A number of years ago I heard of a train in Germany that hung from the rail. Today I got to see it, and ride it. The day started off with a city bus tour around Dusseldorf. I had booked for this the day before but there was only one bus left for the day and I didn't want to rush myself to get to the bus stop to start the tour as it was a bit of a walk from the info centre. So I waited until today. Clearly they were setting up for an event this weekend as there are stalls and food trucks going...

Going to be a short one today as it was mostly uneventful travel. Today was all about farewelling Hamburg and travelling to Dusseldorf. I'm not really sure what to expect in Dusseldorf itself, I'm mainly using it as a base to see things in Wuppertal and Bonn but will happily see what I can find on the tour bus tomorrow. Old town is supposed to be quite pleasant (but what old town hasn't on this trip?) so that could be a good shout. I have to mention that if you are coming to Germany be...

Sometimes the plans just don't work out as you expected. A bit of a quieter one today. I had a ticket from Sunday to do a city bus tour and planned this afternoon to visit the city observation tower. The bus tour was a bit of a bust as I was sitting on the right side of the bus and most of the highlights were on the left. I'd probably say 80/20 left/right. So if you come to Hamburg (and I hope you do because Miniature Wonderland alone is reason enough to me) and do the Route C tour bus; sit on...

So this day is basically the entire reason I had Germany on my list, everything else has just been to make it a worthwhile passage through the country. Miniature Wonderland (Miniatur Wunderland in German) is the largest model railway in the world. It's in the Guinness World Records, the American's try to say they have the biggest, but they don't. Funny comment about that later. Anyway there's currently 14 different scenes including iconic European locations such as France, Switzerland and...

There wasn't a whole lot that happened today. A lot of train travel as I made the trek north from Stuttgart to Hamburg. Probably the only interesting thing that happened during the train ride was needing to leg it between transfers. I later found out that I didn't need to transfer but Deutsche Bahn decided to do it because transferring to the second train was faster by around 50 minutes. Anyway the problem with the transfer was that I was in carriage 2 of the second train and when I reached...

Right off the bat I can be honest and tell you the difference between Switzerland and Germany is already showing. The ankle was feeling much better today so I headed out after breakfast to get started on my sightseeing tour of Stuttgart. Decided today I'd walk to the S-bahn stop to see how I'd go getting there with the suitcase. Pretty fair to say I think I'll be getting the U-bahn back to Stuttgart Main Station to head to Hamburg on Sunday. The path is quite narrow, somewhat overgrown and...

As the Switzerland leg of the adventure comes to a close this post is just a few more photos that I've taken along the way and some general observations from my time here. The transport system is amazing. Without a doubt one of the best aspects of Switzerland is that you can get just about everywhere in the country using the public transit system. And it is incredibly supportive of riding the rails with bikes if you are so inclined to bring a bike along with you to get to those extra little...

It's a bit of a short one today, but don't worry there's a bonus post coming which I've been cooking up for the last few days. The ankle this morning was still a bit sore, better than yesterday but after another 15,000 steps I figured it would be best to actually take it easy today and not do too much walking, especially as I don't know how much I'll need to do getting to the hotel in Stuttgart tomorrow. So I made the decision early this morning that I'd ditch the Gotthard Tunnel Experience...