Tuesday, 9 July 2013

Austria to Germany to The Netherlands in just a few days!

We're sort of in wind down time, ready to go home. Our enthusiasm for being tourists have waned, so pics have been few and far between, driving has been just the motorways to get anywhere faster, and the boys are just keen to hang out in the hotel room. We've got 3 more nights and then we are going home... While we are all getting along really really well, I think we are ready for some normalcy.

From Vienna, we drove to Salzburg in Austria, then to Stuttgart via Dachau where we visited the Dachau Concentration Camp. The camp recommends only 12 year olds and up to visit, as there are some fairly graphic images of dead bodies lumped together in a mass grave, extreme starvation and concepts of inequality including imprisoning homosexuals, the disabled, as well as the Jewish and other religious sects, as we know. It was a stark reminder of how far we have come in the western world in regards to equality and freedom, which I think is a valuable lesson for my boys to understand how bad things really were. It was quite humbling, yet also such a huge reminder in how some laws are still so inhumane in terms of civil rights and how drastically the governments need to change them as quickly as possible.




We then got back on the A8 motorway, and somehow came to a dead stop about 40 minutes into our journey. A stop that added 2 hours onto our journey, as there had been a fatal accident on the motorway and they weren't letting any vehicles through. We were hoping to get to the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart to complete our day, but the compulsory standstill made it impossible. We decided to get up early the next day and go to the iconic monument to the famous car instead.

The next morning, we headed to the Porsche museum, and after spending about half an hour trying to find parking, we found the museum to be closed  :( So we took a couple of pics outside it to show that we tried!




We drove to Dusseldorf and found our funky hotel right in the heart of the cafe culture. Such a pretty town. It has a vibe similar to Melbourne, but a bit more relaxed and possibly a lot safer. We had dinner in a 1920s style bar, complete with iconic posters of Hollywood actors of its time, oversized light fittings, red leather and brass bar stools and lots of vintage style. They served traditional German fare, which got the ticks from all of us.


Today we drove to Amsterdam to our house boat for the next two nights. Unfortunately, I had too much work to do before we could venture around, but we walked through the streets to find some dinner, loving the beauty of the canals, the active street life, the playgrounds in the median strips of the streets and the social boating life on such a beautiful night. The only thing which I forgot to pre-warn my boys about is the avid use of pot smoking in this Dutch town. It's everywhere!





So that's been the last few days. We have two nights in Amsterdam, one in Brussels and then a drive to Paris to return the car and fly home. Our European leg has already hit 6200kms in 24 days, with probably another 500-600kms to go. It's been amazing and we will have the most incredible memories... and we have already earmarked which places we'd like to come back and see with more time on on hands.






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