Procrastination Opportunist

With Heidelburg behind us, we pressed on to Frankfurt. It had begun to dawn on me that we would be pushed for time in returning the rental car. I started to entertain all sorts of visions of enormous financial penalties, which were not helped by us arriving at the airport and having to head back out again because we (I) had forgotten to fill the tank up. If you neglect to do so, Hertz informed us they would charge 3€ per litre! Filling it up at the service station was no problem - the problem began when I tried to start the car again and nothing happened. No combination of foot on the brake, foot on the clutch, foot halfway down on the clutch, foot on the brake and clutch, foot out the window, would start the car! Finally, before I gave up and resorted to asking someone for assistance, Mon asked to try, and wouldn't you know it, the car started. She maintains that she didn't know what she did - I suspect sabotage.

Once the car was successfully returned we took a taxi to our hotel. However, the man at the hotel told us that he had a large group of Asian tourists staying with him, all of whom had been forced to stay a further night because of some flight issues, and our room was therefore unavailable. Of course, we saw straight through this; it was much better business for him to have a bunch of people staying another night than it was to have us stay one night only! He sent us to a hotel across the street where he had paid for a room for us. We set ourselves up in the unexpected hotel, and then walked down towards the river. We stopped at a bar on the way and enjoyed some apple wine, which appeared to be more of the flat cider persuasion than wine. Apparently the bar was sold out of pretty much everything else, since the FIFA quarterfinals had just occurred. This did not worry me too much, and so after finishing up (one large glass, no effects felt) we walked down to the waterfront and took pictures of the Frankfurt skyline, which, Mon reported, is supposed to be one of the best. On our way back we stopped at a dairy to get some water and Mon amused me, but not herself, by accidentally purchasing sparkling water, which she only discovered once we were back in the lobby of the hotel. While I can stomach the stuff, I do not know why Germans drink it by choice! Mon, however, was unable to take so much as a sip without feeling sick, and so I had to return to the shops to buy the right stuff.

The sleeping arrangements were strange; while they claim twin share, the beds were actually pushed together, and did not appear to be movable. Thus Mon began a strange act of dragging her mattress onto the floor, claiming it would be a few degrees cooler down there. Because she went through this effort, it meant that I did not have to, so it was fine with me.

After a roasting night, we returned to the first hotel for breakfast, which was very pleasant. Germans like their pastries, boiled eggs and nutella, and I like that they like this. Naturally, I tried to fool Mon again by bringing her sparkling water, but she could see the bubbles, dammit.

Following breakfast, we took a trip to the Franfurt Zoo, which was, I have to say, more impressive than anything we have in New Zealand, but probably run of the mill to the locals. They of course had lions and tigers and bears, oh my, but also huge ape enclosures where Mon felt right at home. The best part was an island in the middle of a large pond in which two monkeys were playing tag. The island was planted out in trees and ropes had also been put up, which gave the monkeys a lot of freedom to move around, and at some speed.

Finally the time had come to go, and we returned to the hotel to grab our stuff, check out, and catch the subway to the airport. We made it there with only minor incident when we were unsure of which train went to the airport, and the only fellow available to ask spoke no English. In my haste I fumbled and nearly forgot the word 'flughafen' for airport, but once he heard that he was able at least to point us in the right direction.

We flew to Berlin on a one hour flight, where we enjoyed a four or five hour wait for our connecting flight to Helsinki. I was excited by the presence of a Burger King, but Mon was not so overjoyed, so we found a slightly more costly place called 'The Red Baron' where we had smoothies and lingered for a while. After we left, Mon then decided to my chagrin that she wanted the soup from that place. Females. We trundled back and shamefacedly booked another table for Mon to recommence her meal.

Once that was all over, we walked to our gate and I was stoked to see that the security officer bore a real resemblance to Doogle. Also like Doogle, he kinda went to town on the rubdown, which I wasn't so stoked about. With my dignity impugned, we went to sit with the masses in a large noisy hall to wait for our flight to Helsinki.

I just realised the very real danger of forgetting entirely what happened on my trip - it is starting to get a little hazy already. Although that could simply be the hour that I have chosen to compose this entry.

So anyway, the next morning I woke up in France and immediately felt like waking up in France should have been more of a compelling experience. However, the sleep wasn't real, being of the Zoplicone-induced variety, and I was still thoroughly jet lagged, so perhaps I expected too much too soon. I don't know if Mon felt any more special than I did, but I suspect not (unless of course feeling special also makes her grumpy - but two days in to our travels, this behaviour was already water off a duck's back to me). We went downstairs and bought pastries for breakfast at a nice little bakery with nice big prices. We walked around a little more and ate our breakfast by the river, but decided we did not need to stick around too much longer, as we had a bit of ground to cover and we did not want to have to start paying for the park we were in.

We packed up our stuff and set the GPS to take us to some random town in the middle of the Black Forest, partly because we wanted to go back a different way, partly because the Black Forest was bound to be full of novel inhabitants such as goblins and witches. The roads got very narrow, and we ended up entering the Black Forest via a town that essentially doubled as a pass. The road got steeper and narrower, and unfortunately I had to drive more slowly (down to 90km/h or so) because there was the danger of running into another car, driven by an unforgiving German driver, coming down the hill. When we finally reached the top of the hill, we stopped to get out at a lookout, where I tried in vain to take some photos with the necessary human interest in the foreground, while Mon took shots of scenery. You may think to call it 'necessary' is rather picky, but in fact I have good reason for doing so: a few years ago I went to my grandparents' place while on holiday. While there, they invited their friend around, who brought a whole bunch of slides with him. Although a little old fashioned, I had no problem with this, until I realised none, but none, of the slides contained so much as a human life form. And there were a lot of slides. Each new slide containing another view, or another building, or another rose bush, seemed to protract the whole affair by 10 minutes a pop. Perhaps I simply had no patience, but it certainly ingrained a desire within me never to subject anyone else to that while showing them my holiday snaps. Mon and I also found that the amazing view did not translate to digital imagery so well (and at least a person or two in the foreground then gives a reason for the picture).

Farther along the road we came to what appeared to be a walkway to another lookout. The German signboard was singularly unhelpful in everything but its diagram of the loop track. With little effort we made it to the lookout, a structure atop some counter-intuitive steps. I managed to fool a couple of dog owners into believing I was German, which turned out to be a shame, as I never did figure out what was wrong with their dog, other than the fact that its hindquarter was involved. The dog was quite amusing - it was completely distrustful of the steps and shuffled along very slowly. More than once its paw went through a crack, causing the dog to lie flat for a while, not quite knowing what to do. We moved on after exploring a little more of the exceedingly unconventional boardwalk, which appeared to serve no purpose other than looking like it was built by Dr Seuss. At this stage, Mon developed a headache and dehydration, which upon reflection may have been a ploy to get me back to the car because she was unfortunately not wearing sensible shows.

The next stop for us was another random little town on the outskirts of the Black Forest. We walked around briefly, and then set the GPS for Baden-Baden. When we arrived, we parked up and I decided to wow my audience by ordering a pastry in German. All went well until I did not hear her question and so responded with 'wie bitte?' She repeated her own question in perfect English. Hmph. I did get another chance when I ordered my own lunch, however, as the burger stand lady did not understand any English (one of the few on the whole trip) and I was not prepared to compromise by having tomato on my burger.

We drove to Heidelburg next, and completely failed to see the famed Heidelburg castle. It was evidently hiding in the trees somewhere; we found the railcar which went to it, and thought we could dodge the fare by simply driving up, but this took us much too far up, and we couldn't look down on it from on high either. So I contented myself with marvelling at the radio tower. On the way out of town the GPS led us on a merry dance, as the only exit appeared to be blocked by roadworks, and no amount of driving 'in the general direction' would persuade the GPS lady to change her mind. Finally, only by giving in to her, we escaped the Blair Witch situation.

OK, this is cheating, as I am writing this entry well after the events took place. At least I now know the ending was happy (by which I mean no death).

I started my trip on the morning of Friday 2 July 2010 with a trip in to work. It wasn't supposed to happen that way, but work has a habit of filling the amount of available time in which to do it.

After the initial rush and stress, and once everything was under control, leaving was rather sad. Naturally because I was leaving work and colleagues behind, but also because I had briefed the new staff member, David Sim, that morning, who was so relaxed and capable that it felt a real shame to be missing out on working with him presently.

Goodbyes had sort of already been said, as I had had a leaving party the previous evening and drinks in the mid-morning of that same day. At those drinks I was presented by my colleagues with gifts for travel, including, I was later to find, a plug for converting all sorts of foreign plugs to New Zealand power sources, very useful if I had toured the world already, bringing home all sorts of weird and wonderful appliances, but less useful for my purposes. However, goodbyes were no less difficult. Mix was very helpful - I had still not packed properly and so I totally scammed him into helping me move my stuff into storage.

When I finally left work at 1pm or so, I was stoked to pass Mike Crowl on the street. The man had been trying to avoid my goodbyes (completely accidentally, I realised) but he could not escape the spectacle I created by hooting and parking very quickly and unevenly on yellow lines, to rush over and hug him.

I arrived in Christchurch at 5.10pm or thereabouts, almost in time to pick up Mike, Mon's dad, from the airport, but not quite. So I went around to Dom's and found him sitting around playing basketball on the PS3 with his flatmates. I was immediately subjected to a losing cause as I joined Dom's team (I'm sure the controls were malfunctioning; at least, that's what Dom said) and we only lost by 40 points or so.

We then went to the Johnsons' for tea and were joined by the smack man as well, before the lure of the football at 2am (!) called him away. Mon was keen on the same thing, so Dom and I ended up dropping in on Mike Murray, and of course, going to Mackers. What use does sleep serve before a long trip? Four and a half hours' sleep does the job.

The first real travel obstacle took very little time in raising its somewhat ugly head; my luggage was quite overweight. Even when shared with Mon, we were 6 kg over the 46kg weight limit. With the distance we were going on the first leg to Frankfurt, I was going to have to fork out $48 per kg. However, all was not lost, as we were served by a redhead and I was able to turn on the charm that comes so easily to me with that species. Either that, or she could not be bothered with the paperwork, so she first offered only $20 per kg and an opportunity to repack, and finally she ignored all of the overweight baggage completely. Problem solved.

One ushj goodbye to Roz and Dom later, we were flying to Sydney. I realised to my dismay in the Sydney airport that Mon was a keen shopper, something that she had hidden from my ignorant self for years. Granted, we did have Mackers for breakfast, something in my favour, so in my satiated state, I had no problem with Mon wandering the shops.

Finally we were off to Frankfurt, with only one stop (a refuel in Singapore) on the way. The movies were unfortunately rather average; I had to turn off "Edge of Darkness" simply because the max volume of the headsets was not loud enough to convey the mumbly plot developments accurately. I did enjoy "How to Train Your Dragon" however, and "Ghost Writer" with Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor felt like a solid movie, appropriate for a plane at least. Then I had to pretend I didn't know Mon, as she cried over some movie in which nothing sad happened. I think the other passengers were sympathetic to my situation - the male ones at least.

The lights were turned off in the plane from Singapore to Frankfurt for far too long (10 out of the 13 hours, I swear) probably because the stewardesses wanted to do less. Clearly it worked for the girl beside me (not Mon) who was either sleeping or faking it pretty well, for 12 hours.

Once we landed, the car hire actually went without a hitch. The concern was of course, that my driving would expose any number of "hitches". However these concerns proved baseless, as it did not take too many scrapes, dings, and injured pedestrians for me to get the hang of driving on the other side of the road. We set the GPS to avoid all toll roads, and set off for Strasbourg. This worked very well, although we should have made a map of where we went. To illustrate how necessary this was, we stopped for breakfast on an unknown street of an unknown town in an unknown district of an unknown country. I am almost not joking about the last one: it was probably Germany, but it may have been France. The travel was enhanced by the fact I could simply plug my ipod straight in to the car, which played it without fuss. Air conditioning also helped.

We arrived in Strasbourg and parked the car in very fortunate Sunday free parking circumstances, and walked around the old town. I sniffed out a Mackers, where we had lunch (Mon was able to take charge of the ordering, this time). We both started flagging, so we headed back to the hotel, where we crashed almost immediately (crashing in the falling asleep sense). We did manage to rouse from slumber in the early evening to head in to the old town for dinner (not Mackers, despite my pleas; we went to a pizza/pasta place instead). The heat was not conducive to having drinks, so we got water only on the way back to the hotel. We walked around a little after dark, but the time without sleep was taking its toll, so we decided to turn in at some unreasonably reasonable hour.

That's chapter one, and less than 1/5 of the trip. How will my two readers contain their excitement and anticipation while waiting for the rest??