An island and an ancient Spa town

Following our (eventually) successful mission to Liechtenstein, we then headed back North in to Germany where I can read/guess the street signs a bit better than in Austria and Liechtenstein. As it was a little bit sunny I thought we should go to a small town on Lake Constance/Bodensee (seems to have different names) and have a swim. The lake contains borders of Switzerland, Austria and Germany somewhere in the middle of it.

We went to Lindau where a lot of their hotels are on a small island about 150m offshore (over a bridge). So we had a small island getaway for the night. I think that most of the water in the lake (which is also the Rhine river) has come off the glaciers in the Alps because it was freezing! Plus there wasn't really any beach to speak of either.

View out the window of our hotel in Lindau

Boat harbour at Lindau

Lindau

Melinda relaxing on a paddle boat

The next day we headed to Baden-Baden. A small spa town in the Black Forest and its where the English Football (soccer) team stayed during the world cup. (It was hard not to know all about it living in London during the world cup). There are a couple of places where you can go swimming in the thermal springs there and get healed by their healing properties (according to all the pamphlets). Apparently the Romans turned up a few years ago and decided to build some baths their and since then, King and Queens and footballers wives have been coming to rejuvenate themselves!

A mad dash for Liechtenstein

1300 hrs Thursday - Left work
1330 hrs - Collect Melinda
1600 hrs - Somewhere in France, completely pissed off with my GPS (I think I may have missed a turn in torrential rain)
1730 hrs - Still somewhere in France convinced that Melinda has set the GPS mode to send Adam completely mad (she is trying not to snigger every time my GPS tells me to turn right 30m after the street we were meant to go down. 1st opportunity to get off the wrong autobahn - in 7.6km)
1750 hrs - Melinda: 'Lets follow those signs to Strasbourg and get a hotel'. Adam: 'I think you are right, and when we get there I'm looking for a shop to buy a new GPS and I'm going to sell this piece of shit on ebay'
1800 hrs - Adam has calmed down. Adam: 'I want to have one more crack at getting to Liechtenstein'. Melinda sighs and says 'ok then, if you think we should'. If you have ever been anywhere with me in the car or hiking, I am absolutely determined to get to my target destination.
1845 hrs - Back on track where we should have been at 1530 hrs
2330 hrs - Liechtenstein Border - yee haa!!
0030 hrs - Only hotel we can find in the capital of Lichtenstein (Vaduz) is 390 Swiss Franks a night, but since its late she gives it to me for 300 swiss franks. I ask how much is that in Euros? Its 200 euro. Shizer... (finally I know some useful German).
0045 hrs - Melinda is delighted with the 5 star accomodation and Adam is passed out on the bed.

We wake up the next morning to a spectacular view out the window across the Rhine valley and enjoy a very nice breakfast with some people who look like they are slumming it in this place. There was some serious money here!

The view from left to right from our balcony

We checked out at the latest possible time to make the most of it and then got back in the car and headed for somewhere more in our tax bracket...

Photos back on and plans for a new weekend

Well I have figured out the photo problem, I think I was trying to upload photos too big for the blogger system. Anyway, the photos are now there for our river weekend and from Luxembourg.

It looks as though our time in Germany may only have a couple of weeks left, so we are going to try and do a mission to Lichtenstein this weekend. Its south of Germany and actually surrounded by Switzerland. We'll let you know how it goes!

I have a problem...

Sorry for the lack of photos lately, I have been having problems with my account and it wont let me upload any photos at the moment!! I'll get some pics up real soon.

Adam

A chance meeting with an old soldier

We went for a walk around Monschau last night and went up the hill to the ruins of an old castle. As has been typical for the last month in Germany it soon started pouring rain. We got talking to a nice German fellow who later informed us that he is 80 years old. We got chatting initially about what we were doing in Monschau and he was interested in my (Adam's) work because he is an engineer too. He then mentioned something about when he was in the war (WWII that is).

He told us that he had been initially put in to the army at the age of 16 and he and his school mates formed an anti aircraft artillery unit. Apparently they would be in class and then if the air raid siren went off, the teacher would put on his steel helmet and they all had to go outside and man their guns. He even said that at times they were happy for an air raid to come to get them out of class! Following this time, he eventually served in Denmark and then back to Germany where at the end of the war they surrendered to the Americans. For the next two years he was a prisoner of war in France and Belgium where it sounds like they spent a lot of their time cleaning up from the war.

He also mentioned one interesting point was that at one stage they were with an American unit which was comprised of all coloured soldiers with a couple of white officers. He said that this was a better time for them because the Officers seemed to like the Germans more than their own men because they were white. The soldiers seemed to like the Germans more because they felt like they were prisoners themselves to an extent as they weren't allowed to mix with white people. He also said that many of the Germans served as translators as not too many of the Americans could speak anything other than English. So they knew what was going on most of the time since they were the ones translating!

So after talking for about an hour, he had to go back to his little holiday shack. It was pouring rain like a tropical downpour so we didn't want to let him walk home in the rain. So we let him use one of our umbrellas and we walked back to his place. He invited us in to have a couple of glasses of red wine and we left with the invitation to come back another time for some more wine!

Back in Monschau with the dogs and flies

We are back in Monschau this week as Aachen is totally booked out (unless you want to pay 200 - 400 euros a night for a hotel!) as they have a world championship show jumping event on for the next 2 weeks. So its a change from a busy little city to a small village full of Germans on romantic weekends away, and oldies on busses getting shipped in for some schnitzel and a small glass of beer followed by purchasing some small ceramic mugs that say Monschau and then shipped out again. Oh yeh, and accompanied by their dog which normally range in sizes from handbag size to 'is it really a dog or a horse' size.

Actually that reminds me to mention a couple of other things which are different to that which we are used to in Australia:

- Dogs can go everwhere including restaurants
- People seem to have no concept that flies carry disease. If you go in to a bakery on a warm day, there are flies buzzing around the pre-made salad rolls. So choose one that doesnt have any flies on it and pretend that the flies haven't been on your roll!

A weekend in the Gibraltar of the North! (Luxembourg!!)

Another weekend, another trip to a new city (and country!). This time we went to Luxembourg for a couple of days and it was pretty good! We took off from where we have been staying in Aachen on Friday morning and headed down through Belgium to Luxembourg. We had booked a hotel on the net to stay for the weekend, so with that programmed in to the GPS we headed straight there. After driving round in a few circles around the city we finally made it. It seems that my GPS didn't know that there was a circus perched right in the middle of the road we wanted to go down.

It is quite a nice city, which was once dubbed the Gibraltar of the North because it was basically one massive fortress. But then in the late 1800's, they declared their neutrality and in return dismantled about 90% of their walls. There are still some small sections there and also some underground tunnels carved in to the rock that the city is perched on.

There are plenty of shops and shopping to be done and Melinda is now sporting a new pair of expensive sunglasses - mission accomplished for her for the weekend!



Looking out from one of the tunnels underneath the original castle


Luxembourg Flags on a remaining portion of the original wall

Raw meat

Well I just thought that I (Adam) would share something that I experienced for the first time ever today. I ate raw mince.

It was the birthday of one of the German guys at work so he brought in a heap of food to have for morning tea/breakfast, and amongst the rolls and cheese and exotic looking meats was a tupperware bowl of raw meat. I wasn't going near it (I could hear my mothers voice somewhere in my head telling me not to touch it) but the Germans all went straight for it! So being cultural and all, I tried it. It wasn't too bad actually! However as I was half way through my raw pork mince roll, one of the Germans decided to tell me that last time someone brought this in that people were off sick for a week!

Maybe I should have listened to my mother...

The Rhine and Moselle rivers and a heap of castles

Well we just had a top weekend driving beside the Rhine and Moselle rivers in Germany and saw a heap of Castles that are alongside both rivers. We started off mid mornig on Friday from the little village where I am working straight down to Koblenz. A quick stop for lunch beside the river and then we pressed on down the Rhine. The river is usually about 100m wide with steep banks on both sides covered in grape vines. Every 2 or 3 km there is a little village and it seems like nearly all of them have either a working or ruined castle perched over it! As there aren't so many bridges over the Rhine, we had to cross the river on a little car ferry which was cool. We stayed the first night in a little walled village called Bacharach.


In the main street of Bacharach


Castle on a hill overlooking the Rhine


Ruins of an old castle along the Rhine

The next day we cruised on over to the Moselle (yep, the wine!) River and spent the afternoon riding bicycles along the river, followed by dinner with a bottle of red! Life certainly is tough here in Germany.

View as you cycle along the Moselle


Moselle River vineyards

Finally on the Sunday we went to a castle called Burg Eltz. Construction started in around 1157 and unlike most of the other castles around there, it has hardly seen any military action and as such is in top condition. It is privately owned, and I imagine privately funded. It therefore had an appropriately high entry price, combined with appropriately disinterested staff (although the tour guide was very good) and appropriately overpriced souveniers! Having said all that, it was quite impressive and it gave me some ideas about building myself a house on a big rock somewhere with nice views..


Burg Eltz


Inspiration for our first house??


Melinda ready to check out Burg Eltz!

Dykes, Becks Beer and 1200km in 3 days

We took a 3 day weekend to go and see some of Germany in the last weekend. We left Aachen (where we have been staying) on Friday morning and drove up to Nordeich on the North West coast of Germany not too far from the Dutch border. There are dykes (seawalls) along the coast as far as the eye can see protecting Germany from getting washed away or becoming a swamp. The beaches werent really that nice at all (if you could call them a beach) but it was nice to see the ocean again. Not far off the coast are the Friesian Islands and apparently at low tide you can actually walk to some of them! It was fairly windy when we were there and the number of wind powered generators around the place seems to indicate that it is windy all the time.

Adam in relaxation mode in Nordeich after a hard days driving...

The next day we drove to Bremen, the home of Becks (the beer not the English footballer). After a few wrong turns and a terrifying 30 seconds going the wrong way down a one way street, (I have now realised that it is no coincidence that thousands of streets in Germany are called 'einbahnstrasse' which means one way street) we finally made it to a hotel. We didnt have time to do a tour of the Beck brewery though which is a shame.

Melinda in Bremen

The next day went went to the site of the infamous Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It is a large memorial site now as all the buildings were burnt down by the British when they liberated the camp to try and stop disease spreading.

After that it was a long drive back to Aachen via Hameln - where the pied piper comes from!

3 countries, the Summit of Holland and a 900 year old beer

Melinda at the borders of Germany, Netherlands and Belgium

Yesterday we went to the intersection of the borders of Germany, Belgium and Holland which was cool. There is a marker on the ground to show it. Then about 50 metres away, there is a marker which shows the highest point in Holland. So I have now summitted 2 of the highest peaks in countries around the world (Mt Kosziousco in Australia 2228m and whatever it was called in the Netherlands at the dizzying height of 322.5m). I am such a top mountaineer, I wont even bother with Everest, its such a fad thing to do at the moment. Maybe I'll go for something extreme like the highest point in Tokelau which is 5m above sea level.

Extreme mountaineering on the summit of Netherlands - 322.5m

Then we went out for tea in Liege (Belgium). That was really a bit of a waste of time as Leige is a dirty industrial/port city. But the food was excellent and the beer even better. They started making it (the beer) in a Monastery in 1128 according to the label (fortunately the one that I had was from a later batch...) It was so good that I was annoyed that I had to drive back to Germany to the hotel and had to stop at two!

Sent to Germany!!

Well lucky me (Adam) I have been sent to Germany for work. Looks like I will be here for at least 2 weeks, maybe more...

The first week has been great. I spent the first 4 days by myself until Melinda came staying in a little village near the Belgian border called Monschau. A nice little old village with houses and buildings dating back to the 1400's. There are nice little uneven coblestone streets everywhere and I know this because I twisted my ankle going for a walk up to an old castle on the hill overlooking the village. Never mind, you get that on the big jobs! I just dont think that walking around in thongs (flip flops, jandles or whatever else people want to call them) is necessarily the best choice of footwear around.

Monschau with Castle over looking the village

The first pub Adam went to in Germany

Creek running through Monschau

On the Thursday I took off from work at lunchtime to go and pick up Melinda from Dusseldorf. It was her first experience on a German autobahn (no speed limits!!!) and I think she enjoyed me whizzing her back to the hotel at 180km/h down the autobahn! (I would have gone for more but the car is governed and wont go any faster). Stories I have heard from people in the past are true; here I am, full concentration, hands at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel doing 180km/h and a Porsche or Mercedes comes flying past you!

We spent the weekend checking out the former West German capital Bonn and stayed in Cologne on the weekend. We were lucky enough to turn up in town on the night of a big fireworks display along the Rheine! They had a funny band that was playing with a singer who looked, dressed and acted like Bob Downe (an Australian comedian), but I think he was serious. Also a few other band members sporting dodgy moustaches and singing songs that you would have expected to hear on 'Hey Hey its Saturday' (a variety show that used to be on for 20 odd years in Australia). Good wholesome family entertainment...

View of Cologne from the top of the Cathedral

Inside Dom Köln - the 'Mt Everest' of cathedrals