We had a break (a long weekend) here where all the kids had to go home so no one had to be at the school to supervise them. Crista was having her birthday and had already planned in advance for this trip.
It would kind of be her "birthday present" from us.
On Thursday we headed to the train station in the morning and took the railways all the way down to Hamburg HBF. We entertained ourselves/each other with our Macs :) on the train. I've never played so much "Quinn" (a free multiplayer tetris game).
Once we got off the train we headed straight to get the car that we had rented. We were supposed to get a little 1-series BMW but got a brand new Audi A3 TurboDiesel instead. We weren't complaining.
(I realize that i focus on cars more than most people would...but that's just me :) so bear with me). I was quite impressed with the car, it did fairly well in all categories. The A3 is a decent low-end hatchback.
We stayed in Hamburg for a few days and just looked around, shopped, took night pictures, and had fun (appropriate fun, of course). I really like Hamburg. The people are very well off there so it's nice to see all these upscale apartments and performance cars. It's not like Zürich but it's closer to it than anywhere in Denmark :). Ah, how I love countries that don't tax their citizens an arm and a leg just to get leather, or automatic windows. Anyway, enough of the car talk for now.
Here are some night shots of Hamburg.
woops, don't know how that audi one got in there /sarcasm ;) nice night shot
(thanks Mario, Crista, some day I'll buckle down and get a decent SLR)
On Saturday, we left early in the morning, got in the car and started making our way down to Hannover. We were looking for a place that Vanessa's dad was supposedly held during World War II. We couldn't find the place and none of the locals knew anything about it so we just looked around the city for a little while.
I instantly fell in love with Hannover. It's a beautiful city and reminds me a little of where I grew up in Switzerland. The roads were fun to drive on too.
A little later in the day we headed down to Dresden to a place called "Little Saxon Switzerland." It's called that because the beauty in that area makes you feel like you're actually there in Switzerland.
Before I go any further, though, I must tell you about something that happened on the trip. First of all, this is extremely embarrassing, although it could have happened to anyone and it sure does seem to happen to many people.
Now that I've sufficiently justified my stupidity I will go on with the story. The car we were driving was a Diesel, and I put premium petrol in it. The labels on all the other tanks screwed me up. The car ran well at first (for the first 5 minutes) and i then noticed a serious loss in power and I was topping out at around 160kph which was definitely not normal since we were cruising at 220-240kph the whole day. We kept on driving and eventually got to your exit and started turning off on the downhill slope when the car suddenly just died. We were still technically on the highway so it was quite a disconcerting experience. Then, the miracles started happening. I had just popped the hood, because I still hadn't thought of what I had done wrong, and out of nowhere comes this silver Audi. It just happened to be a service vehicle from the local Audi dealership in town. The driver had friends in the car but he still stopped, even though it was his day off and no one was working. He did what, for some reason, I didn't think of doing and smelled the gas cap. To my dismay it smelled like gasoline :(. Luckily, the circa 4km road down into town was all downhill.
Then he called a tow truck and the car was towed to the dealer in downtown Dresden. He was doing all of this on his day off and was extremely nice and helpful. He even called an agent in to work to see if I could recuperate the money from Sixt Rentals somehow but to no avail. The tank had to be drained, as well as the pump and the lines. The filter got changed and amazingly, the car just started again with no hiccups. I thank the Lord that nothing else happened to the car. Putting gas in a diesel car can turn out pretty ugly. I did have to pay a couple hundred euros, and that hurt my pocketbook, but it could have been so worse, especially at a dealership. I was extremely satisfied with the people that helped me out and I didn't mind waiting inside the dealership with all these beautiful cars around me.
We finally got to Dresden, a beautiful little town and also spent some time in Saxon Switzerland. Pics:
When we got done with that area, we headed to Berlin through the night and got there around 23:00.
We got in for a showing of Iron Man at the Imax theater. After the movie we had to head home, man was it a long trip. On Sunday, we had to head back.
All in all, a great trip! I miss Germany already.
Too see all the pictures I've uploaded from this trip
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