• 2023 | fifty years,  aachen,  europe,  frankfurt,  germany,  koln

    Day 25: Aachen, Koln, Transit

    After totally crashing last night, I slept in bits and pieces, waking several times, just feeling like the hotel room was too warm. Once my brain was sort of alert, I figured I should probably look at booking trains to get me to Frankfurt flughafen, now I had an idea of times. I still don’t totally understand the DB online booking system, from what I could tell, I could pick the train with the lowest fare, then in the booking options make it a flexible ticket possibly for any train today, and only pay a few euro more, so I could get a 40 euro ticket, and for an extra…

  • 2023 | fifty years,  england,  europe,  frankfurt,  germany,  glasgow,  london,  scotland,  uk

    Days 4: Frankfurt-London-Glasgow

    Early start in Frankfurt, as my flight to London was a 7am departure. I figured if I got to Frankfurt Hbf a little after 5am I’d be fine. It took me a little while longer than expected to get everything together, not helped by a crap night attempting to sleep while my brain kept poking me to make sure I didn’t oversleep and miss the flight, so I got the the station around 5.15am, still a comfortable amount of time in theory. I hadn’t accounted for the happens-more-often-than-expected thing that German trains sometimes do run late. Germans will joke about this, crazy as the concept seems. So I board the…

  • 2023 | fifty years,  europe,  frankfurt,  germany

    Day 3: Frankfurt

    The final actual day in Frankfurt, and I’ve done a lot of walking the last couple of days, so I took things a bit slower. I had planned to take in a couple of museums, the Senckenberg Natural History Museum and the Stadt Museum, but I stuffed up on the research as the Stadt is closed on Mondays. Fortunately the Senckenberg wasn’t, so I went and checked out the dinosaurs and other wonderful attractions. I had one of those moments, coming out of the U-bahn station, where I wasn’t sure if I’d emerged in the right place or was heading in the right direction. Fortunately, after 20 or so metres…

  • 2023 | fifty years,  europe,  frankfurt,  germany

    Day 2: Frankfurt

    Welcome to the next installment of possibly the world’s least read and least informed travel blog. Today was the day that some may have been waiting for: the day when the 4 year old yells at me in German. Today I was able to spend a few hours with L’s cousin S, and S’s 4 year old Tochter A. Last time we were here, we met one of L’s other cousins, K, who was 3 and had a huge personality, an didn’t understand why I didn’t speak much German. So she spoke at me slower, and louder, and when that didn’t work, most of the time just yelled “Nein! Nein!”…

  • 2023 | fifty years,  europe,  frankfurt,  germany,  singapore,  transit

    Day 1: Transit – Singapore – Frankfurt

    There’s a line by Mick Thomas in a Weddings Parties Anything song that goes, “There’s no point writing postcards on your bad days” and I quote it a bit. I’m gonna tweak it a little today, and turn it into: there’s no point writing long postcards on you long days; and with today being a long long long day, I’ll try to keep it short. Wasn’t the bet flight into Singapore, there were several small people around where I was sitting, and they haven’t yet got to the point of enjoying flying. One poor cherub must have screamed for 90 minutes straight, I didn’t ee what their parent’s were doing…

  • 2019 | mambo de la luna,  badenheim,  europe,  frankfurt,  germany

    Days 18-20: Frankfurt, Badenheim, and surrounds

    The last few days have been full of many cool things, and many hot things. For the hot stuff, well Europe is currently experiencing close to a record-breaking heatwave. The maximum temperatures started with a bearable 32, but today and possibly tomorrow are around 38-39 degrees. Add this to longer hours of daylight, and the temperature peaking around 5pm and the level of comfort less than optimal. And then comes the bonus, as this area is full of 200+ year old houses built to keep warm through snowy, sub-zero winters, and lack the high ceilings, fans and airconditioners that no Australian home would be without, and well, I’ve been sweating…

  • 2019 | mambo de la luna,  europe,  frankfurt,  germany,  transit

    Day 13: Frankfurt

    I’ve hit that point where I think it’s day 13, but it just might not be. I’m not completely sure what day it is, but am pretty sure I spent most of it either getting to or wandering around Frankfurt. The flight in was good, premium economy on the Singapore airlines A380 is pretty comfy, the seats have an okay recline and a decent amount of space. First movie was South Korean, “Hit and Run Squad”, full of drama, some explosions, and lots of car chases. As the last two stops of this tour are Krakow and Frankfurt, I thought that possibly one of the most memed movies of the…