DE2008-from St Civran to Hanau-am-Main

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My trip to Deutschland (Germany) in March 2008 started very much like my trip to Great Britain the year before, on a mad urge to escape!

I had been lending my car to my son who was using it to take his little family around. Being isolated in the village they needed it badly. But so did I. One day I said I was leaving, going to visit some friends in Germany, driving there with... my car.

I left my place in France on 20 March at 6am to be precise and arrived at my friend's door in Germany in Hanau near Frankfurt at 6pm, i.e. twelve hours on the road in straight line, diagonally from the middle of France heading north-east into Germany. On a map it goes from my village near Argenton-sur-Creuse to Bourges, Auxerre, Chaumont, Nancy, Saarbrücken, Kaiserslautern, Mainz, to end up in Hanau-am-Main, a trip of about one thousand kilometres.

The weather was dreadful. I drove through hail and gale, some snowing and sunshine at times. But the roads were good. All the roads were good, the ordinary highways and the motorways, both in France and in Germany. I took photos as I was driving, without focusing, vaguely pointing in the direction required just to have some evidence of the actual trip. Travelers often omit talking about the actual traveling, the actual going, moving, to concentrate on the place they went to visit. My photos here are very bad, I admit. Unfortunately it's all I have. It snowed over Easter and my camera got cold, seized and stopped working altogether. It said 'card blocked' and I was advised at the photo shop to buy a new card. As I couldn't afford buying a new card for €29,- then, I went on with my life without taking photos!

It snowed for Easter at the end of March and we spent the weekend watching the snow fall from the balcony, from inside a nicely heated living room. The last week of March we took a trip to the Taunus mountain to a pretty village called Schmitten covered in snow. There I met up with an old friend I had been sailing with in the South Pacific. Back in Hanau I met up with my old school penfriend Christiane. She had asked me for dinner on a Saturday night. As I misunderstood her on the phone, I turned up on the Sunday night instead. It would not be amazing except for the fact that we had not seen each other for half a century and those 24 hours made all the difference!

I enjoyed walking around Hanau, even walking all the way from my friend's place to check my emails at an internet shop in town. Hanau used to have Spanish immigrants working at the Dunlop factory. Nowadays I found there was a lot of people from the Middle East including women wearing the traditional veil.

After a fortnight there I decided to drive back to my place in France. Next time I'll make sure I have a camera in working order!

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