Category: General

2008 European adventure: Breidel to Aachen

Post author By isaac
Post date November 12, 2008

Summary: On the final leg of our trip, Mandi, her mom Bette, Bette’s mom Nancy, Nancy’s friend Cassie, and I made our way from Hahn airport to Breidel on the Mosel River to Beilstein, Burg Eltz, and a rendezvous with our friends in Aachen. Mandi and I headed back home via Frankfurt airport while the others stayed a couple more days.

25 October

Our Ryanair flight back to Germany didn’t suck too much – they did try to sell us lottery tickets and booze but they were roughly on time and didn’t hit any birds. A drunken guy got up while we were taxiing though, so someone was buying the booze.

Mandi went looking for our rental car while I sat on the luggage. We ended up with another sweet minivan, this time a VW Touran. Is that the same minivan as the Routan that Brooke Shields is trying to sell Americans? It was comfortable enough, black, and had a navigation thing. Unfortunately, the navigation thing only seemed to know German, so we got a bit lost before we managed to decode enough German to get headed towards Breidel. I never did figure out how to change the language, so by the time we got to Frankfurt we knew a smattering of navigation-related German words.

Tags germany, travel

General

2008 European Adventure: Finland

Post author By isaac
Post date November 10, 2008

20 October

In retrospect, we probably should have just paid more to fly directly from Frankfurt to Helsinki, but flying out of Hahn did get us to Trier, Beilstein, and Burg Eltz so I guess that compensated for the hassle.

Thanks to the navigation thing in the rental minivan we made it to Hahn airport for our Ryanair flight to Tampere, Finland easily enough. The airport is pretty funny because it’s in the middle of the German countryside. We speculated that Ryanair has such good on-time and lost-baggage stats because they use tiny airports where they’ve got a lot of control. We paid extra for priority seating so we got to sit together even though the plane was completely full.

The baggage claim area in Tampere was pretty crazy – the conveyor just spewed bags out into where people were standing – but we managed to collect them all and get on the bus to town. We should have caught a cab or bus to our hotel, but we leaned into the wind and rain and marched from the train station to Omenahotelli.

Tags finland, travel

General

2008 European adventure: Nuremberg and Trier

Post author By isaac
Post date November 7, 2008

Summary: Mandi and I drove from Nuremberg to Trier, making a stop at the Frankfurt airport to pick up Mandi’s mom Bette, her grandma Nancy, and Nancy’s friend Cassie. We enjoyed delicious little sausages in Nuremberg and saw a bunch of Roman ruins in Trier before heading to Hahn airport for our flight to Finland.

18 October

Mandi and I flew in to Prague, but flying out was crazy expensive, so we planned to meet up with the rest of our party at the Frankfurt airport using a combination of train and rental car with a stop in Nuremberg. The train ride from Prague to Nuremberg was beautiful – it looked like it’d be fun to take a couple of days, stopping in Plzen and some small town between there and Prague. Just from the train we saw rock climbers, bicyclists, and even a golf course.

Tags germany, travel

General

2008 European adventure: Prague

Post author By isaac
Post date November 5, 2008

Summary: Mandi and I flew in to Prague via Munich, recovered from jet lag for a couple of days by eating a lot of pork and drinking a lot of beer, then took the train to Nuremberg.

15 October

For Mandi and I, European adventure started in Prague. We tried to make it to Prague a couple of years ago but ended up in London instead due to a snow storm. We figured October would be early enough that there wouldn’t be snow, but we had our fingers crossed anyway. We flew in on Lufthansa via Munich, arriving at about 8 am. Arriving in the morning on a trip where you’re doing a big time zone change sucks, especially if you aren’t good at sleeping on planes. I bring all the stuff required for airplane sleeping – headphones, neck pillow, exhaustion – but never manage to sleep. After some confusion at the airport we figured out how to catch a bus then the metro into town and found our hotel to drop off our bags. Our room was ready, but we resisted the temptation to take a nap and instead hit the cobblestone streets looking for coffee and something edible.