Germany a Decade on...
10 years ago this year, Kristin left home to spend a year on exchange in Germany. It has been one of the best experiences of her life. Since then she has finished High School, completed Honours in Psychology, gotten married to a spunk, spent a year working in recruitment, had a beautiful baby girl to said spunk and is now currently busy working part-time in recruiting and being a full-time mum!
Not till now had she the money yet alone the time to take a journey back to see her host family et al. Since we sold our investment property, we have been wondering what to do with the money. It should all go towards helping us get a foot in the door of the Sydney house market but the temptation to use a small portion of it to go back to Germany has been too much. So in October, we will be taking Charlotte with us on a 19 day car trip around Germany, here are the detail so far...
- Fly into Frankfurt and hire a car.
- Drive from Frankfurt to Mainz, up the Rhine River Valley to Koblenz and on to Cologne.
- From Cologne, head straight over to Diepholz (just near where I lived for a year) and stay with my host parents. From their place, we're hoping to explore places like Hannover and possibly Hamburg. Depending on time, we might even try and get up to the North Sea.
- From Diepholz, we would like to spend a night in Luebeck.
- Drive from Luebeck to Berlin (probably our biggest day of driving, the rest is less than 200km at a stretch).
- Berlin to Dresden.
- Dresden to Prague (yes, we will drop by the Czech Republic).
- Prague to Bavaria... we have a number of people we can stay with here in places like Furth im Wald (right on the Czech border), just near Straubing and Regensburg and also closer to Munich. We're hoping to get to a couple of the castles and explore the area a bit.
- From here, we'll either go over to the Black Forest or, more likely, start to Drive up the Romantic Road which will lead us back to Frankfurt.
- We have an option to take a detour off the Romantic Road to Heidelberg.
- Continue up to Frankfurt and fly back to Sydney.
Here is what the trip looks like on the map:
