Solipsism Gradient

So, after a tiring and uneventful train trip, we’re safely established in a small hotel in Königs Wusterhausen, near Berlin. We’ll be staying here until Sunday, and then it’s off to Poland. More as soon as I get some rest…

I see I got seriously behind… so many nice places to see, and not always a good connection in the hotels. Ah well.

Anyway, the garden exposition in Bingen was excellent, though it was very hot. Spent the night in Mainz, then went north to visit Kloster Eberbach, a very old building complex. South again to visit Worms on the next day.

We’re now at a nice little hotel in Schriesheim, where I have relatives. Yesterday we went down to Heidelberg which is a simply amazing city. Tomorrow it’s off to Stuttgart to return our car and then by train to Berlin, from where I’ll hopefully be able to post some pictures. Stay tuned.

In Germany again, drove by Trier and stayed overnight in Kastellaun, an old Celtic city, also quite interesting. Today I’d originally planned to drive into Koblenz but turns out there’s a garden exposition nearby in Bingen, which shouldn’t be missed.

Malmedy (Belgium) was excellent! Definitely one of the prettiest towns we’ve ever been to. Highly recommended. Then we drove southwards, spent the day in Luxembourg, which was also very interesting, then spent the night in Thionville (France).

Today we’ll follow the River Mosel into Germany, probably as far as Koblenz, and then we’ll see what happens next.

I just put some selected pictures on Flickr – first from our January Amazon trip, to get that out of the way. More to follow soon.

Progress report after a few days offline. Siegen and Netphen were excellent. We then visited a friend near Düsseldorf, tried to find a place near Düsseldorf or Köln, but every hotel in a circle of maybe 80 Km around Düsseldorf was booked up (and at outrageous prices too!).

So we decided to drive on and finally stayed for the night in Düren, an old papermaker’s town. The Paper Museum was fascinating! We then dropped in by surprise on friends near Aachen, and are now spending a day in Malmedy, Belgium. More anon.

Well, since I may be offline for a day or two at a time I thought it better to disable posting here while I’m away. Sorry about that…