Never believe a local who says 'It's not possible to get lost..."

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Karlsruhe, what can be said? Um, not a lot. Although it is a pretty town, there is not a lot to do here and I really should have known better when the town does not even feature in my Central Europe guidebook. Nonetheless, I arrived in town mid afternoon and promptly got lost – the instructions for locating my accommodation were to “follow the blue signs on the bike rack”. Okay, so I found the bike racks and naturally I could not find the blue signs so I was faced with a 50/50 should I go left or right? I went left, and with my bags in tow, walked almost 2kms before thinking this cannot be right. So, I turned and walked back the 2kms and still not finding any blue signs at the bike racks continued to walk and eventually found the right road only to walk up and down it because of numbering system! Finally, I arrived at my accommodation, only to be told that for that day only they were not accepting check-ins until after 4pm, so I left my bags and wandered back into town.

All of the city closes down on a Sunday in Karlsruhe, so I decided to catch a train to Heidelberg the following day to explore. A local lady that was sharing my dorm with me in Karlsruhe said to me “…you won’t need a map to get around Heidelberg…once you get to the old part of town you’ll know exactly where to go…it’s very easy to get around, you can't get lost…” I really should not put so much faith in what others tell me! I arrived in Heidelberg to find that the tourist information centre is not open on Sundays which meant I was on my own in regards to navigation, and with very few people around I hopped on the bus to take me into the centre of town – only it didn’t take me into the centre of town rather of I was heading into the suburbs - clearly I could not read the bus map properly. No problem, I got off a number of stops later and caught a bus back to the station to start again. Carefully studying the map this time, I boarded my next bus only to be taken in another direction, which again was not the direction for the centre of town! By the time I had got another bus back to the station, bearing in mind that it was a Sunday, so the buses were operating on a limited timetable, I had wasted nearly two and a half hours and was frozen solid. The weather had started to turn nasty with strong winds and snow combining to freeze every part of my skin that was exposed to the elements. Given that it was now nearly 2.00pm I decided to give up my Heidelberg adventure and catch the train back to Karlsruhe and to the warmth of my accommodation.

Overnight it continued to get colder and the snow fell steadily. When I woke up on Monday morning I flung open the curtains like an excited little child and was entranced by the snow, I just wanted to run out in my pyjamas and play exactly like you see in the movies. I managed to contain my excitement and had my shower, checked out and ran out to enjoy the wonder of snow before heading off to the train station to travel to Bern.

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