Today’s mission:

• On May 5
• Wake at 4
• Catch 3 trains
• Across 2 countries
• With 1 goal
• And 0 idea how it’ll all pan out.

Let’s do it!

After waking up every hour during the night just make sure I hadn’t slept through my alarm, I got up at 4 after a less than great night of sleep. Still better than missing a train though!

We got ready and stumbled out of the hotel room, leaving our usual calling card.

We checked out, and shuffled across the road to Frankfurt am Main train station, grateful again that we picked a place so close to it.

Happily, the pretzel place we visited yesterday was already open, so I had a nice tomato and relish one and a small coffee, whilst being gently mocked by the storekeeper about my complete lack of German language skills 🙂

There wasn’t too long to wait before our “ICE” train arrived. Big and shiny, and with a red stripe which of course always makes things go faster.

I booked the tickets ages ago through the Deutsche Bahn website, and I want to give a big shout out to their phone app for making everything so easy. It stored the ticket, and all the helpful information about which platform, which car, and which seats we needed. It also gave the ability to “Komfort check-in”. This means when you find your seats and are all settled, you just hit the button in the app to say “yep I’m here”, and the conductor doesn’t need to stop by to check on your tickets. Too easy!

After a bit of a struggle to heft our heavy bags on to the overhead luggage storage (I kinda wondered if we’d make the whole thing come crashing down on our heads, but no), we sat in our comfy window seat with table, ready to go.

At exactly 5:40am, as scheduled, the journey began. Within a few minutes, we were whipping through the landscape at 270km/h which was pretty cool, and surprisingly quiet while we sat by, watch the sun rise over lovely bits of German landscape.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get better, a member of staff walked past asking if wanted coffee. Of course! Why doesn’t anyone ever do that when I’m getting a train from Newtown to Central?

The train stops for a minute or two at each station, but had a longer wait time at Köln (Cologne), one of the major stations. When the train started, it headed off in the opposite direction, ie going backwards instead of forwards. It’s ok, it didn’t head straight back to Frankfurt, but off in a different line on the way to Düsseldorf and Duisburg, but it seemed funny (to me) that a train would change direction half way through the trip. As a bonus, Köln station is kinda pretty.

It wasn’t long at all before it was time to manhandle the big suitcases from the rack above our heads for our first train change, in Duisburg. Thanks again to the Deutsche Bahn app for giving us a reminder that it was time to leave this train, and which platform we had to head to for our next train.

Now what can I tell you about Duisburg . Umm, it has a train station? That’s about the limit of my knowledge. But it’s nice enough, it has a shop with the pretzel machine, so it must be a good place. The only downside perhaps is that if you want to ‘spend a penny’, it’ll cost you 1 euro. But at least this money helps ensure the bathrooms are nice and clean.

We had a 40 minute wait here at Duisburg, watching all sorts of trains and all sorts of people come and go, mostly commuters heading to work by the look of it. So here are some boring station photos I took to help kill the time.

Our train arrived bang on time, and … then it just kinda sat there. And sat there. There was an announcement in German I didn’t understand but I figured it was “sorry we’ve been held up a bit”. We only have an 18 minute window at our next station for our next connecting train, so we were crossing our fingers

Ten minutes after our scheduled departure time we were in the move. Once again the Deutsche Bahn app came to the rescue, sending us a notification that we should only be 4 minutes late getting to our destination. Shortly afterwards, the train stopped again. There was another announcement so I got my translate app running, just in time for it to translate “thank you for your understanding”. Which was kinda ironic, seeing as how I didn’t.

This train moves (when it’s moving) at a more stately 80km/h or so, but it still quiet, comfortable, and we found a spot for the bags thank goodness. There’s a toilet on this train, it’s not working. A few people have walked up and found this out – it is pointed out by a very loud announcement “this lavatory is out of order!” which then results in a pretty awkward walk-of-shame back down the carriage for the passengers who needed to go.

The train had a few more rests in between stations, slowly making its way through construction work. However once it had passed that past, the driver was going hell-for-leather to make up lost time, getting us up to 160km/h in parts.

When it became apparent we had no chance of making our connection at Arnhem, once again it was the Deutsche Bahn app to the rescue, telling us what we already knew (you won’t make your connection), but helpfully, saying “click here to choose an alternative”. Seriously the customer service is just excellent, it’s like someone’s holding your hand the whole way to make sure you get to where you need to go. Awww.

We could tell we were getting close to crossing the border into the Netherlands, the land was already flat, flat, flat. The onboard announcements were being delivered in German and Dutch. Then, somewhere between Emmerich-Ellen and Zevenaar stations, we crossed the border with no fanfare and no fuss. Welcome to the Netherlands!

Once arriving at Arnhem Centraal I hit the “alternatives” button in the app and, no dramas, there’s a train to Amsterdam in 15 minutes. It looks the way this train works is everyone piles in, then moves from carriage to carriage looking for the best spot in the ten minutes before it takes off. There’s no luggage storage that we can see, so we hung around in the vestibule until Utrecht, where we were able to get a seat.

Ah, Amsterdam! It’s lovely to be back. There were things I remembered, the canals, the flowers, the bicycles (OMG the bicycles!) and of course within minutes of walking out of the station, there was the smell of weed.

The rain was in and off when we arrived, so we took a short walk and found somewhere for lunch. In keeping with our tradition of sticking to local cuisine (ha!) we had pizza and pasta. I was hungry so you only get an after photo this time. The restaurant had some funky decor going on though.

Watching the endless stream of people go by, it feels like every UK lad and ladette has decided to avoid the upcoming coronation celebrations by coming here instead. Packs of skinny lads, packs of fake tanned and big lipped ladies, I was almost looking to see if there was a Geordie Shore camera crew following them all for a new series.

We had a wander around , and grabbed a croquette from FEMO, the nifty ‘automat’ food shop. Pick a window, tap your card, get what’s inside. Simple! It was really busy inside so no photos this time.

We wandered the pretty streets through the light rain, past about 10 shops selling “space cakes” and ten shops selling these delicious looking overloaded waffles full of chocolate and other delicious things. There are a lot of shops dealing to the ‘marijuana tourist’ crowd it feels like – there are so many reasons to visit Amsterdam but alas this is the one that probably gets the most publicity.

Our room wasn’t ready when we arrived at the hotel so we wandered through more pretty streets and past more shops selling space cakes and the like , plus more packs of lads and ladettes. Man it is super busy – I remember last time we were here we were leaving on the first day of the ‘Sail’ festival and the streets were rammed with people. It felt a little bit like that today, but I guess Friday lunchtime it makes sense that there are hordes of tourists descending. Plus us two, compounding the problem by, I dunno, 0.0002% 🙂

After stopping for an iced coffee before my feet mutinied, we popped into a supermarket, and I’m taking to moment to call out these ridiculously cute, if kinda useless, itty bitty 150ml tins of Coke. Awww.

Upon our return to the hotel, the room was ready. I knew when I booked this place was known for being quirky and it doesn’t really disappoint, check out the odd little space we’re crammed into. It’s big enough, and has windows even though they’re way up in the ceiling. Thankfully there’s a remote-controlled blind for them. We hung around here for part of the afternoon, doing important things like writing up much of today’s blog and sorting out the photos. Now, I’m not saying the lift here is small, but, with our luggage we had to go up to our room one at a time! Not only that, it has no kind of internal door, so if you want to lose a finger you can reach out and touch the wall as it scrolls on by. Like I said, a little quirky.

We went out and looked at some of the shops, bought the tiniest of keepsakes coz that’s all the spare room there is in the luggage. There was also one thing in a shop I had to take a photo of just so I could caption is thusly for my own amusement:

Also I’m not sure if this actually sells suitcases, but I do appreciate TK Maxx’s sentiment.

Here are a few more sights to see from the afternoon’s wanderings.

After a bunch if “Where should we have dinner” wandering around, we ended up right on the main tourist drag, but my poor old body was saying let’s stop here. Wherever here is, here’s where we’re stopping. This time we did manage some Dutch food – bitterballen! Super tasty mini-croquettes, with mustard. Yum! After that – burger and pizza. The place didn’t really pass the vibe check, but the food was OK. ANd the price was kinda tourist-rip-off-y, but, hey, at least we’re fed :). There were these two blokes at the table next to us, from Ireland I think, and it felt to me like this was their first trip to Amsterdam… poor things were completely stoned off their chops, trying to work through a mixed grill while also solving all the problems of the universe. Hilarious.

After dinner we followed it up with a Razzle. A Razzle is I think what happens when you hire your marketing department on fiverr, late on a Friday afternoon. Rubbish name, but it was more a less what happens if you could order a McFlurry from Wish 🙂 I had the stroopwaffel version, and gotta say it was pretty darn good. Plenty of Razzle, maybe even a tiny about of Dazzle.

Because we are such voracious, high energy, unstoppable party animals, we went back to the hotel straight after. Perry’s already asleep, and I won’t be far behind as soon as I hit Publish on this blog.

Tomorrow should hopefully be a bit more interesting for you all than reading about us catching some trains. But we’ll all have to wait ‘til tomorrow to find out. See you then.