Ilmesmühle to Heilbronn

Again we had to say sad ‘good byes’ today. We had a wonderfully relaxing week with our lovely friend Holger at his home, Ilmesmühle. The week went by very quickly and we are taking with us many special memories and moments.
The children really enjoyed their first week of no pressure and responsibilities since leaving Auckland and certainly made the most of it.
The mill was a place full of nooks and crannies waiting to be found and explored. Sometimes the children were gone for two or three hours finding new areas and they played imaginatively with what was on offer. Harry Potter featured strongly during the week and Ben was a particular fan of the trap door leading into the cellar…

The train was a bit delayed and it was cold in Fulda that day.

Here we are at Fulda train station saying farewell to Holger. We were all sad, but also know that we will have a re-union at some stage, and have lovely memories to take with us.

We had to change trains once in Würzburg for which eight minutes were allocated. I should have listened to my wise aunt who has worked for the Deutsche Bundesbahn (German Rail) for a couple of decades, and who had advised me to perhaps change the train trip and go via Stuttgart. While this may take a little longer she thought it would give us more time to change train. As it happened we were late leaving Fulda and we then missed the connection and had to wait for 1 hour 45 minutes.

In the end that wasn’t as bad as what we first imagined as we whiled away our time eating. Holger had made us a lovely picnic with carrots, mandarins, mozzarella/tomato/basil baguettes (Leberwurst for Nick) as well as plenty of chocolate bars too. We managed to eat all of that and then the children spotted a sausage stall and we shared a big ‘Bockwurst’ (a bit like a Frankfurter, but bigger and tastier) on a baguette roll. They all really liked it and decided to have one more, then another and another after that. So we had all of Holger’s picnic and then four enormous baguette rolls with Bockwurst.

That didn’t stop us having a big dinner of Maultaschen (German Ravioli type yummies) and salad that Pascale had expertly prepared for us.

So, here I am back in Heilbronn…let the fun begin…

Tschuessle

Tanja