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Well I thought I had better let all the blog watchers know that I am back home in Christchurch now. Work's not bad but holidaying is way better! :)

Till my next holiday, bye bye.

Bored in departure lounge

We are just about to called to hop on the flight from Frankfurt to Sydney. You can see from the pic that we have been delayed a little bit ;) They have only given me a boarding pass to Sydney so I am not sure what time my connecting flight over to Christchurch will be. With a delay of 18 or so hours at this stage I don't expect I will be back to Christchurch till Saturday ( as long as this plane works ok ).

Anyways, will see ya when I see ya :)

Almost coming home

There was a slight hitch in my plans to fly home to NZ tonight. When the 747 was spinning up the engines to take off there was a backfire of about 10 feet of flame which is apparently not normal. After engineers checked it out and we sat around on the plane for a while we heard that we were going to be staying the night again in Frankfurt. It's now 5:30am and I've just got into the hotel room so a quick post before getting a little sleep and trying again tomorrow. They haven't been able to confirm our next flight schedules but will try and post that if I get a chance.

The travel fun continues...

Last post for this holiday :)

The train ride to Frankfurt and my stay in the hostel last night were pretty uneventful. I'm feeling well rested for the trip ahead. I've just finished breakfast and will have a pretty quiet day mucking around in Frankfurt before catching my fairly late (11pm) plane back to NZ tonight.

It has been a really great trip and I want to thank all my European friends for their awesome hospitality! I've had so many primo 'tour guides', thanks so much :)

Also I'd like to thank all you folk back home that have been following along with the blog, it was always really nice to hear from you. It's also going to be really great to catch up with you all again very soon :)

Love to all,
Jonny

Round 2 Hamburg

Today I managed to get out to the waterskiing place again and had great fun on the wakeboard. I think my snowboard practice must have helped because I found it much easier on the wakeboard than the water skis which made for a fun day. I learnt a couple of things on it thanks to the helpful staff :) I was only there on my own so I don't have any further pics of the wakeboarding action. Also I've just finished my first drive on the Autobahn. Ingmar kindly let me drive his nice wagon from Hamburg to Itzehoe which included a fairly long stretch of unlimited highway. I was pretty nervous with that drive mainly due to the gear shift being on the other side but felt pretty used to it by the end of the trip. So, lots of excitement ;)

Having checked off all the things I wanted to do on this trip it's now time for some goodbyes, one train trip to Frankfurt, one last night in a backpackers and then a bit of a flight back to NZ. I'm pretty sure I will be able to update again before I take off, so until then, signing out :)

Hamburg water fun

The highlight of my couple of days in Hamburg this time round was the trip to the water skiing place yesterday. I'd never heard of this before but at this place you don't get towed around by a boat. As you can hopefully see from the pic there is a system of tows kind of like using a skiing rope tow. Because it was my first time with this kind of water sport they got us to use water skis as apparently it is easier on the skis than with a wakeboard. It was pretty tricky and it wasn't till about three quarters of the way through our 2 hour session that I was able to consistently go round the course and by that time my arms were pretty tired! I would really like to try out the wakeboard as well so hopefully I will get in one more trip to this place before I leave so that I can give that a go. I don't know if I'll actually have time as well but maybe a pottery show would be cool ;)

Bye bye :)

Retrospective of Stuttgart

Well I'm now in Hamburg after my overnight train from Stuttgart. So, as mentioned in my previous post here are a couple of pics from Stuttgart. The first one is just a building I happened to like the look of in Stuttgart main centre. I think it might be the old palace but I'm not exactly sure. The second photo is from my visit to Tübingen. Unfortunately this castle gate was being renovated and had covers over most of it. I liked the look of this corner turret which wasn't obscured by the covers, so here it is. Tübingen was really cool with a myriad of little streets to explore. It has some really interesting university history and traditions as well. The next photo is a view of the main square of a little place called Freudenstadt which was a neat little village that we stopped into on the way to a forest walk in the Schwarzwald (Black forest). A photo from a very nice waterfall that we visited on the forest walk is also pictured. The rest of that day included some delicious local specialties at some little restaurant that seemed like it was miles from anywhere. Before I jumped on the night train Marion and Helge took me to a beach bar that is on top of a big building in the city centre of Stuttgart. There is a pic of that bar and the big (overexposed) glowing ball is actually an illuminated rotating Mercedes Benz insignia that adorns the top of the main railway station. So that about covers the highlights of Stuttgart and area and although it was a flying visit it was well worth it.