08 JUN - The Beginning
It seems strange to put this title so far into the blog but I thought I would try to keep a little more of a diary here. I (Rico) landed in Amsterdam first around 9:30 AM local time. Rocco landed around 10:50 AM. There's nothing terribly exciting about an airport. They're all pretty much the same. You know, kids drooling, clowns doing tricks (clowns scare the bejeezus out of me) and adults having skipping contests. It's very hard to judg skipping contests. The points for "flare" are the hardest to dole out.
Our first order of business was to call the rental car agency so they could retrieve us from the airport. We had a little trouble since we didn't have any change but we used Rocco's credit card and it worked. I've already posted about our rental agent. There were two other groups of people leasing from the same company so we all sqeezed into the van. One group looked like normal tourists. The other group were a bunch of guys from Brazil. They were wearing Brazil jerseys and one guy had a foam, Brazil colored soccer ball hat, very stylish. They are going to be in Germany for the whole time too but they were only going to be able to see a couple matches. The Brazilian sitting next to the leasing agent was glad that the agent kept his hands on the gear shifter or some people say "stick".
The rental agency wasn't at the airport since it is a lease instead of a rental. The agency which looked like a trailor office was about 10 minutes from the airport. I'm not sure why someone needs a rolling office. You never know when you may need to pack up and move your business quickly. The hard part is taking your address with you. Engineers are very picky about changing street names.
Once we got the car, a Nissan Pathfinder, we had to get the doggone thing out of 4-LO gear. We must have wasted about an hour trying to figure that d*** thing out. The car manual is in French which is not very useful. No hablo Frog. Rocco finally figured it out. You had to put the car in neutral and THEN change the gearing. I'm sure Moondawg would have know this immediately but he might have been very glad to hear from us at 5AM besides the fact that that our phones weren't activated yet.
(Here's where the pictures start)
Rocco's alread mentioned the nice dog doo sign we saw. Once we got on the road, we noticed immediately these HUGE windmills. These aren't your great-great-great-great......great-grandfather's windmills, no SIR. I'm sure they generate at LEAST 1.21 Gigawatts of energy each.
If this were a movie, you would see artistic fades between beautiful landscape shots, shots of us driving and laughing, shots of us at the rest stops and shots of the 3 naked women who passed us at 200 MPH. OK, maybe not so much that last part, but at least I didn't fall asleep at the wheel while I was thinking about that. I figured that by the time we got to Weimar (see map below) that I had been going on 60 hours of packing and travelling with only 8 hours of sleep. I don't think that I did too poorly.
So we finally arrived in Weimar. A beautiful small city in the state Thuringen which was a part of the former East Germany. Here is a shot of a typical street downtown.
This next picture shows the area around our apartment. It turns out that the sign on the right that looks like a T means dead end. I learned that one the hard way.
Our apartment is very nice. It's on the 3rd floor so I'm glad that we didn't have to move the furniture in! Whew! I'll have to take some pictures of the apartment building and the rooms tomorrow. We finally arrived around 9PM local time. As you can see, it is still very light outside at this time. I figure it is because we are that much closer to the North Pole than in the US. The weather is beautiful right now. It's sunny during the day and doesn't really get warmer than 75F and at night it's in the 50's.
So that's our first day. I'll try and catch-up in the next couple of days.
Enjoy,
Rico (aka Knuckles)
Our first order of business was to call the rental car agency so they could retrieve us from the airport. We had a little trouble since we didn't have any change but we used Rocco's credit card and it worked. I've already posted about our rental agent. There were two other groups of people leasing from the same company so we all sqeezed into the van. One group looked like normal tourists. The other group were a bunch of guys from Brazil. They were wearing Brazil jerseys and one guy had a foam, Brazil colored soccer ball hat, very stylish. They are going to be in Germany for the whole time too but they were only going to be able to see a couple matches. The Brazilian sitting next to the leasing agent was glad that the agent kept his hands on the gear shifter or some people say "stick".
The rental agency wasn't at the airport since it is a lease instead of a rental. The agency which looked like a trailor office was about 10 minutes from the airport. I'm not sure why someone needs a rolling office. You never know when you may need to pack up and move your business quickly. The hard part is taking your address with you. Engineers are very picky about changing street names.
Once we got the car, a Nissan Pathfinder, we had to get the doggone thing out of 4-LO gear. We must have wasted about an hour trying to figure that d*** thing out. The car manual is in French which is not very useful. No hablo Frog. Rocco finally figured it out. You had to put the car in neutral and THEN change the gearing. I'm sure Moondawg would have know this immediately but he might have been very glad to hear from us at 5AM besides the fact that that our phones weren't activated yet.
(Here's where the pictures start)
Rocco's alread mentioned the nice dog doo sign we saw. Once we got on the road, we noticed immediately these HUGE windmills. These aren't your great-great-great-great......great-grandfather's windmills, no SIR. I'm sure they generate at LEAST 1.21 Gigawatts of energy each.
If this were a movie, you would see artistic fades between beautiful landscape shots, shots of us driving and laughing, shots of us at the rest stops and shots of the 3 naked women who passed us at 200 MPH. OK, maybe not so much that last part, but at least I didn't fall asleep at the wheel while I was thinking about that. I figured that by the time we got to Weimar (see map below) that I had been going on 60 hours of packing and travelling with only 8 hours of sleep. I don't think that I did too poorly.
So we finally arrived in Weimar. A beautiful small city in the state Thuringen which was a part of the former East Germany. Here is a shot of a typical street downtown.
This next picture shows the area around our apartment. It turns out that the sign on the right that looks like a T means dead end. I learned that one the hard way.
Our apartment is very nice. It's on the 3rd floor so I'm glad that we didn't have to move the furniture in! Whew! I'll have to take some pictures of the apartment building and the rooms tomorrow. We finally arrived around 9PM local time. As you can see, it is still very light outside at this time. I figure it is because we are that much closer to the North Pole than in the US. The weather is beautiful right now. It's sunny during the day and doesn't really get warmer than 75F and at night it's in the 50's.
So that's our first day. I'll try and catch-up in the next couple of days.
Enjoy,
Rico (aka Knuckles)
posted by jprg4evr at 3:24 PM
1 Comments:
Did you mean JIGawatts, like in Back to the Future?!
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