Prague to Frankfurt (Monday 11th September 2017)

This morning we said good-bye to Prague and the Czech Republic. Prague is a lovely city full of life and interesting things to see and do. The lanes and streets are fun to explore. Prague is very much a “walking city”, easy to navigate with plenty of good shopping, eating and drinking everywhere. It’s also a city big enough to make an excellent tram service a very useful tired traveller’s friend. To be honest, we were both tired of all the tourists. The city population seemed to made up of 90% tourists, 10% locals. I can’t complain because we contributed to the 90%, of course. And the fact that the city is so full of tourists is not a reflection on the city or people of Prague. I guess it underlines that Prague is a very good place to visit.

A short taxi ride took us to the train station. As expected yesterday’s visit to the station stood us in good stead and we were able to get to the bus departure point with an hour to spare. Our bags were loaded in to the bus just before departure at 10:04 and we proceed to tale our seats. And what seats they were! We found ourselves upstairs at the very front of the bus. All we had in front of us was a huge windscreen and a magnificent view. The bus left a few minutes late, making its way through the Prague suburbs to the road to Nuremberg. The country-side was lovely, exactly what I had expected to see. Rolling green hills with cattle grazing, ploughed fields, fields of maize and forests of oak and pine. All along the 3.5hr journey were also fields of solar panels and wind turbines – not ugly at all. Reassuring actually, that at least in Europe the people are doing something about the plight of our planet.

Because of the traffic in Prague and our slightly last departure we had resigned ourselves to the fact that we would miss our connection in Nuremberg. We had only 20 minutes to get from the bus stop onto the train. The bus arrived at Nuremberg ZOF a few minutes late, our bags were not the first to be unloaded, so that took a few more minutes. Even though the station was just across the road we were still up against it. Anyway, we gave it a shot. We walked at rapid pace across the road and then down the street to the station entrance. Last night we had worked out that the train would leave from Platform 6, so at least we knew where to go. Right inside the entrance clear signage told us which way to got to get to the platform – we could go right or straight on. We went right and quickly found Platform 6 at the top of a set of stairs. I raced up the stairs to find no train at the platform – hooray, as we had managed to get there with a full five minutes to spare! As it turned out the train was running 20 minutes late and we still almost missed! It was a very long train and we were standing no where near our nominated carriage so we ran down the platform for a short while and just jumped on anywhere. But we got on in 1^st class and couldn’t make to 2^nd class from there. So we jumped off again and ran further down the platform until I heard the station master’s whistle blow and jumped straight back on. We found our seats as the train began to roll out of Nuremberg. Phew! Two hours later we arrived in Frankfurt.

We have booked into a little boutique hotel, Hotel Cristall, right next to the station. After dropping out bags we wander over to Kaiserstrasse, directly opposite the grand main entrance to Frankfurt Hbf. A beer was the first order of the day so we pulled up a chair outside a nice looking popular bar and ordered a drink. I noticed the unusual name of the bar “Kakadu’s” and remarked the same to Kerry. She looked over my shoulder and read the sub-text “An Australian-style bar”. Stone he crows! We’d traveled half way across the world just to walk into an Australian bar in the heart of Germany! We enjoyed our drinks and a chat with a couple of American lads and then left to find somewhere else for dinner.

In keeping with the evening’s theme of non-German establishments we chose a Chinese noodle bar. It was always going to be a good choice when we saw that we we the only non-Chinese people in there! And it was very very good indeed. One of the partrons helped us with the selection of dishes from the menu. We topped of our international “progressive dinner” with an Italian gelati as we walked back to the hotel in the drizzling rain.