Home at last

To paraphrase from the last entry:
"I can't imagine anything exciting will happen". What a crock!

• We got confused about which tickets to buy at Frankfurt train station to get us to the airport, so we waited in line for half an hour at the information desk and were helped by a chap with the most stereotypical German accent you've ever heard.
  
• We ended up getting on the wrong train anyway!
  
• Our flight out of Frankfurt was delayed by two hours due, according to the sign, to 'ship rotation'. We still don't quite know what that means.
• The bottle of duty-free port that Owen purchased with his last Euros (only after being assured that it would not cause troubles with security, so long as it remained sealed in its bag) made it through security at Frankfurt with no troubles, but was not allowed onto the plane when we changed at Tokyo - apparently the Japanese airport security don't trust the German airport security (feel free to insert your own WWII joke here!). He was required to enter Japan (going through customs etc) in order to have it placed in the hold as checked baggage. Fortunately there were two others in the same situation, and a Japanese airport official was able to accompany them all through the process. It was exceedingly fortunate that, even with the two hour delay from Frankfurt, there was enough time to do this, otherwise the port would have gone the way of the vegemite, sunscreen, toothpaste and insect repellant.
  

That about wraps it up for this trip. Thank you all for reading and commenting, and a special mention must go to Adam, for his daily quotes.

Until OX fun times goes aborad again (don't hold your breath), it's sayonara, auf wiedersehen, tot ziens, au revoir and goodbye from Owen and Xavier.

Day 23: Homecoming

It is now the morning of Day 23. The day for going home. We have a train to Frankfurt, and then our flight leaves from there tonight.

We may manage to get in a last round of spiral stair-cases as well :)

This may be updated if anything exciting happens...

I can't imagine it will - 40 hours of travelling doesn't lend itself to that kind of thing.

We get back to Canberra at lunch-time on Friday. See y'all soon.

Day 22: Fun and Games

So we had a solid plan for today, but they got stuffed around a bit this morning by the opening times of the various things we were going to see. In the end, however, we got to everything we intended to.

We went to a maze this morning. Made of Hemp plants. I have photos, but no time to upload them this morning. We were the only people there who were not either under 10-years-old, or supervising people who were under 10-years-old. But because we can't speak any German, we had fun!

You get a little brochure thing on the way in, containing a list of questions and a slection of coloured shapes. The idea is to find, inside the maze, signs that give answers to the questions, and hole punchers of different colours which punch appropriate shapes into your card. Once you have all the holes punched and questions filled-in, you hand it back in at the shop - possibly to win a prize or something, who knows.

Because of our lack of skills in the German language, we had great fun trying to match words on the signs with those on the questions to get the answers... no idea how we went, but we banked on having the right answers :-)

The it was to the water slides!! The place we went was part of Therme Erding (http://www.therme-erding.de/de/100682/100888/english.html) - but we only went to "Galaxy Erding" - a dome-shaped building filled with about a dozen water-slides. Everything from 4 foot-high kiddy slides, to "extreme" slides. We tried out all of them except the kiddy ones that we thought we might get ordered off if we tried to get on them!

There was a central stair-tower that all the slides came off - some from the second storey, with the highest ones up as high as 8 storeys.

Pretty much every slide had it's own theme or novelty to make it totally different from all the others, for example:

The slide with uphill parts - where there were jets of water to push you uphill (you had to have an inflatable donut thing to go on it)

The Extreme Faser - "reach speeds of up to 72km/h"... and it timed your run, so you could see how quick you go. Owen (4.75 sec) defeated Xavier (4.77 sec) in the duel by the barest of margins.

I could tell you all about every slide, they were all awesome! It was such a good fun way to finish off the trip espacially given we were both pretty much ready to go home.

If anyone every asks me what to do in Munich... I will recommend the slides!!!!!

Day 21: Bikes, Food and Cameras

Today we made a 4 hour cycling tour of Munich take up pretty much the entire day. By the time we slept in, walked (the long way) to the start point of the tour and bought our ticket, went on the tour which went overtime, and then challenged ourselves to find our way home without using the map, it was after 5pm.

The tour was good fun and the guide did a good job - but we had a slight problem with lunch. We were supposed to stop at a beer garden for food and drinks, but the one they usually took people to was closed. So she led us all on to another place nearby... which was also closed. After getting on the phone back to base, asking them to organise us something, we got to go back to the original beer-garden, but only to go into the restaurant that was there. All of this turned the 4-hour tour (which they actually claimed would be about 3.5 when we set out) into about 4.5 hours.

We also had all sorts of troubles with cameras and memory cards today, which is really not interesting enough to tell about, but ended up with Owen's memory card being stuffed and all of the pictures from today being lost.

Dinner was at an Italian restaurant where Spagetti Bolognaise was ordered all-round (I'm not sure why anymore... but I think there was a reason). For dessert we had Spagetti Bolognaise and Pizza. Made of ice-cream. If only we had the pictures of them.

Owen's SpagBol was soft-serve ice cream that came in long strands, like it had been pushed through a salada biscuit or something. It was piled up with raspberry sauce and coconut on top for the Bolognaise Sauce and parmesan cheese.

Xavier's pizza was... HUGE! It came out on a dinner plate, and covered it right to the edge. It was a reasonably thick layer of vanilla ice cream for the base, raspberry sauce for the tomato paste/sauce, and then bits of fruit PILED on top, as the toppings. Again, coconut on top represented the cheese, and there was chocolate sauce around the very edge on the plate.... maybe the burned crust???

It really didn't look that big in the picture on the menu!!!

But we trooped through it, and walked back to the hostel rather than taking the train to get rid of as much of that dessert as we could!!!

Day 20: "Best Decision Ever"

OMG... the train was hot!!! We walked into our 6-bed cabin on the train and were struck with hot, stuffy, unpleasant air. Opening the window was fine, the cool fresh air rushed in - until we were trying to sleep. The sound of air rushing in the open window of a vehicle travelling at 200km/h (I made up that speed) is not exactly the soothing lullaby you want to be dozing off to.

So it was quite un unpleasant ride with minimal sleep all round. Katie met us at the train station (much appreciated given it arrived at 7:16am) and layed out our options for the day. With storms forecast for all the days we are here, but not starting until about 5 o'clock this afternoon we decided to take possibly our only opportunity to go hiking in (or near) the alps.

We chose a 2-and-a-half hour walk which would take us up into the foothills (or foot-mountains) of the alps, to a hut for lunch and then across the hills/mountains to get a cable-car back down to the bottom.

The journey upwards was fine - nice weather, nice views, nice walk, nice lunch. As we ate lunch the dark clouds began to appear over the distant mountains. As we left the hut after lunch, the clouds were moving in, and there was occasional lightning in the distance. It looked like it was going to miss us, though.

Following this walk, there was an option to take a detour and climb to the top of one of the peaks, and come back down. We decided not to go this way, and instead forge on towards the cable car... just in case the storm did come over us...

Best decision ever.

As we continued walking, we got some cracking views of storm-cloud covered mountain-tops - lightning flashes over the alps... all the while closing in on us. Literally minutes after arriving at the cable-car building, all hell broke loose.

The wind raced through, looking like it was going to rip the flag off its pole. Clouds appeared to be falling from the sky as the rain swpet across the valley towards us before the downpour began up on our peak. The occasional thunder crash and lightning bolt added effect. People who were still out on the walk when the rain came were emerging from the end of the walking trail drenched (and then had to push through the wall of people in the doorway who were all standing around taking photos of the people being poured upon!).

Then the hail. Big hail stones came down at just as acute an angle as the rain was sheeting in. More people emerged from the trail, moving as fast as they could without risking losing their footing on the sloping, rocky trail - and covering heads with arms for whatever protection they could get from the hail stones.

The building we were in, which housed a large waiting area (for cable-car riders) and a cafe quickly became very crowded - with people arriving faster than usual to get out of the rain, and with the cable-car not operating due to the wind.

It was a ripper of a storm, but it swept over us in minutes leaving no sign that it had ever been, except for the layer of hail covering the ground, and a lot of wet people. The sun was out, shining brightly.

The cable-car soon started up again, and the train we through we had missed at the bottom of the hills was in fact just very late - so all ended well.

The two photos below are taken facing the direction the storm was travelling. So it's looking out over the sunny part of the mountains just as the storm got above our heads.

Day 19: More spiral stairwells, and Amsterdam

Today we took a tour of the Dom Tower (the one mentioned two posts previously), where we discovered that the nave of the cathedral had been destroyed several hundred years after its completion by a tornado 335 years ago to the day. We also found out that the rubble had been left there for over 150 years before it was cleaned up!

Here are some images of the view from the top of the tower, after climbing the 465 steps, mostly in the form of a spiral stairwell. However, unlike the previous instances of this particular style of ascention enabler that we have encountered thus far, there was no need to squeeze past anybody. This was primarily due to the fact that everyone in the tower was part of the tour group, so we were all going in the same direction at the same time.

Also part of the tour was the area where the bells of the carillon are kept.

The church that used to be attached to the tower

The City of Utrecht. Leela's house is somewhere in the top 5th of this picture, next to the canal.

The bells of the carillon.

After lunch, we went to Amsterdam to board our night train to Munich. We took a tour of the canals of that city and saw, amongst other things, a giant cruise ship just leaving port, and several floats (oh, there was pun intended) in the Gay Pride parade that happened to be on the Amsterdam waterways today.

Day 18: A different mode of transport

After a rather leisurely start to the morning, we walked into town to hire a couple of bicycles for the day. We then went out for a ride. We basically rode alongside the canal until we stopped for lunch, and then looped back and rejoined the canal on the way back to Leela's place. We were out for the best part of 6 hours, and by the time we got home, we were glad we didn't have to do any more cycling. At least it beat walking for 6 hours - gave some different muscles a work out.

Leela's flatmate has a parrot (actually, she's just looking after it for someone else). It's large and green and, fortunately, not pining for the fjords. It likes to eat banana.

True story.

Some pictures:

A castle in just outside of Utrecht. According to our tour guide (Leela), the family who owned it knocked down most of the defensive structure and replaced it with comfortable rooms. In every conflict since then they've had to bribe all sides to not attack their place.

A boat passing under a raised roadbridge.

Waiting for boats to pass so that the bridge can be lowered and we can be on our way. The chap in blue jeans and white shirt just to the left of the bridge is holding a pole with a string on the end (click on the picture for a large version). At the other end of the string is a clog, into which the passing boaters would put money.

Day 17: LOX Fun Times in Utrecht, or Amsterdam Shmamsterdam

We took the train from Paris to Amsterdam. The most exciting thing to happen was that two American tourists fell foul of the rail system, and tried to get on using just their Eurail passes. Unfortunately for them, this particular train required reservations (or something) and they'd have to pay some large number (I can't remember the figure) of Euros. This didn't actually come to light until we were well under way and the ticket collectors came around, by which time it was too late to just get off the train. Their other option, and what they ended up doing, was to only pay 96 Euros each and get off at the first stop (Brussels).

We were met at the station in Amsterdam by Leela (who you may remember from Edinburgh) which was a pleasant surprise - we were planning to have to make our way to Utrecht ourselves and meet up with her there. After dumping our stuff at Leela's place, we went for a wander around downtown Utrecht, which was lovely. The largest building in the city (by law, apparently) is the Dom tower. It is across the road from a church. It used to be part of the church, but the folks that built the place concentrated on the tower and the church-y bit, but ran out of money when it came to the bits in between, so it was built poorly, so it collapsed. In the end they just put a road through it.

Good times.