I totally don't remember that you went to Düsseldorf back then.
We flew into and out of Cologne, which is how I know that there are often crazy cheap tickets available on this route.
But I do have very fond memories of spending lots of time at Eiscafe Sirena with you and Graham!!
I have very fond memories of this, too. I would happily eat a Spaghetti -Eis right now.
Oh, I didn't even think about that, but I can see that you grew up close enough for it being the big "local" amusement park!
Technically the closes proper park was Holiday Park, but even then Phantasialand was in a different league.
I like the look of that
Disneyland book.
Ling Bao is truly an amazingly themed hotel. They have another one in the Africa area called Hotel Matamba that looks beautiful, too. It has a Central Africa theme. And then the Charles Lindbergh Hotel inside the Rookburgh area which looks great, but also very uncomfortable!
They all sound great, but I do have a soft spot for anything Chines.
They also had Mett which is raw minced pork. Yes, it sounds disgusting, but it is actually very tasty. And it is more a northern German specialty and not available in Bavaria, so I did enjoy it one morning.
I love this. I had not realised that this is not available in Bavaria. I suppose this is one of the advantages of living pretty much in the centre of the country. When I grew up, specialities from all over Germany were readily available.
Of course, I started the day by checking if we had finally gotten a stateroom assigned. We were now only four days away from our cruise and it was getting ridiculous.
I remember we had one cruise like this on
DCL. people were joking that we would get the lifeboat suite.
We have been trying to see her for a long time, but it never worked out and she found a very inexpensive fare (20€ each way) to fly from London to Cologne for the day, so she decided to do that.
How nice that she was able to meet you. Was this good old Ryanai?
The Taschen store was very impressive! They had their whole catalogue and they do publish a lot of amazing books.
I would have been like kid in the candy store.
It has a very interesting history as it was started in the 13th century. By the 16th century they stopped and it wasn’t until the 19th century that it was finally completed.
That makes the construction of Sagrada Familia look speedy.
It is now full of locks - Michael is always a bit scared the weight might make it collapse. It did happen to a bridge in Paris.
I am sure I read somewhere while we were there that they found a way to reinforce the bridge to cope with the weight of the locks.
The tickets cost 121,50 € each and we thought that was a fair price.
That does sound fair.
Then, came the chance again when he announced more dates in Germany in 2020 and you have heard the rest ... but those tickets sat in my German sock drawer for 3.5 long years.
I am sure it was worth the wait.
It was a good deal as the train that we wanted to take would have been 100€ each for the short trip for some odd reason.
That really was a good day. Professionally, when I hear Rail and Fly, I break out in a cold sweat. We call it Rail and Schrei in the office.
Just as we get to security and I pull up our boarding passes on my phone I get an alert that our flight was delayed - of course because of the delay of the incoming airplane!! It was supposed to leave 70 minutes later now. This led to us sitting around a long time, in the end the plane left two hours later, but made 30 minutes up in the air.
Oh, what a pain. At least our flight was only 30 minutes delayed. However, this still meant that it was 3:00 AM by the time we fell into bed.
Hotel prices in Barcelona really surprised me when I started looking for our three nights.
The hotel prices in Barcelona are insane. We always stay in a nearby town called Molins de Rei when we are cruising out of Barcelona.
We then were in a very long all-white hallway - actually the whole room was white! At the end was a window in the shape of a palm frond, two beds and, separated by a glass wall next to the beds, a shower and a wash basin. No toilet though… We found that behind a hidden door that you had to push in and then there was a very long very narrow room with a toilet at the end. The door here had no handles and you had to push on the end where the hinges are to make it close (or wait until it fell closed). Once in there you felt like you were in a room where there were no windows and no doors… spooky!
That sounds and looks utterly bizarre
Mine was with smoked mozzarella, sun-dried tomatoes, rucola and a pesto mayo.
Apart from the rucola, this sounds amazing.
Corinna