Day 2 - From Offenbach to Kassel
Awoke early this morning - around 6am German daylight saving time. Amy and I have already adjusted to Deutsche time with seemingly no jetlag.
Hotel Friedberger Warte is really impressive - nice room, helpful staff and showers and bed! Double glazed windows really do a good job of keeping out the noise and cold! The sun tries to come up here, but produces no heat. Haven't seen the temperature above 10degC yet. Breakfast was provided and our first interaction in Deutsche took place. Amy picked up her first souvenir - a tea bag with Pfeffer minte tea. She doesn't like the flavour (toothpaste) but still got a thrill out of the name.
With breakfast complete - Amy and I decided it was time to get going; we'd planned to see the botanical gardens for an early morning stroll - and headed off with the best intentions. After around zwei minuten outside thinking about bus vs train, we realised that we couldn't feel our bodies anymore and raced back inside to thaw out. It is very cold here. Still with good intentions, we thought we'd take the bus and train to Offenbach to pick up our motorhome rather than the taxi. Again, not the greatest idea as it took us 2 hours to get there; it could've been longer if it wasn't for a friendly German bus driver whose hand gestures overcame our poor understanding of his schnell deutsche.
Ahh...to have our own vehicle, it'd be a dream come true...
The gentleman at the rental centre spoke excellent English, enough to have a go at me for not speaking German, with a surname like mine - once he let me get a word in edgewise, he was happier. Well, the home is great - brings back memories of driving the old Dyna - except no shaking when hets 80km/hr; and had it up to 140km/h - seems to be it's limit. As a matter of coincidence, we picked up the home around 500m from where Mum and Dad lived on Tulpenhof strasse. We drove up past the house - well, a few times actually as we attemped to leave Frankfurt. Couldn't get a park on the street and it was hard enough squeezing the beast down the street, let alone parallel parking. We'll try again later when we get the Audi - it'll be like a mini. BTW - there may have been some renovations happening at Tulpenhof straße 10....
lots of driving ensued - not getting us far, but after we decided to stop turning right, we managed to find a slow road that took us to Hanau.
Our biggest problem was that our map is too large a scale to include many towns - and Germany is built out in this region; so they have had 10 cities before the one we've been aiming for. A better map would have been useful.
Amz convinced me to use the autobahn (she just navigated me onto it) and our problems were solved. No more decisions about which way to turn, only major cities get a mention, and traffic is so much less. We lost out on the sight seeing along the way though, but all I was seeing were crashes heading straight for me in all directions. We'll try the scenic route tomorrow.
We finally reached Fulda - or thought we had - there are a few exits for each town and we just took the first. We learnt a lesson there.... Visited Schloss Fasanerie - a beautiful palace Residenz of the Landgraves, it was amazing. Paintings by Rubenz and other greats...portraits of kings and queens - from King George II, Queen Victoria, Marie Antoinette, to Tzar Nikolaus I and his daughter. Everything in there was 300-400 years old - paintings on the ceiling showed the world as they knew it - no Australia.
The palace too our German to the next level, they said they could speak a little English, and meant it. They could say the things in English, that we could understand in German. The guide stuggled along...trying to give us as much as we could take in, but our German is still too limited. We could get the general idea though.
On to Kassel... once again, the autobahn showed the way. We were absolutely frozen in the Schloss and the surrounding gardens. We'd gotten hot inside the home - the sun was shining and the car heater provided the warmth - we were feeling good. We'd taken off the jumpers and then, while we were inside the schloss, the wind came up. It got freezing!
Autobahn to Kassel - huge numbers of trucks, so my only challenge was timing my passing manoeuvers, and excapades into the left (superfast) lane. Did ok - well, the best part about the motorhome is we can't see behind us, so even if they were angry, I couldn't tell. But again, traffic just flows on the A-bahn.
Now, Kassel is the place for us - we had no idea of the address of where we wanted, but knew it was near the centre of town. We just took the Kassel - mitte Ausfahrt - so did everyone else, so it must've been right. Saw an (I) - but was just a map on a post, with no indication of the campingplatz. It did show us we were about where I thought we should be heading, so we turned the corner and Wunderbar! it was there in front of us.
The Fulda river is flooding - everything is very wet, and there are puddle ducks in the torrent. Picked up some groceries where they made fun of us for wanting a plastic bag - very conscious of rubbish levels here. Fortunately, they thought we were English - We didn't correct them!
Currently 6degC outside; 17degC inside ('room temperature')
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