A weekend in Essen

I am in Essen, Germany. And since we will go on a skiing trip to Austria next week I decided to take the ferry and drive my car over to Germany. You may have heard that the current weather in England is crazy, tons of snow, the airport London Heathrow was closed down for a while and so were many, many roads. The reason was simple: since usually it doesn't snow that much here England decided to save money and don't buy any snow plows. Well, maybe they will reconsider this now. But back to my trip: Even with almost all of England under a nice white cover East Anglia (our area) is almost snow free. That meant I didn't have any problems to drive from Thetford to Harwich on Friday early morning. I mean real early morning, sometime between getting up and waking up. It was an easy, 1h 20 min drive. The ferry went from Harwich to Hoek van Holland and it took 6.5h. I had my own cabin and had enough time to take a nap and relax before I had to go on the 3 hours drive through the Netherlands. And that was really crazy. It was a Friday evening and it seemed like everybody was on the roads. It took me much longer than I expected. But that didn't matter, because Dave's flight from Stansted to Germany was late, too. Yes, Dave spent the weekend here with me.

We were invited to a 70th birthday party of my friend Marcus' father. And it was a great and crazy party again. The whole thing took place at an old castle, a very small one, but a real castle. Have a look:




Marcus and Juergen performed the German song show they did on our wedding. And the highlight was our performance as village people.










Everybody has so much fun. It was a great day.

The plans for the coming week are mainly to clean of the first floor of my house now. Marcus and Eva, who are renting it, bought new furniture and also want to move in all of Eva's stuff now. That means I will have a lot of work with sorting things our, driving to the recycling center and get everything else packed. Marcus and another friend, Frank, will help me on Tuesday. Yes, this is the next step to my final move. And it feels very right.
And then I am so much looking forward to our one week trip to Ochsengarten, Austria starting next Saturday. But this will be another post here on my blog.