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Published: June 15th 2007
Up Where We Belong
Glynn and Jude take to the skies once more. A mere matter of two and a half weeks ago we were arriving back in the UK after a year's worth of adventures abroad and yet here we are now, back on foreign shores and busy lapping up yet more history, culture and spectacular scenery. It´s good to be back!
Our trip to the Black Forest in south-west Germany began with a very wet start to the day. We had intended to take the bus to Birmingham airport but it was chucking it down with rain and the prospect of gettng drenched on a 20-minute walk to the bus stop was far from appealing. Instead, we swallowed our financial pride and forked out a whopping £10 for a taxi that barely took 15 mintues to get there. To think that in South America we could have travelled for 14 hours on a luxury bus for that amount of money....ah well.
We checked in at the KLM counter, did the obligatory visit to the duty free shop for the free perfume testers, complained at having our bottle of squash confiscated at the security desk (what is it with this 100ml limit on liquids now?) and made our way on
Donaueschingen
...and not a pair of travel trousers or hiking boots in sight! the first leg of our journey to Amsterdam. We were a little late arriving but thankfully had a decent amount of time between flights so no stress there. After standing my ground with the Dutch security staff about a small bottle of make-up remover they wanted to confiscate (the British security let it through, you see), we boarded our connecting flight to Stuttgart. I can't say that KLM was the best company we've ever flown with mainly because I was a little concerned about the age of the second plane we flew on but we arrived in Stuttgart safe and sound, albeit about 45 minutes late due to the bad weather which seemed to have followed us from England like a scene from a cartoon.
My father was waiting to meet us in the arrivals hall and it was good to see him again. It actually felt like only a few weeks since I brought Glynn to Germany for the first time to meet his prospective in-laws rather than a year and a half. We had an amusing time trying to find the exit to the short stay carpark, which turned out to be accessed by driving down into
Guten Tag!
All that practice at pulling gormless expressions finally pays off for Glynn. a subterranean multi-storey and swinging round a few poorly lit bends - all part of the fun and adventure. Heading out onto the motorway, we joined a 10 km queue of traffic crawling out of the city as the heavy rain fell all around us. It was almost as if we had never left home!
En-route to Neustadt where my father lives, we made a brief stop at Donaueschingen, a small town famous for being the source of the river Donau which flows all the way from Germany through Austria and into Bulgaria. It was a pretty corner of the world and Glynn and I would happily have stayed on to join in the town's beer festival which was taking place tonight if we hadn´t had other plans.
Speeding along, we turned off the autobahn and made our way into the heart Black Forest country just in time to pick my sister up from the train station in Neustadt. She had travelled from Munich after work today but judging by how ill she was looking, she should probably have stayed at home. She had awoken with a fever of over 38 degrees this morning but didn't want to
Making an Entrance
Big door, tiny Jude. miss out on seeing us as we so rarely get the chance to spend time together, bless her. Needless to say that by the time we got her to my father's place, she was looking very pale and fit to drop at any moment.
While my sister ended up having an early night to see if she could sleep off the sickness, Glynn and I partook in a few excellent beverages with my father. Later on we were joined by Franziska, my father's wife, who had been to the theatre with friends. It was 1am by the time my eyelids finally felt too heavy to keep open so off to bed we trundled slightly the worse for beer and wine but all the happier to see some of our favourite people again.
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