The LazyAssGeek’s

Turns out that one is also paved with good intentions. Such as the intention to write a little bit here & there during the trip. It’s now a week since we drove from Köln to Öhringen and I barely found time to finish up the post about Amsterdam and the first night in Köln. We’re now in the very small village where Biggi’s father lives, and I’m sure it has a name but I have absolutely no idea what it is at the moment. So what I’ll try to do now is get us from Tuesday leaving Köln through Friday.

Tuesday morning we headed to DYNOS where we again met with Klaus-Peter. After a coffee and a brief meeting we drove over to the production building and toured it. Nothing much had changed to my eye since 2000, though I’m sure there are tons of details that have changed. But making Vulcanized Fibre hasn’t changed much in 100 years, you take giant rolls of paper, feed the number of plys required to get the resulting thickness you’re aiming for, dip them in a really nasty Zinc Chloride acid bath and then rinse it for hundreds of linear meters of rollers. Andy & Biggi seemed to enjoy the tour, though that wasn’t unexpected from Andy since he’s a guy and it’s giant machinery making stuff(insert Tim Taylor grunt). I was worried about Biggi being bored to tears but it worked out OK.

After the tour we hit to road South toward Öhringen. We started off on the autobahn (most Americans think of “The Autobahn” as a specific road, but really it’s just German for “highway”) but after a bit we turned off to side roads and drove into Heidelberg. It’s a beautiful old city, though we didn’t have time to do anything in the actual city aside from drive through it. We did drive up a winding road to the castle and walked around snapping tons of pictures. The most amazing bit of the castle is actually a ruin. One of the typical tower cylinders you see had split almost in half down it’s height, with the outside part mostly just sliding down do the ground to that it still rests against the castle. It’s sort of like opening a dollhouse where you can look inside. I could try to describe more, but picture being worth more words than even I am able to type (ok, more than YOU are willing to read) just click the photo gallery link and you’ll find tons of pics.

We stayed off the autobahn for the rest of the trip, winding along the river Neckar. It’s a gorgeous ride that Andy & Biggi have done tons of times on motorcycles and even in a Volkswagen bus a time or two. You pass though village after village built into the hills on either side of the river, with the occasional castle-like villa perched hillside from time-to-time. They’re the kind of roads I love to take the Vette out on(cue the foreshadowing music).

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No, not me, duh, but we’ll come back to that later…

So we were somewhere in Amsterdam when last we met, dear reader (not you Jim, the other readers, both of them). All 3 of us slept very late and after waking up a bit Biggi declared she wanted breakfast, even though it was 1:00pm by the time we were motivated enough to leave the room. Andy hunted up a place to aim towards on Google and off we went. Our hotel was right by Centraal Station which is quite a building, so we wandered across the street in that direction, took some pics and worked our way towards our destination. We didn’t make it to that restaurant because Biggi was HUNGRY and our walk took us right by a place the declared breakfast all day, bingo! An excellent call it turned out to be as well. Not only was the food good, but the coffee was superb.

After the refueling stop was finished we wandered along and through some of the many shops that line the streets. We stopped in the central plaza in town where there were a number of street performers, including a Darth Vader I had to get a picture of for Aidan & Owen. Then we headed into Madame Tussaud’s. The wax figures were the usual mix of local figures who you would never know unless you were a local and movie & music celebrities. Most of the statues were pretty good, some were very good, some just made you say “hmmmmm.” They had a Pirates of the Caribbean exhibit which included a small “house of horror” setup with live actors. There were a group of young girls behind us which made this a great deal of fun as the provided an excellent scream-track. Biggi added her own music to the mix when the actor who was jailed like Jack Sparrow aboard the Black Pearl started making grabs for us. Overall it was an overpriced but fun way to spend an hour or so.

We did some more shopping & touring the remainder of the daylight hours, visiting a couple of old haunts of Andy’s. One of them was a pub called Black & White, or had been called that anyway. It obviously had changed ownership and shifted focus from coffee shop/pub to café. The other haunt was much more successful and where we stopped for dinner, an Italian restaurant that doesn’t look like much but serves very good food for Amsterdam-reasonable prices. After walking all afternoon we decided to ride the trolley back to Centraal Station and stop at the hotel before we went out into the Red Light District.

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10-11 hours of sleep after 30 hours of work, travel and seeing some sites and I have a bit of energy to post this first thrilling entry!

The travel went about as well as one can hope for, <snob>at least when flying coach</snob>. It did start with Andy sending a nasty e-mail to Ranjan because AGAIN the boy or his pet travel agent didn’t listen and we wound up with 3 of the 4 sets in the middle instead of having a window seat. Air France service was pretty good and the food was actually edible. Andy managed to get some sleep but Biggi didn’t sleep at all and I managed about 45 minutes or so at the end of the flight. I made up for the lack of plane-sleeping in the car, managing darned near 4 hours of sleep on the 5 hour ride from Paris to Amsterdam. Our chariot is an Opel Zafira, a decent if boring minivan-esque machine. We made it to Amsterdam with a minimum of traffic & fuss, not that I really remember much of it. Having a car in Amsterdam is not at all cheap, 47E per day!

Amsterdam itself is of course a pretty cool place. There are bicycles everywhere and when walking around you need to keep your head on a swivel so as not to get run down. You notice quickly that the bicycles are all pretty old and crappy. Andy & Biggi tell me this is because there is a very active bicycle stealing ring in the city so there’s no point in owning a nice one when it will just be stolen anyway. After a short time in our room at the NH Barbizon Palace we took a walk around the city a bit and had some Chinese food for dinner at a completely forgettable restaurant. Biggi decided that she had been awake long enough and so we headed back to the hotel to drop her off, comfy in bed with the TV and a Corona. Andy & I headed back out.

Our first stop was at a bar called Rock Planet, a small, college-bar sort of take on a Hard Rock. Still a cool place with lots of rock memorabilia on the walls, cold beer and great rock music playing really loud. And of course a coffee shop next door, which helped take the edge off us and the loud music. Deciding after 2 Grolsch that we should probably do some walking while we were still able, we headed out to walk around the red light district. It was still on the early side so things were just starting to warm up, but the ladies were already in their windows for your shopping pleasure. The majority of the “windows” are actually doors to small efficiency hotel-room sorts of setups. While most folks would picture a fairly wild party area, it’s actually a fairly typical European shopping style of place. Hard to describe but I think the best I’ve come up with yet is New Orleans, only stoned.

We kept walking around looking for a likely place to have a couple of pints and wound up just outside the touristy area. The bar looked fairly typical at first glance, but 1/2 way through our first bier it became obvious that we were not from an island that spoke a language with a heavy French influence, and they were. We hung around for one more beer cause hey, 4E for a 1/2 liter is cheap in Amsterdam, then we moved on.

We wound up at the Cafe Trinity or some such, after I thought Andy was done but he found a 3rd wind as we were walking back to the hotel. This place was in the red light district, if barely, but had good energy and Grolsch on tap. Plus the 3 barmaids were a lovely mix of dark, mocha and “holy crap girl you need to at least look at the sun every so often.” But still, all nice to look at, and very nice to chat with as well. Which Andy got to do more of, because a couple of young Brits wandered in and after amusing one of the barmaids when I told the one that turned out to be Gus that if he didn’t want to pay 5E for a Bud then he should stay home and drink instead of going out in Amsterdam. The other one turned out to be Sam, who almost immediately pushed my American buttons by starting in on a rant about how few Americans have passports. Well we had a good drunken conversation, Andy kept chatting up the barmaids (at which point I wondered aloud to him how the married guy wound up talking to the lovelies while I was talking to 2 blokes from Manchester – he reminded that’s cause I’m a dumbass, point to Andy) and all-in-all had a good time.

We left Cafe Trinity and discovered Biggi still awake! Though she claimed to have just re-awakened and taken an Ambien to make sure it was the last time. Before long we were all 3 asleep and we’ll leave Day 2 for the next post….