Guten morgen!

Today we woke up early. It’s a little strange here for my body. The clock on my computer says 2:30AM, and we’ve been up for a couple of hours already. Yet, we had a full night of sleep, and it is obviously well into the morning.

This morning we’re going to take the high speed train to Cologne. It’s raining this morning. Not too hard, but it greatly reduces visibility, and of course everything is wet. Stephan is going to meet us up there, so in effect he is going to race the train. He likes to drive fast – we’re often the fastest thing on the road here well over 200KPM. (120MPH+) But even he can’t outrun the train!

The trip will take us about a half hour in the train, but almost 90 minutes for the Audi.

Just stopped at the bank. I got 400 Euro burning a hole in my pocket now for the popout windows I brought. That is our money for the week though – so no spending spree.


We’re on the way back now. We rode the ICE from Montabaur to Cologne. The train only hit about 295KPM (180MPH), slightly slower than it is capable of, probably due to the light rain. We saw Stephan racing down the Autobahn to meet us – and he was flying! Quite amazingly, he made it to Koln only about 15 minutes after we arrived.

In Cologne, we saw the Dom (Cathedral), and walked part of the city. We took a little time out and toured the Chocolate museum. Swiss chocolatier Lindt bought Stollwerk a few years back, a high quality chocolate made in Cologne. The former owners family decided to “give back” and built a $30M museum to all things chocolate.

Chocolate Museum Video (on Google)