Cologne and Bremen

Cologne

Friday night and since Cologne is known to have decent nightlife we thought a night out was in order. Donning the hair straighteners and a little slap for only the 2nd time in a month – ah the joys of grass roots travelling (and that’s just Andrew) we hit the town, well hit it as hard as we seem able these days! Of course it was raining, playing havoc with the frizz, but after a little perseverance we found a great little bar serving good cocktails and finished off with a Thai. As we headed home about 1am the city was buzzing, we are blaming the resourcefulness of travel fund on our early departure but if we’re honest we were just done for…

The next day we cycled the 5km into Cologne for a more cultural experience. We got it with the famous Dom (cathedral) and other attractions but what was more apparent than anything else is that this town is popular with hens and stags, along with other random groups of people sporting kilts, Mexican poncho’s and other matching outfits…they were all over the place and in full form throughout the day. Popular activity for hens seems to be that they carry a price list, not sure if its fortunate or not that we don’t understand enough of the language to know what they are selling but can of course imagine! Andrew has banned me from coming here should I be in the requirement of a hen do location in the future!

There was a wedding taking place here and we have no idea what the 'uniform' was representing, but the little boy looked cute...

Bremen

Bremen is our next destination but there is an important detour on the way; one last war cemetery to visit near the German/Netherlands border. My brother asked me to go, since this is where our granddad is buried as he lost his life during the 2nd world war; as such we of course never had an opportunity to meet him and indeed my father was only 2 years old at the time. I’ll keep reference brief since it’s a personal thing and I found the experience far more emotional than I ever expected it would be, but I am very pleased to say that the cemetery, like those we saw in France, is beautiful, peaceful and very well maintained.

So the last stop on the German map, at least for a while, is Bremen, partly because it’s a convenient stop and partly because it reads like a decent place. Having just spent the day there we can confirm it’s a very lovely town and a pleasant place to spend a day; small and compact, many beautiful old buildings and quant streets. We took a look at a place under the cathedral which housed several mummified corpses in open coffins – well it seemed too weird to miss really but we didn’t hang around too long.

Scandinavia is calling and tomorrow we head for Denmark. We have one problem, and I suppose the first real problem of the tour, the sat nav appears to have given up. One day it was working fine, the next it simply doesn’t and is dishing out nasty internal memory errors. Eventually we will find somewhere to have it repaired, and in the meantime will have to resort to the traditional map – oh dear, what was that I was saying about us not yet having argued! We are going with the theory that we believe Scandinavia would be the best area not to have sat nav since the roads seem less numerous and we can wing it…time will tell.