Germany North to South

terryhills4

Feb 144 min read

We said our goodbyes to Portugal and head off to Düsseldorf Germany for a month of visiting friends and family in Monika‘s home country of Germany which I had not visited for 20 years

A very enjoyable flight and we were met at the airport by Jonas and Christiane. A wonderful reunion as in the old days we spent quite a bit of time together. We stay at their house in Marl.

After an evening of reunion drinks came to discussion on what we should do the next day. The old coal industrial heartland of Germany has basically shut down because nobody burns coal anymore and this part of the world as it’s very bad for the environment they turned one of the processing plants into a very cool museum we had a chance to check out. At the Ruhr Museum, they explained the process of coal coming out of the ground and how it was sorted and cleaned into different types of coal for different applications like home fuel or use in a train or a blast furnace. The view from a top this magnificent structure was pretty amazing. Everything was written in English as well, even though I understand and speak German sometimes it’s easier to just read it in English. 🤓

We toured around a little bit, had some dinner and then I went with Jonas to his band practice, It was a lot of fun. His band called Restless play basically classic rock. We had a little jam session and I even sang a tune with them. Great band. Hope to see them back on the road again and the website up and active. We did spent a few hours the next day touring a couple of guitar stores one that reminds me of Canada‘s Long and McQuade. Some of the prices were a little bit high, but they had a great selection of guitars that I played. 😎

We went to visit the old house that we lived in back in the early 90s and went for walk through the park. Things have changed quite a bit that’s for sure. That night, we had a wonderful reunion dinner with Pia and the kids Jan and Inga. A beautiful evening was had by all.

The next day we were off on our journey again, heading to Hoch Sauerland Kreis . This was our first train journey in quite a while and the first time I ever went there by train. It made for an interesting take on the German Train System which unlike before seems to have a lot of problems with delayed trains that being said, it was very cool anyway. 😋

We got to Oldsburg and headed off to Ellinghausen to stay with Sabina and Christof our old friends. Monika and Sabrina have been friends since school days and Sabina was the maid of honour at our wedding. We also celebrated Monika 61st birthday with a very nice dinner and a much too late of an evening 🤪

Seeing as were tourists the next day we went to a beautiful city called Paderborn. This is where the bishop of the Catholic Church of Germany apparently lives or lived, and they have the smallest river in Germany. A real cool shopping street and the churches are amazing. As we are walking about, we came across a memorial to apparently they had a tornado in 2022 that did quite a bit of damage.

A great drive through the countryside with lots of wind turbines. The next day was a reunion with Monika‘s many brothers and sisters and a very touching reunion. Following that was a much much too late night playing a few games.

We were then off to Fulda thanking Sabina and Christof for all the great times and back to playing with trains. 🚂 German fast trains called ICE are quite fun and if you have a look at one of the pictures, you’ll see 249 km an hour. We arrived and headed off to our hotel which turns out is attached to a castle.

We toured around this beautiful city with its churches and really old places and palaces. It is in this city that Napoleons invasion towards Russia was stopped. We had a great reunion dinner with Stefan and Simone. Myself and Stefan had not seen each other since the early 90s and Simone came to visit us in Toronto about 2 years ago. If you will notice in these pictures, the crosswalks are little tiny guys with crosses. Very cool.

We were up early on the train again, heading in the direction of Frankfort airport. It was there that we met up with our son Nick. We picked up a Rent-A-Car and headed off to Trier. We will base here for the next 10 days or so until we head back to Portugal with some interesting travels coming up in between.