Travel is enjoyable but only once you get to your destination as a flight of 10 hours followed by another of 12.5 hours after a transit stop of 2 hours is tiring no matter how many hours one gets to sleep on the plane.
The flight from Singapore to Frankfurt which left Singapore just after midnight Friday Singapore time was a little like the first sector with head winds giving the plane some decent shakes for extended periods.
We crossed over numerous cities or towns that I had never heard of, or if I had they were long blanked out of the memory
but there were some good sights no more so than the city of Baku which stood out like a beacon
and also the sunrise which commenced around 4.30 am local time
We landed around 6.30 am and had a quick trip through Customs etc. getting to stand outside the terminal by 7.15 and then the fun started.
On the plane I had loaded a European sim card into my phone so that I could ring MDS who supply the car. Numerous failed attempts followed before I replaced that sim with my ONE.nz sim which worked a treat and arrangements were made to be picked up in 15 minutes.
The pickup service duly arrived and took us back to their depot where our new car waited for us. Having been this way before I knew that we required an Umweltplakette which is a green sticker that goes on the car to show that it is environmentally friendly and so you can take that vehicle into any of the German cities that have mandated areas where only low emission vehicles can access and those areas tend to be the city centres.
Our vehicle supplier said no problem , he can supply the sticker so I handed over my credit card but it was no go as only cash and as (bad) luck would have it we hadn’t brought any cash. Again no problem just drive down to the nearest shell service station and you can draw some cash out from there, so off we hopped in the 308 and very gingerly drove the 1 or so kms to the service station and after overcoming the language challenges, drew out some Euros and returned to the car yard.
Having paid the €10 we then started our trip to Mannheim about 73 kms south of Frankfurt. Leaving the car yard we pulled to the side of the road and tried to put the address of our hotel in Mannheim into the GPS. Now one would think that that is an easy task but this GPS is not very intuitive so after wasting 10 or so minutes it was back to the car yard with a request that we get some instructions.
Again, no problem our man says and he jumped in the car and started “playing” with the GPS until he realised that this GPS System is unlike others that he has been familiar with. Nevertheless after playing around for a little while he got it programmed and off we went, even more gingerly as most of the drive was on one of the unrestricted speed limit autobahns and I needed quite a few kilometres to get used to the vehicle and also driving on the other side of the road.
Arrived in Mannheim around 9.30 am and then had to negotiate, with the assistance of the GPS a road system that was somewhat foreign as blocks are designated by Letters and then a number - our hotel’s address is F4, 4-11, Mannheim. It was so confusing we ended parking the car and asking a local to point us in the right direction.
Long story short we got the car into the hotel garage and then had a walk around the city centre, doing no more than passing the time before we got access to our room at 3.00pm.
Being a Saturday not unsurprisingly there was a wedding group in the centre of the city
A long time since we last slept properly, the eyes are on the ends of matchsticks however our European holiday is underway.
Kms travelled to date 76
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