Intercity Hotel Frankfurt

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with sleeping Arrangements settled, we heAded out for dinner. i hAd that mAgicAl trAvel experience where you discover a brAnd new culinAry deight. get this- neuer wine, or new wine. this stuff is Aged for 1 short week, then served in pint glAsses. it tAstes like mikes **********Ade. me likey.

this morning we set off northbound up the wine road, or weinestrAsses. here is whAt you do- you drive to A teeny german ...

... they kept saying "sorry" they could do nothing, and continued to ping-pong me around. I finally found a sympathetic official (or maybe he'd read about Americans going "postal") and he made some calls and FINALLY got my bags routed to Basel.

My bags arrived in Basel, where it was a joyous reunion, and we were on to Geneva. When I got them in Basel I literally had 3 minutes to get them downstairs to the train track. About all ...

Continued down the Main River this morning. Docked at the small town of Aschaffenburg. No tours here; this is not a tourist town. I went off walking by myself since the town was right by the dock. I took the main street through town and found a few old half-timbered buildings. This is not an old or restored town. However, I did ...

... toilets smell. Bad. We transferred trains at Brussles to head for Brugge. I was repeating Flemish in my head. Dank oo. Dank oo. If I can say 'thank you,' I'm golden. Eh? Brugge had an expecadly small train station with a huge bicycle parking area. Sprawling yet clustered. Niels is waiting for us. He got here a few hours earlier from Koln. So, off we go to walk around Fantasyland Brugge.

The plane ride was not too bad. I got an aisle seat right by the door of the plane. It was in a row of three seats, with the middle seat empty! It was a full flight, so having an empty seat beside me was great but the only draw back was my seat did not recline. I was surprised to hear that we were going to be served a hot meal, followed by the typical complimentary drinks. On the plane they showed Marley & Me, I slept thru the next movie so don't remember what ...

... and found nothing but pregnant women everywhere--a very fertile area, as Paul says. In the city square (Romerberg) Juliana stole a book (it's all on video). Just outside the city square, nature called Paul, but he was too frugal to pay 0.50 Euro to drop a pound. I feel sorry for the man who cleans the urinal, as that is free. Paul was up all night, listening to both hockey games that streamed live on internet radio. Ihame about the Canucks

... table and watched the festivities while drinking good beers that we'd never heard of before.
The hot spiced wine really took away the chill and we walked around Frankfurt for a while. It's much more scenic than we expected! especially the older parts of the city and the river front.
That night we had a fun dinner with Katie's friend Heather and her boyfriend Sebastien. They took us to a local restaurant with great apple wine!

We stopped briefly in Frankfurt on a windy and rainy day looking for BBQ chicken. We couldn't find the resturant--it appeared closed for remodeling--and we were quickly driven back to the HBF to wait for our train. We caught an earlier train to Heidelburg, which gave us the oppertunity to do a little shopping.

... where there were festivities and bratwurst :) ), made our way up to some pretty little parks and gardens, and walked down by the river. I was a little sad on the train to the airport the next day...seeing frankfurt get smaller and farther away. It was such a nice little place.

... it is really getting COLD now. A max of 8 degrees and I guess we hit that for about 2 minutes near 1pm today. We have almost finished our holiday now and Frankfurt should give us a chance to wind down before we hit the stratosphere headed for the warmer climes. [Almost totally off-topic] Many of the hotels that we have stayed at have had an English TV channel or 2 - mainly CNN, MTV and sometimes BBC World. Has ...