We had time for a leisurely breakfast before having to check out and catch our train to Frankfurt. When we tried to settle up at reception with Traveller’s Cheques, they informed us that they could not accept them. I see a definite pattern here…

The train station was across the road from the hotel, so it took almost no time at all to lug our bags across and sit in the cafe at the station for a while, drinking my second coffee of the day in my case.

Several trains pulled up at our platform, including some double-decker carriages. I’d never seen anything like that before. I wondered if our train would be like those, but as luck would have it, it wasn’t. The ICE high-speed train just had plain ordinary single-story carriages. Car 23 was somewhere near the middle of the train. We stashed our bags in the above the seat racks and found some seats. Shortly afterwards, the train pulled away from the station and we concentrated on watching the Dutch countryside.

It’s hard to take pictures on the train. Just as I was positioning and focusing, a tree in the foreground would whip by and mess up the shot. I can’t help but feel that if I were more proficient with pre-setting suitable f.stop and aperture settings, I’d get more acceptable photos under these extreme conditions.

I saw only one old-style windmill, but I was unable to snap it in time. “No worries”, I thought, “there’s bound to be others.” There never was. There were many turbine-style ones though. After about an hour I tired of taking pictures and just watched the scenery go by.

I have no idea when we crossed the border into Germany, but looking at the route it must have been fairly immediate. We went through Duisburg, Dusseldorg, Koln, Bonn… In total it was about a three hour journey, with the surroundings slowly becoming more industrial in nature.

Eventually we arrived at Frankfurt.

We waddled down the platform and found the taxi stand and thrust a piece of paper with the name of the hotel written down on it so that we wouldn’t literally get lost in translation. The taxi driver took some back roads but eventually we found some familiar landmarks and we pulled up at the Lindner Congress Hotel. I remembered it from my last visit in 1998.

We checked in, went up to our room, and collapsed. Later on we joined the conference organizer, R, for a very pleasant dinner in the hotel restaurant.