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| Project Germany | |
| A year long blog about my travel planning for a trip to Germany in 2007 | |
April 8, 2008 Today is Easter Sunday and I realized I hadn't updated this log in months. Most of the trip is now booked and I have been spending my time looking for and collecting information about things to do in my chosen locations. To see more about this, you can look at my itinery page. For some reason I am finding it difficult to pin down information about possible boat trips on the the Rhine and Mosel. I have found websites but my German is not good enough to be able to compare the options very well. I will keep trying but if anyone reading this has been there and has a recommendation, feel free to email me to share your experience. We are also hoping to so a short bike ride. I can't decide if it would be easier or better to bike from Koblenz to Boppard or Koblenz to Cochem. I am not a great biker and do not do well on hills. I am wondering which route is easier. I have made new friend online through my German language learning efforts who has expressed a desire to meet me in Germany, so I think she and her boyfriend will be coming to meet up with us in Koblenz. I am constantly amazed at how wonderfully friendly the Germans I have met so far have been. January 23, 2007 Well it has been too long since I updated this blog and a lot of progress has been made. In fact nearly everything is now booked. Here is how it is shaping up. We got so lucky and snagged round trip airfare from Washington to London for half price. I think the airline made a mistake because these prices were only available for 24 hours. Nevertheless, I happened to see them and booked them and so far so good! Next we booked one way tickets from London to Düsseldorf with only a short layover in London. These tickets started out as very cheap (only 10 GBP each) but once all the taxes and fees were added, they were almost 90GBP! Still within budget however. We will arrive in Düsseldorf and immediately take a train to Koblenz our home base for the next 4 nights. From here we will take day trips up and down the Rhine and Mosel rivers. We hope to squeeze in some hiking, biking and exploring in towns such as Cochem, Rüdesheim, Bingen and Boppard. On the 11th (a Saturday) we will travel back to Düsseldorf by train and check into a hotel at the airport before taking the U-Bahn 3km into town. Here we will explore and meet up with a friend who lives in this city for the day. The next day we have to get up early and Graham has to catch a plane to England while I take the train to Bremen. Graham will spend the next week with his parents in England while I visit friends and see more of Germany. While in Bremen, I hope to see all the things I mentioned in my last entry back in September including visiting Regina and meeting her family. On Wednesday I will leave Bremen by Train and meet up with another friend in Münster for 2 nights. This part of the trip is the part not yet booked. This friend is not a native of Münster and has not confirmed what she wants to do with me there. I don't know if I need to book a hotel in town or somewhere else. On Friday morning, one last friend, plans to drive to Münster to pick me up and drive me back to her town, Siegen. I will spend Friday seeing her city and meeting her family. She has invited me to stay at her house overnight and the next day she and I will drive to Köln for some sightseeing and then onto Düsseldorf too. Finally I will end up in the same airport hotel in Düsseldorf that Graham and I stayed in the previous Sunday. My flight the next day isn't until almost 8pm, so I will leave my bags at the hotel after I check out and travel the 3km back into Düsseldorf to look around one last time. If I am lucky, the same friend that Graham and I visited the previous Saturday will be free for lunch and we can have a short second visit. My flight, although late, is direct to Southampton in the south of England and with the time difference, I will arrive at 8:15pm English time. By 9pm I should be on a ferry to the Isle of Wight and by 9:45 I should be "home" with Graham and his parents. Monday to Wednesday I stay in one place. Visiting with family, going for long walks, playing with my little neice Alice and generally relaxing. Thursday we will make our way leisurely to London and probably do one of the organized guided walks we like so much. Friday, if we stick to the plan, we will travel by train to Windsor just for the day. Alternatively we may stay in town and do some other guided walks or explore a part of town we haven't seen before. Saturday we fly home to Virginia! My next log entries will be about each town I plan to visit and what I want to see while there.
September 10, 2006 This week I have been looking at Bremen. It is north of all the other places I want to see, but my friend Regina (Hi Regina!!) lives there and I must include Bremen on my itinerary. We are thinking that we will end our trip in Bremen and then fly to London from Bremen for the second half of the trip to visit Graham's family. The things I have read about so far that I want to see in Bremen are:
I started looking for interesting but inexpensive places to stay and so far this is what I have found: Hotel Buthmann im Zentrum (recommended by Frommer's) Best Western Hotel Schaper-Siedenburg Hotel Hanseat (good location, but pricey) September 4, 2006 I didn't have too much time this week to do any work on the trip; however, a friend sent me pictures from a place she visited that really intrigued me. The place is called Spreewald and it is unique - just the kind of place I love to visit. There are no cars allowed and everyone, even the postman, gets around via pole-pushed punts on miles of interconnecting waterways or by foot on footpaths. Most of the people who live there are descendents from the original settlers and they speak a hybrid language all their own. Here is a link to a site that will tell you more: www.spreewald.de/. Unfortunately for me, it an hour from Berlin and too far east to be fit until my short little week. If I went there, I wouldn't get to visit the people I know in Germany and that would be a loss. So Spreewald will go on my list for a future trip. The places on my "possibilities" list currently includes Koblenz, St Goarshausen, Rüdesheim, Rothenburg, Dinkelsbühl, Mainz, Düsseldorf, Köln, Heidleburg, Bacharach, Zons and Duisburg and in the far north Bremen. Obviously I can't do them all. We don't want to be moving house every day, so one place will become the homebase and we will take trains or boats or cars to visit the ones we do see. August 28, 2006 My current struggle is trying to decide what type of place we will want to stay in. For example, when we went to Austria a few years ago, we spent one whole week at a "Wander Hotel." It was all inclusive (and very inexpensive because the Euro was less than the $). It saved us from having to pick a restaurant every day, but at the same time, we felt that we had to be back everyday in time for dinner. We were spending our days in the region so it wasn't a hardship to come home for dinner though. Now in Germany it will be different. We hope to do day trips to visit friends and I love visiting old medieval towns and villages. I also like browsing in small gift shops and visiting history based museums. With Graham being a vegetarian, it is usually helpful being in a city for the choice, but if we are going to be driving to other places all the time, city driving is scary. If we are in a small city with a train station, then we won't need to drive, but then we can only visit places the train goes to. It is a dilemna. I have been searching for self-catering apartments and trying to pick one that is located in a place that is central, easy to get to, but also interesting. The sights I have found so far are: Place near the Lorilei rock in the Middle Rhine valley Tomorrow I plan to start trying to learn my geography of German a bit better. Right now, I am not always certain where a place I have found is located geographically. Germany is such a big country. August 14, 2006 Everyone keeps telling me I should go into business planning trips for people because I put so much effort and get such great results with my own trips. As much as I would love to get paid for doing something I love to do, I doubt I could charge what it would take to make it profitable. It would also eat into the time I had available to do my own planning. So today I decided I would try sharing what I do by keeping a BLOG about my process, discoveries and decisions. If anyone stumbles across this blog and they happen to be planning a trip to Germany, perhaps some of my research will come in handy. We probably won't be able to actually travel until next August so as usual I am starting earlier than most people would start. Aside from continuing my efforts to learn German which I hope to practice while there, I will be spending the first few months reading about places in Germany to create my "wish list" of locations to visit. The next step will be to dig deeper to narrow the list down. Check back weekly to learn what I have learned or discovered. The first thing I have researched is airports. I hate changing planes. In the last 5 years, every time I had a connection, my luggage was lost (including both going and coming from Ireland). So I will be looking for a direct flight to Germany on an airline that also flys to England direct as we will be going to England after Germany to visit family. From Washington Dulles, I can fly direct to either Munich or Frankfurt. I have seen Munich before, so that leaves Frankfurt. First decision made! Next, I have a few friends in Germany who I want to visit on day trips. They are scattered up and down Germany on the west side. This means that I will concentrate on cities/towns/sights/in Western Germany and not even tempt myself with Eastern cities and Berlin is scratched.
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