Let’s Tour The South

So we took a train to Frankfurt airport where we picked up a Rent-A-Car a nice Audi station waggon and we also picked up our son Nick we headed to Southern Germany for a little tourist and family visiting 😀

After a great first evening and getting over the day of travel and Nick getting over his day of Jetlag, we headed off for a drive to the Nuremberg Ring racecourse and just like everything else that we go to visit this time of year, it was closed that didn’t detour us. We had a great drive through the country. The next day because we’re freaks joined by our family member Lara who is a Red Bull fan and we drove to the Spa Francochamps race course in Belgium. Naturally, it was closed, but we did have a good look around and we went to a pretty cool museum in the closest town which had a bunch of cars and very cool things besides race cars going back hundreds and hundreds of years. On this particular quiet Saturday, I had a chance to find out just how fast an Audi station waggon will go. 😀

Sunday rolled around and myself, and Nick departed the Trier region of Germany and headed off to the Black Forest and Lahr. We stayed for an evening at our old friends Darryl where we also met up with Sven who I had not seen in over 20 years since the last time I was in this area. We drank a bunch of beers and reminisced about all the stupid things we did 20 years before. What a great time. Lahr is also Nick’s hometown and the home with the former Canadian forces base where at one time I worked and many of our Canadian friends were stationed. Things have changed quite a bit to say the least.

Another tour around the base with some more photos of the area and the old CFN building, which is now a construction site for affordable housing. We bid farewell to Lahr and headed to Baden Baden for a three hour swim in the famous spas. Next stop is our old stomping grounds of Rossweg and Len and Undi’s house. Len goes right back to the scene of the crime and the PTL party and Uni was a former nanny.

There are two cats at Len‘s house which wanted nothing to do with myself except to look at me like, why the hell are you here? 😂

During our time in the south, we had a chance to go to the Mercedes museum in Stuttgart and the Porsche museum in Stuttgart as well. Very impressive displays and a lot of cool old cars. We had a lovely dinner with my old work colleague Thomas and he told me everything that’s going on the firearm world in Germany and it doesn’t sound like it’s changed much 20 odd years later.

Some of the cars that were there included the Pope Mobile and Princess Diana‘s red Mercedes. Lots of pretty cool race cars that must say were cool and an original 1930s trophy from one of the first car races.

Porsche as well as having a museum and a pretty nice little restaurant is a factory that produces lots and lots of different cars. Who would’ve thought. 🏎️

We went with Len to one of the older buildings on The American Panzer Kasern. This particular building used to be field, Marshall Rummel’s headquarters and officers club. It’s currently a US Army fire department office. There is a auditorium and a dining/meeting room.

The larger room has a Roman style painting done in 1939 and legend has it that Hitler did the speech from the balcony as pictured above. There are also coats of arms for the various states in Germany. At the time a couple of them are now part of Poland and Austria was considered a German state at that time. This whole room is constructed with African teak, which is a wood that is currently unavailable anywhere in the world. It’s an unbelievably historical place to have checked out.

Another wonderful evening with Len and Undi and meeting up with all of their kids who are not kids anymore and it was time for Nick to depart on his vacation to Munich and Berlin. As per the photo below, he ended up in the Hofbrau house of Munich. He got himself a nice red Audi. One of the more stranger things we came across was the television commercial in English on German TV promoting investment in Ontario. No kidding. 😄

After my return journey to Trier our old friend Yvonne from Switzerland came to visit us for the weekend. We toured around old Trier and had some lunch meeting Karl Marx who was actually born there. Very historic and this is actually Germany’s oldest city.

Hanging up with the family we decided to make something Canadian, which was breaded chicken, wings, and Caesar salad that we made from scratch. Unlike in the old days. You can actually get chicken wings and a lot of restaurants as there’s a lot of American style food here in a lot of English used in menus and ads and in the language. I was very surprised.

With one more day left in the area and everybody gone to work Monika and I decided to go for a drive to Luxemburg city for a spot of lunch and to fill up on cheap gas. We ran into a Villeroy Bach Store of all things. We had some lunch at a cool Restaurant and I had a traditional meal which was called Kniddelen.

A wonderful day had by all

A couple of goodbyes to everybody and a wonderful time visiting with the families

We got up in the morning and we headed off to Frankfurt airport with a stop in Kaiserslautern for lunch at Nord See which is a fish restaurant we had not eaten out for quite a while. A goodbye to our Audi that treated us really fine. A lovely evening at the Hilton in Frankfurt airport impressive mall type place called The Squire.

This place integrates hotel airport train stations all of it in one very impressive facility. We then took a flight to Lisbon Portugal, where we hung out for three days waiting for our return to Toronto. 🤓

A nice few days in Lisbon one being the evening, one being a rainy day and one being a beautiful sunny day that we ended up with a lovely outside meal with lobster and shrimp curry.

Our two months here in Europe have been very special and a lot of fun and seeing old friends and family was also great.

We will be back.

For now, we’re heading back to Toronto to regroup in March head to Victoria at the end of March and back to our RV.

We will continue our summertime springtime RV adventures.

Until next time, thanks for following along, we will be in on this blog in April

Cheers