I think I'd be looking back on them as fine sights to have seen.

Episode 20: Photo-dump III

Another photo-dump for you. Luxembourg-Schengen-Aachen via the scenic mountain road is a long drive and a wrong turning here and there only makes it longer so not much happened today that's worth writing about. Here are some snaps from Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Kolding, Copenhagen, Helsingør and Luxembourg. Sorry they're not particularly well-arranged, I've had enough struggling with the formatting on this site to last a lifetime so you'll have to take them as you find them. Give the first one a click and you can cycle through without it bothering you, anyway.

Episode 19: Luxembourg, Luxembourg.

Luxembourg: our fourth country in four days and the last new country of the trip. After today we re-tread old ground, passing into Germany tomorrow, returning to Enschede for the final of the football tournament on Sunday afternoon, taking our last sleep on the continent in Antwerp, Belgium on Sunday night before getting the Eurotunnel back to England on Monday.

When I think of Luxembourg, I think of fairy-tale castles nestled in the mountains, surrounded by evergreens and commanding vistas of a sun-drenched valley with maybe a little village at the bottom, much like the Hogwarts/Minas Tirith hybrid we encountered at Hohenzollern on the way to Stuttgart. Luxembourg city isn't quite like that, of course. It's a modern metropolis with all the usual trappings; shopping plazas, so-called nightlife, traffic, tourists, what I'm now beginning to think of as the obligatory red-light district, multi-national chain stores so you could be pretty much anywhere in the world, hotels, conference centres etc. etc. etc.

The aldstadt - or old town - where we are staying, actually is a bit more like my Schloss-in-the-forested-valley vision. It sits on either side of a shallow, narrow valley which clearly did used to be heavily tree-lined and does indeed feature a number of smaller dwellings at the bottom, though because it's so small, they climb the valley walls and from a certain angle, you're back in Lord of the Rings territory - gazing down on the Elves' home at Rivendell - perhaps unsurprisingly as we are only just over the border from Burg Hohenzollern and this whole region is where some of the properly ancient fairy tales that inspire fantasy writers came from.

Connecting the two parts of the aldstadt (and responsible for the vantage point that made me see Rivendell in the Péitrusse valley) is the Adolphe bridge, also known as the new bridge, despite being 114 years old; an impressive sight at 502 feet long, 138 feet above the valley floor and built from a local sandstone - as is most of the aldstadt. The light-coloured masonry gives the whole thing a regal air and ramps the wow factor up just a little.

A random wander over the bridge and around the new town led us into a residential area which also contained most of Luxembourg's government offices. Flats and the finance ministry seem odd bedfellows but I think you'll find both on the same street. All the ministries are in the same area, surrounded by Brazilian restaurants and tattoo parlours.

We came to Luxembourg pretty much on a whim. We were planning the trip and we'd sorted which football matches we'd attend and we had this two-day gap between games. Well, we'd already established that there didn't seem much to see in the Netherlands (we thought we'd have got a better look at Amsterdam than we actually did, otherwise we might have gone there) and we thought, why not?

Looking into it today, I discovered that Luxembourg is actually the perfect place to end the trip.* The people of Luxembourg have an attitude towards borders that regular readers here might recognise; a Luxembourg passport will get you into 172 countries without the need for a visa, this tiny nation is a founding member of the EU, they've been part of alliances with all four of the countries that border them for centuries and it was in Schengen, Luxembourg that the eponymous Schengen agreement was signed, without which this trip would have been a complete pain in the arse, probably twice as expensive and full of needless bureaucracy.

Thank you, Luxembourg.



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*Yes, I know we've got three days left. I'm doing a thing here, alright? Don't come in here with your facts and spoil it. The last few days are pretty much just the homeward journey, OK? 

Episode 18: Not a lot to say about three countries in three days.

Sorry I've been away for a while; a lack of WiFi in the hotel in Neumunster was to blame at first and then I somehow forgot to write anything last night here in Enschede. Honestly, not that much has happened anyway. In Copenhagen we toyed with the idea of an impromptu visit to Sweden but we decided against due to the cost of the crossing (54€ one way on the bridge) and the time it would then take us to get back through Denmark to our hotel in Neumunster, Germany. We drove up the coast instead to a place called Helsingør. All the way along the coast you could see across the water to Sweden but from Helsingør you felt you could almost reach out and touch Helsingborg on the opposite shore.

From there we went to Neumunster, which was nothing more than a stop on the road to Enschede, and therefore another place I don't have a lot to tell you about. We ended up talking to an Austrian woman at breakfast; she - and apparently everyone else - assumed we were in town for the heavy metal festival happening not far away. Fair enough, my aesthetic does have something of the metalhead about it. That was the only thing that happened in Neumunster anyway and we very soon hit the road to Enschede.

By a stroke of luck our hotel was only about 15 minutes' walk from the football stadium so we stayed in our rooms and chilled out all evening until it was time for the game. The Dutch team defeated the English and it was a triumph of will over skill - not that the Dutch weren't skilled, that's just not the main reason they won - and dare I say that England's supposed tactical genius head coach got a number of things wrong?

Anyway, that's what has happened over the last few days. We're just off to Luxembourg now and I'll update again from there.

Episode 17: Shiny; Happy People.

København (I've always preferred the Danish spelling, it just looks cool) is king of the capitals. I've seen Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and Berlin on this trip and London, Cardiff, Dublin and Edinburgh previously but Copenhagen tops the lot. We came to Europe basically to wander around and here is where we've found the best place to do that. There seems to be no end to the procession of new things to see as you go around the city.

But more importantly there's simply a general nice feeling about the place, the people just seem happy. I know I said the same in Paris but now comparing Paris to here I start to wonder if I was getting good vibes from fellow tourists there, because in the Danish capital it seems more noticeable how at home the people are with their wonderful city. Paris felt like a beautiful place where people live. København is a beautiful place to live. The distinction is slight but important. Now the main difference may be tourists; Paris got at least 11 times as many as Copenhagen last year (according to some very basic research by me that probably misses out a bunch of factors), and it must be a bit difficult to really feel at home somewhere when the visitors outnumber the locals. While that may stop Copenhagen becoming jaded, though, it's not the main reason why the place feels so happy to begin with. Chesterfield gets basically zero tourists but as much as I love my town I can't say it's anything like a happy place to live. So what is the secret?

Denmark as a whole regularly tops the world happiness charts and there are a ton of theories as to why. Without wanting to get all political again, I'd have to say that it's the laws of the land that play a big part. It's quite a progressive country and - as visitdenmark.com puts it - few have too much but even fewer have too little. Equality's the thing. You can't be anything but happy when you live in a country with such a level playing field for all. It's freedom. Where there's equality and mutual respect, there's the freedom to be yourself, and that's the only way to be happy.

It shows anyway. Once I got to thinking about how good the city felt to be in, I had plenty of opportunities to just people-watch and work out why. There're ways people act when they aren't confident they can be themselves (I'm something of an expert because I've never been confident in myself) and I saw just one example of those behaviours today, and that from a tourist. It's not the most scientific study but there you have it; it is my conclusion that in Copenhagen everyone can be themselves, so it seems, and the laid-back happy feeling thus created permeates the whole city, giving you the chance to really appreciate the beauty of the place.

This is the furthest point from home on this trip (discounting a trip to Majorca a couple of years ago it is the furthest from home that either of us have ever been) and yet we didn't feel out of place today. That's not unique to Copenhagen but it's interesting, nonetheless, and certainly a far cry from the streets of Doesburg, the police stations of Brussels and even the British Embassy.

Denmark - and especially the capital - has been my favourite place so far. If I had been able to stay here a little longer and had I the skill for such a thing, I think this entry would have been a real love letter to København. As is I've not really gotten to know the place well enough for that and I probably couldn't do it justice anyway.

Oh, and Chris spent about an hour in the LEGO store and managed to come out with just one tiny bag of bricks.

Episode 16: Colder in Kolding

I've tried not to be that guy chatting about the weather all the time but eventually I was bound to start scraping the bottom of the holiday topic barrel.

Personally, I've found it too warm: 30°C in Paris, nearly 35 in Germany sometimes. I'm not equipped to deal with those temperatures. We're at a similar latitude to Glasgow here in Kolding so thankfully it's a little cooler, though when the sun's on you, you really know about it.

Nope, you know what? I can't keep it up. How people manage to have whole conversations about the weather I'll never know. I've said all I needed to say about conditions on this holiday in one paragraph.

Unfortunately, a review of our time in Western Denmark will be equally brief. You will recall how we're here mainly so Chris can visit the home of Lego, I'm sure. Well, that was a bust. Billund is the place where you will find the Danish LEGOLAND, as well as the Lego shop and what seemed to be Lego's R&D wing.

Unfortunately the shop is in the theme park, meaning we'd have had to spend about £40 each just to get access to the shop. The office building which seemed to be where all the designing and engineering happens was, perhaps understandably, not open to the public. It would have made for a fascinating tour, I think, but I appreciate that a) there may be a slight risk of corporate espionage and b) there're people doing their jobs in there. I don't think I'd want tour groups tramping through my workplace all day while I'm trying to get on with it, so it's fair enough that they don't either.

Kolding itself is a quaint small town with a 13th century castle, a lot of old houses and not much else in the way of outward signs of what must be a fascinating history. It's near enough the border that it has probably been part of a few different countries and empires since it was built.

Billund I can't tell you about; we went for the Lego and left disappointed without venturing into the town proper.

Copenhagen tomorrow.

Episode 15: Sunday, bloody Sunday

So, what can I tell you about Bremen?

Well, parts of it date back to the 1400s, chunks of it were destroyed in the war and rebuilt by the people of the city. It's home to one of the oldest shopping streets in Europe.

Unfortunately, that's pretty much all I've got. I've seen all that good stuff, the Cathedral and the whole aldstadt district; it took about 45 minutes to tour the lot. It's lovely and quiet here, not too many people. Probably because the whole place seems to shut down on Sundays. There were a few cafes open and a brass band playing in the main square, apart from that the town was dead.

Just another thing we failed to find out beforehand, I suppose, but how many cities can you name where Sundays are still treated as a seemingly official day of rest? It caught us by surprise and I think it would have done if we'd had years to plan this trip. I'm not complaining, I don't know what we would have done if anywhere was open anyway, it was just weird to walk through a city with practically no-one about, you don't get that anywhere I know. Every city I've ever spent time in has been perpetually busy, even on Sundays.

Just a short post today then. There doesn't seem to be much to add. It feels weird that this time next week we'll be in our last hotel of the trip and getting ready for going home in the morning. With the number of places still on our list to visit it doesn't seem possible to fit it all in in a week. In the same way, it almost seems like we've been over here forever already and home and work is just a dream I was having. I'm looking forward to getting back (home that is... to work, not so much).

Anyway, tomorrow it's country number 5: Denmark. See you then.

Episode 14: The elephant in the room

So, the car was allowed into Amsterdam, it just wasn't a good idea to take it there. Like most cities, it wasn't built with the automobile in mind, but unlike most others it seems to have made little effort to accommodate the car. Mostly I think that's great. The place looks so beautiful and mostly that's because it's unspoiled by the passage of time and I love that. I think that's what people mean by living history. It's what I mean by it, anyway; the place still looks and feels like it did a hundred, two hundred years ago but you can mostly go about your 21st century existence with no problems (car enthusiasts may find that a struggle but most people seem to bike around over here). We didn't get a lot of time, unfortunately, to explore the city but we've been there now. We've seen it with our own eyes. It's a start. Some might call this trip "going to see the elephant." It's kind of a you go just to see what's over the horizon deal, no great plan, no worries about we have to do this or that thing, you just go, you see what's there, you come back. Or in our case, you go somewhere else and see what's there too.

And thus we come to Doesburg. Yes, those amongst you who had access to our planned itinerary may have expected us to be in Doetinchem tonight and so did we, but apparently the hotels there were sold out when we booked and we are in fact in a tiny town a few miles away. Not that it matters, the only thing in Doetinchem of interest to us was the football game this evening. Having said that, if we were to do this again, I don't think we'd stay here next time. The town is beautiful and in fact boasts some interesting sights and attractions, such as a restaurant that claims to be the oldest in Holland,* but the few people we've interacted with didn't seem very welcoming to tourists and there are no actual hotels here. I'm not writing this blog to put anyone off visiting anywhere we've been on this trip but if you prefer a traditional hotel over an airBnB-type arrangement and your Dutch is anything other than spot on, I would advise you to make Doesburg a day-trip, not a stop-over.

I don't like being in someone else's house. Our host may not live here so we have the place to ourselves but I still have the feeling of intruding. The room is ok and the people who look after the house have been nice (of course; guests like us are paying their mortgage for them) but there's an indefinable awkwardness to sitting on a person's terrace or using their bathroom that you just don't get in a hotel. In a hotel it's a company's services you are using and I prefer that. That's just me, I guess; I don't even like staying at friends' houses, so throw in the stranger element and the fact that I'm basically paying for the privilege of having my social awkwardness active at all times and it's easy to see why this isn't for me.

I've mentioned occasionally to Chris that this holiday was not really ideal for a couple of introverts. The extrovert personality types are far better suited to this kind of venture. I wouldn't want to change who I am for the world but if I could have suspended certain parts of my psyche for a few weeks, that would have been helpful. But it makes you learn and grow, to do things like this, it's good for the soul if you try and see the world a different way.

In the end, we came to see the elephant and we did, almost literally; there was a big copper one stuck on the side of a building in Hamburg. I don't think we have a picture, unfortunately, so if you want to get a looksee, you'll have to go and see the elephant too.

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*I don't know if that refers to Holland as in the Netherlands or just the province of Holland but either way, it was opened in the 1400s so I think the claim is a strong one

Episode 13: Unluckily for some (i.e. you), I did actually write something today.

I'm not sure why I fell into a daily update schedule for this, but it was a bad idea. There are some days on this trip where the place we lay our heads is simply just a point on the journey and the drive there was motorways all the time.

In essence what I'm saying is that there's not a lot to say about today. We had a drive around Dortmund (trying to find the way out more than to see the sights), we stayed on the motorway all the way to Rotterdam and now we're in an airport hotel a way outside the city. We're not 100% sure if our car is allowed into Dutch cities at all (I think we are allowed in but on all car-related matters I defer to the driver, so if in doubt we'd better stay out). We're going to find somewhere to park outside the cities tomorrow so we can see a bit of Den Haag and Amsterdam but we're really just marking time until the next football game tomorrow. After that we get to see some of the proper destination cities that we came for, Bremen and - assuming we're allowed into Danish cities - Copenhagen (and Chris' pick, Billund, home of LEGO).

Rest days are important though, I suppose; they're just not much fun for you to read about. I've also run out of general Europe-based chit chat.

I would make some quip about not being able to get a decent cup of tea but I feel it's gone beyond a joke now, both in the sense that the law of diminishing returns states that you can't tell the same joke over again and expect as good a reaction and in the sense that if there is a new and different way to get a laugh out of my stereotypical British need for a cuppa, I can't think of it because it's now become an actual sore point; I'm not joking any more. I suspect my preoccupation with this issue may indicate genuine caffeine addiction which is also no laughing matter even if it is by far the least harmful addiction you can have.

I suppose it just seems a waste to me that I've got nothing to tell you (more accurately, it feels like you, my readers, will think it's a waste). I've spent a lot of money on this trip and you only get so many days, both of life and - in this barbaric world of labour in service of capital - to use as you see fit. It doesn't bother me that nothing happened today but while in theory I don't care what anyone else thinks, I really, really care what everyone else thinks.

I don't know, I just wish I had something more exciting to say, I guess. It comes down to poor planning again and it's been the same throughout. We were in Paris on a Tuesday and guess which day the Louvre is always closed? We've hit cities with interesting events on the before or the day after said event and we would have been more motivated to do things if we'd actually learnt a language, as planned. I don't mean to focus on the negatives, I'm just doing the typed version of thinking out loud and we are having a good time, or I am anyway, Chris hasn't really said.

Which is all a really long-winded way of saying that I've got nothing to say. Sorry, it was a bit of a waste of a post, wasn't it?

Episode 12: Every Day's a School Day

Well, then. That's us at the half-way mark. 11 days down, 11 to go. With all the miles we've covered (well over 2000 miles just by car, no idea how far we've walked) it's been a bit of a blur.

So I suppose I could use this as a time for reflection: the midpoint has a symmetry to it and we're only here in Dortmund to kill time, really.

It wouldn't be correct to say that this journey was about finding myself, I hate stupid clichés like that: I always know where I am. I may occasionally lose track of where everything else is but I am my own fixed point of reference. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that I haven't learned some stuff.

The most important thing I've learned, I think, is that there's a good reason my brother and I don't usually spend a lot of time together. We like each other fine, we just don't get along well. We're too similar in some ways and too different in others. You would hope that that would balance out and we'd be just about fine but somehow it doesn't. I suppose it's not a normal situation with the stress of the travelling and the fact that on the whole continent the only people we've really got to talk to are each other, but we both function better when we don't have to be around each other 24/7.

Frankly, we both function better when we don't have to be around people in general 24/7, so it's no great shock that the lack of time alone for either of us is starting to tell.

Also, I've learned that driving around Hamburg is a nightmare and Google maps will not help you when you need it most.

I've learned that the jug on the breakfast table that you think has milk in it should not be poured into your tea without checking because there is a chance that it may be cream. I've learned that you can get frankfurters for breakfast in Berlin but you can't seem to get frankfurters for any meal in Frankfurt and hamburgers may be readily available in Hamburg but the authenticity is no guarantee of quality.

Sadly, I've not learned much, if any, German or French, though I have learned one phrase of Dutch. It is of no use because it came from the trailer for the new Planet of the Apes film and I will have no cause to ever tell anyone "apen samen strenk" but I know it now. I believe it's probably burned indelibly on my memory by the sheer absurdity of its being the one phrase I have learned on this trip, but never mind.

Apologies for my absence from the airwaves yesterday, the hotel in Hamburg was like something from the 1950s in every way, down to the décor, the lack of en-suite bathrooms and most crucially for this blog, no Wi-Fi.

We're back to the Netherlands for the next two days, taking in the West coast cities of Rotterdam, Den Haag and Amsterdam before returning East, heading for Denmark.

Episode 11: Running for the Border.

One of the big themes throughout this trip and blog has been freedom. The whole point of this was making the most of our right to Freedom of Movement. That right is everyone's in the EU and it has shaped the physical continent in interesting ways. Every we time cross a border we remark on how unremarkable it is. You have to be quite eagle-eyed to even spot the borders most of the time.

The crossing from Belgium to the Netherlands was my favourite. The road widens where the border crossing used to be, you can imagine the customs booths and the barriers which used to span the tarmac and halt you on your way from place to place. Now though there are a couple of petrol stations instead. It's perfect; "there used to be a pointless thing here," it seems to say, "a vestigial appendage from a bygone age. It was no use to anybody so we tore it down and put in somewhere for you to refuel, just to make your life that bit easier."

There are those who might say "but what of sovereignty, identity?" Well, I can't speak for the people here but they seem to have a strong sense of identity to me. I've spoken a lot here about architecture and that identity is very much reflected in the physical spaces of the people here; their homes and places of work. Even just roads, fields, geographical features. You may not see the borders but once you're a few miles into a country you know about it. There's something indescribably German about Germany. The Netherlands are the most Dutch places you've ever seen. Even when you escape the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, Paris is unmistakeable (though it can look like New York in places, I'll admit).

And today we are in Berlin, former home of one of the hardest and most famous borders of the modern era. We crossed that line a few times on our travels today and this was one we noticed immediately. It was torn down as well, of course, but it has been commemorated, lest we forget the folly and cruelty of building walls between peoples, whether literal or figurative.

You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone (well, going) is another theme I've addressed before and it's pertinent again. We are about to lose the EU, to some this is an acceptable loss - to some that loss is a victory, a boon to mankind. Fair enough, each to his own, I suppose. To me however... the more I get to know what I'm losing, the less willing I am to give it up. I'll get no greater sense of identity by being outside the EU, I'll lose a newly discovered part of my identity. I'll still be European in a geographical and ethnic sense but neither of those have any significance for me. I'll get no further sovereignty, in fact I'll lose the protections the EU currently gives me - from having all of my laws set by corporations whose financial might makes them stronger at the negotiating table than many individual nations. How am I and my fellow countrymen made more powerful by that?

Anyway, this in serious danger of becoming another Brexit rant and I'm sure you've all had enough of that, especially my facebook friends and readers of other blogs so I'll move on.

What I understand more by their absence in my life are those borders; they're briefly gone from my life and what I know now is that they're nothing but arbitrary lines on a map. They are given so much significance by so many and it baffles me. I've got two more countries to see on this trip and I'm going to cherish crossing the borders: I'm going to revel in the fact that I won't know exactly where the lawyers and the warlords drew the lines by which they sought to control the lives of millions. I celebrate their insignificance as a triumph of the common man. As much as the peoples of Europe have their strong identities, the plain fact is that we are all human and which side of the imaginary lines you were born on doesn't actually matter.

Until next time, dear reader, Auf Wiedersehen.

Episode 10: Photo-dump II

We've had rain all day, a lot of photos got accidentally deleted when I tried to add some of them to this post and I'm very tired. It's a probably a good job this was always going to be a picture post because it would have been a massive rant otherwise.

Anyway, here are the best of the surviving pictures. Most of them are churches and castles or museums. You can click to see them at full size.

Episode 9: Here Comes the New Schloss

It's been another day for driving and admiring the scenery. Bavaria has some lovely views. More forests, more valleys, more mountains, more pretty villages and fairytale castles.

This is really Chris' leg of the tour, I suppose; we've got the nice driving roads and he's the one who selected the stops along the way.

It's not that the scenery has become any less agreeable, but if you were to read yesterday's entry again, it would serve pretty well as record of what happened today, which is probably not much fun for you. We didn't have to contend with the red light district in Stuttgart and the castle was more Disney than Hogwarts (in fact it was the inspiration for the Disney castle) but pretty much today was like yesterday.

We drove around Stuttgart a little this morning, just to take in the sights before we left. There's not much to say about that either.

Here's a picture of that Disney-looking castle.

Tomorrow is the longest drive of the trip and there won't be much time for sight-seeing, so I'll probably do another photo-dump with the sights of Germany so far.

Guten Abend.

Episode 8: Time-travelling

Today we saw two very fdifferent sides of Germany.

Picture a castle perched on a mountain so steep that the forest on the mountain-sides has an odd vertical quality to it - almost like it's 2D - the trees seeming to grow above each other, rather than in ranks.

Picture the road that winds between these steep wooded slopes, picture if you can the views from the high places where the trees part and you feel you can see to the end of the world. There's a poetical side to me that would like to tell you that it was breath-taking but I'm an honest man at heart and I've never had my breath taken away simply by the sight of something.*

But I'm getting ahead of myself. To take you back to the start I must fast-forward a couple of hundred years to the modern Germany.

We'd inadvertently parked the car in such a place that, to reach it from the hotel today, we had to make an early-morning trip through the red light district. I'm not one to judge** but it's just not really the place I wanted to be. The clientele hanging about at that time of a morning aren't exactly the upscale business types you'd find elsewhere in and around a commercial city like Frankfurt, let's just put it that way, shall we? I'm not a fan of being leered at in general and when it's by the sort of people who were on that street this morning, it's even less pleasant. God knows how it must feel to work with those stares on you all the time.

Anyway, we got out of there pretty sharpish and hit the highway again. After a few wrong turnings we found Bundesstrasse 500, a fantastically scenic route through the peaks between Rheinland and Baden-Wurttemberg. Again we were going too quickly to get many photos. We did manage to stop and snap a few but they were low quality and did not do the scenery justice, so if you really want to see you'll have to make your own trip.

From there we found our way to Burg Hohenzollern; ancestral home of the Prussian Royal family, a title they apparently still claim even though their kingdom is no longer a kingdom. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's a striking building and well worth a visit if you can survive the hike and the altitude. Nerds, imagine a smaller Hogwarts crossed with an even more scaled-down Minas Tirith. Everyone else, imagine a really nice-looking fortified palace.

So, we stopped there for dinner and carried on to Stuttgart. Tomorrow we head for another castle, another scenic road, and Munich.

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*Well, maybe once. But that's another story for another blog entirely.

**Total lie; I'm a very judgemental person. I simply have no strong feelings one way or the other on ladies of negotiable affection.

Episode 7: One Short Drive for Dan

Today was what this trip was about: 3 cities in a day, a great road for driving on and finishing up with frankfurters in Frankfurt.

Cologne has a Lego shop, so that had to be stop number one, thanks to Chris. From there we toured the aldstadt, uncovering a few hidden architectural gems and by total coincidence, a monument to the moon landing. Today was the 48th anniversary of that giant leap for mankind and we just happened across an obelisk tucked away in a back-alley commemorating the achievement.

The column was constructed, a few months before the moon landing, from the stones of a Roman harbour which used to stand nearby by a well-known architect and for no particular reason he seems to have added a dedication to Neil Armstrong.

The construction of the "Schmitz-pillar" was completed in 1969. In the same year, on the 21st of July (exactly at 3 o'clock 56 minutes and 20 seconds CET) Neil Armstrong, the first man with the left foot, entered the moon, from the schmitz-saule 389994km and 100m away (calculated by the institute for space research The city of bochum). Niel A. Armstrong, who came from brown and NASA, was grateful for his pillar and inscription. - Google Translate's version of the inscription.

Moving on, we took a short drive to Bonn, former capital of West Germany. It's another beautiful city and our method for deciding where to go was the old "what's that over there?" technique: you see one beautiful thing and walk over for a closer look and you notice another on the horizon, so you walk over to that too. It served us well. There doesn't seem to be a great deal for tourists to do in Bonn, but there's plenty to see and I think we got around most of it.

So we hopped back in the car and headed for Frankfurt am Main, and finally we were done with the Autobahn. Germany has some incredibly scenic driving routes and we saw a cracker today. Unfortunately we were moving too fast for pictures so you'll have to come and have a look for yourself. It is worth it, believe me.

Any road, we ended up in Frankfurt and we couldn't really come here without trying a local version of the food which has taken the city's name world-wide now could we? In honesty, I don't think we got the real thing, but we tried a couple of places and in the end we had an acceptable meal, and what more can you ask for?

Tomorrow we head for Stuttgart, via another scenic road and an old castle. And incredibly, that will be week one of the trip over with already. Honestly, part of me just wants to get home. I have really enjoyed this holiday but we could have done it so much better and I want to get this messy, not-well-planned first jaunt out of the way, so I can come back wiser and better-prepared again in the future.

Of course, once it's my first day back at work I may wish my time out here had lasted a little longer but a wise man once said that you go away "so that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colours."

Episode 6: On the Road Again

Utrecht to Cologne is a short drive and can be done in well under a couple of hours (once you cross the border, of course, you're on the famously not-speed-limited autobahn). The journey time might be lengthened somewhat if your car still hasn't got it's clean air certificate, without which you can't actually enter Cologne. This was the case with us and we foolishly believed what the travel guides and the hotel receptionist told us about how the stickers were available from all petrol stations.

In fact every one we stopped at bounced us on to the next one until we finally were directed to a mechanic's garage where the sticker can be purchased... but only if you can make it over the language barrier.

It's been a constant failing of this trip that our French and German are about as good as our Martian. Learning a language was part of the plan before we came out here, there just ended up being no time, as there was no time for a lot of things that really should have been viewed as essential; properly planning what we wanted to do in each city for a start.

Waking up of a morning and asking "what do you wanna do?" is fine when you've got a couple of weeks in one place. With less than a day per destination, making it up as you go along wastes precious seconds, minutes, hours, not to mention mobile data while you try and map out where you are and where you're going.

In the end we didn't see much of Cologne today, due in part to the fact that my running joke about a lack of tea has become a serious matter. Dehydration is always a risk on long journeys and my attempts to ration the water are a fine idea but with nothing else to drink of an evening, I've been feeling the effects. Tomorrow's trip is a short one, and we'll have time for a look around Cologne in the morning before we head off for Bonn and Frankfurt, so I'll report back more tomorrow.

(Author's note: this was published about half a day late, so in this piece "today" refers to the 20th of July 2017, "tomorrow" to the 21st)

Episode 5: The Brussels Incident

I finally got a cup of tea!

Thank you Belgium; at last a country which understands the most important part of breakfast.

Anyway... The plan for Brussels was something like: European Parliament, comic book museum, chocolate, waffles, heckle Nigel Farage if he's around. The actual itinerary consisted of bouncing back and forth between the British embassy and a couple of police stations, trying to file an incident report.

Yes, we've had our first official incident. Trying to work out the French on the police forms nearly caused a second. Being the go-between for the police and the embassy didn't help matters either. Each organisation seemed to think the other was responsible for resolving our query.

The upshot is that our tour of Brussels was curtailed slightly. We did find a waffle shack: an Australian one, but whatever.

So we set off for Utrecht in the late afternoon, checked into our hotel and headed off to our first football match of the trip. Anyone who cares will already know how the game went so I won't go into detail but it was one of the best matches we've ever been to, because of our fellow spectators rather than the game itself (though that was good too).

When you're sharing a stand with the Scotland fans you can usually expect humour and we were not disappointed. I've never experienced Do-Re-Mi as a football chant before but it works surprisingly well.

Also on display was banter with everyone from the stadium stewards to an England coach who was sat nearby to the British TV presenters also in the vicinity - all good-humoured and well received, I must add. I've never laughed so much at a football game.

Half-time gave us the chance to sample some local dishes such as rookworst broodje and saucijzebroodje (hot dog and sausage roll - so exotic; still, a step up from McDonalds the other day).

And that was about it until I sat down to write this at midnight but was sidetracked by Chris' sudden panic attack over whether our car would be legally allowed into German cities. We now believe it will but I guess the test will come tomorrow when we attempt to enter our first German city. We're so well-prepared, it's unbelievable.

Stay tuned, our next "incident" may just be around the corner.

Episode 4: The Photos

Shopping in Paris: not my idea of a great holiday activity and having experienced it first-hand, I'm not exactly a convert. No amount of nudges could dissuade Chris from visiting the Lego store though, so we drove 'round to St. Denis, hopped on a Metro train in to the centre and visited a shopping mall. After the Tower and the palaces and Notre-Dame the day before, it was something of an anti-climax - although as shopping centres go it was OK, I guess. The best part of the retail experience is that I am now the very happy owner of a tea kettle and some much better walking shoes.

The plan was to get to Brussels mid-afternoon but a snafu with the public transport system in Paris, and the traffic around St. Denis caused by a Coldplay concert meant we didn't arrive 'til 8:30pm, local time.

No matter though, we've only been here a couple of hours and we can already tell this is a night-time city. A short walk around the centre took us past more open bars, restaurants and shops than we'd seen in the whole of our trek around Paris and if anything, the Belgian capital is an even more beautiful place than the French one.

Today was mostly travelling, shopping or hanging around Metro stations. Not much to talk about there, but a picture's worth a thousand words so here are the snaps of Calais, Paris and Brussels instead.

CALAIS:

Notre-Dame á Calais                                                    Calais Town Hall

 PARIS:

Blackpool Tower                                                                 Taj Mahal

Urgh, what a dump

Notre-Dame                                                                   Île de la Cité

BRUXELLES:

View from The Hotel Chambord

This crazy clock thing.

And last but by no means least: