Nürnberg - Frankfurt

The next morning we found our car, which we had left and ignored for two days, and it was covered in ice. We then managed to negotiate our way out of Nürnberg (I always felt this was a big achievement, being the navigator, and not understanding German, and therefore not really comprehending the street signs) and headed for Frankfurt.

It was a rather uneventful journey, where we spent most of the time skipping between relatively awful radio stations. We must mention the radio stations here: they seemed to have a fascination with Dido, and we heard the same songs over and over again. One station also had a particularly annoying jingle that they played everytime it was time to ring up for the current competition.

As we neared Frankfurt we needed to gauge where it was best to refill the car with diesel, as we needed to return the car with a full tank. We managed to locate the rental car entrance to the airport, returned the car unharmed (apart from a tiny chip in the windscreen, which the guy checking the car immediately noticed - probably mainly because the car had been brand new when we got it - it had been driven from Flensburg, up near Denmark, where it was registered, straight to Frankfurt, we reckoned).

We caught a taxi from the airport into the city, to the Marriott, where we were staying in luxury for our final night. This was the view from our hotel room:

We found a post office to post the fire helmet back home - it ended up taking up too much room in Tim's luggage - and then for something to do we caught the train into the city to the shopping district and had a wander.

We had dinner that evening in one of the three hotel dining rooms, along with some business men, and three American ladies who worked for Avon and seemed to be in Germany for a conference. We kept being given free courses by the waitresses (it was a bit weird) including a small plate of venison: "Excuse me, I didn't order this." "Oh no, that's a complementary dish".

We retired for the evening to watch tv - a novelty we hadn't seen since Possenhofen. This included a German movie that was actually set in Western Australia, but everyone spoke German, including the obligatory Australian Aborigine.