I flew to Frankfurt to begin with, while Sarah sat her exams, poor girl.

I spent two lovely days with some of my relatives in Frankfurt. We had wonderful food (and lots!), and toured around Frankfurt’s inner city, as well as through Wiesbaden.

My first outing in Germany was to take a walk through the gorgeous forest near Hofheim (where my relos live), it was magic after being on a plane for 24 hours.

From Frankfurt I caught an ICE (Inter-City-Express) to Ilmenau where Daniel studies.

View the photos »

Ilmenau used to be in East Germany, and I think you can tell. There’s a slightly run-down feel about things, and then there’s the dodgy flats made of blocks of concrete. There’s lots of construction going on though, so there’s money coming from somewhere.

I still thought it was great, it was great to see Daniel after so long, and his flat was cool. We went shopping for the festival and had awesome sausages.

The next day Daniel went to uni for a bit and I wandered around town. In the afternoon we set off for the Hurricane Rock festival.

View the photos »

Daniel and I got a lift to Hannover, and then caught a train to Schessel via Bremen. Scheesel isn’t much more than a train station and a few fields. But in one of those fields 50,000 young Germans were gathering for three days of ROCK.

Like at all good rock festivals it rained, but only on Friday was it particularly bad. And even then it cleared up before the bands started in the afternoon.

There was a modicum of drinking, but also some lovely breakfasts and great sausages!

Some of the highlights for me were (in no particular order):

• Franz Ferdinand
• PJ Harvey
• Air
• The Hives
• Cypress Hill
• Monster Magnet
• David Bowie
• The Cure

If you think that’s a good line up, I spotted a guy with a Hurricane T-shirt from a few years ago. The headliners were Radiohead, Massive Attack and Björk, wow.

After three days of Rock, Rain and rrrrr-fun, we headed towards Amsterdam!

View the photos »

Sarah was due to fly into Amsterdam, so Daniel and I went first to Oldenburg where we met Astrid, and then hitched our way to Amsterdam.

We were a bit slow getting going, so we didn’t really hit the road until about 2pm, but that was ok, we’re on holiday!

We ended up only getting to Gröningen that day, just a little way inside Holland, but we were pretty chuffed anyway. Our first lift was in an awesome Mini Cooper S, four people and all our luggage crammed in. The driver was a bit of a Mini enthusiast, and he enjoyed driving, so we took all the minor roads through the country side, awesome!

We hung out in Amsterdam for a few days, not doing much, just chilling out. We campped at Zeeburg, just out of town and next to a lake.

Eventually we got our act together and headed to Daniel’s home town of Meppen.

View the photos »

In Meppen we stayed in Daniel’s parents’ house, which was totally lovely. They made us wonderful breakfasts, eventhough some days we didn’t get up until midday.

We hung around Meppen for a few days, just experiencing life there. We met some of Daniel’s friends, who were all super, rode Dutch bikes around and had yummy food.

We spent a bit of time at the Abi festival, which is basically a mini-rock festival which the year 12′s organise as a end of school party. It’s pretty crazy, there’s no way they’d let kids do that here!

After a lovely time in Meppen we caught a train across the country to the (in)famous capital of Berlin.

View the photos »

We spent the most awesome week ever in Berlin, staying with friends of Daniel, Charlotte and Imke. They have a lovely little flat in Charlottenburg, just near the train station.

We saw most (some) of the sights, the Wall, the Reichstag, Checkpoint Charlie, the Tiergarten, some other stuff.

We had delicious breakfasts most mornings, and a group foot bath, and went to a crazy secrect bar behind a restraunt and danced the night away fueled by champagne and iced tea. What fun.

After staying in Berlin for a week we had to part company with Daniel, sniff, tear. He had to head back to Uni and pass some exams!

We’d see him again in a fortnight or so, but in the meantime Sarah and I headed down to Munich.

View the photos »

We only had a couple of days in Munich, but boy were they great. It’s a gorgeous city, much smaller than Berlin obviously, but still very lively. We watched people playing Boule in the park, walked through the Englischer Garten and visited two wonderful pubs.

The first was run by a lovely woman who was super chuffed to have some tourists speaking German to her, even badly. Later we walked around at random and found another little pub with a live Jazz band, they were great (although a bit sozzled).

The next day we visited the Dachau concentration camp, which was a pretty full on experience. We also visited the Olympic site, and walked through the Athletes’ village, another place with an unfortunate history.

After hitching and training it around we thought we’d go for a change of pace and hire a car. So we jumped in a little Euro-car thing and drove into the Alps!

View the photos »

We got stuck in the car park to start with thanks to a broken boom gate, but once we got started we headed straight for the Auto-bahn! Except it was a bit wet so we couldn’t drive too fast.

We headed through Augsburg and then down past Neuschwanstein to Reutte in Austria. We camped at a lovely spot there and drove around the area in the evening.

The weather wasn’t so good in Austria the next day so we drove to Italy instead, how cool is Europe! Sarah drove us through 43 switchbacks to the top of Passo dello Stelvio which was awesome.

We then drove into Switzerland, three countries in one day! After a night in Santa Maria at the best campground ever we did a day walk in the Swiss National Park, before camping again in Bad Ragaz.

Finally we dropped the car in Konstanz and caught a train back towards Munich, and then onto Berchtesgaden.

View the photos »

Berchtesgaden is a beautiful little mountain village in the German Alps. It has the dubious honour of being the location of Hitler’s mountain retreat, but at least you can see why he liked the place, it’s gorgeous.

We planned to stay just a day and then do a walk in the surrounding hills. But owing to the unavailability of huts in the mountains we had to stay an extra day, but that was ok.

Being relaxed travellers we didn’t really know what day it was, so we nearly got caught out by all the shops shutting at midday on Saturday. We ran around like nuts for half an hour buying all sorts of weird food for our hike, because all the normal shops were shut, how silly.

The night before our hike we camped near the König See, ready to get a boat across it the next morning.

View the photos »

The route for our hike took as almost completely around the Watzmann over three days. We started at St Bartholomä on the König See, then ascended 1000 metres to our first night at Kärlingerhaus.

The scenery was absolutely incredible, and the weather was very kind to us. The huts are more like YHAs, and pretty much anyone could should do this walk.

Day two took us even higher, even across snow, to Ingolstädter Haus which is just across the border in Austria. From there I climbed the Grosser Hundstod, which was a great climb, although I was clouded in about half way up and didn’t get to see this awesome view.

On the third day we descended about 1200 metres (my knees!) back to civilisation, and finally by school bus back to Berchtesgaden.

With just a few days left we trained it back to Ilmenau to see Daniel one more time.

View the photos »