Today starts as a regular work day, so the electronic bird song starts at six ten. This time is perfectly calculated to allow me to hop into my cycling cloths, grab my soup from the bridge and start my bike commute to work, but today’s special. I quickly fold yesterdays clean laundry, fresh from the dryer, get a pretty haphazard start on packing a trunk and then exceptionally take the car to work.
I wrap up work shortly after noon and hurry home, where Arne has been preparing for our holiday by baking a banana cake (since we have two ripe ones left), getting general stuff like snow chains, backpacks, thermoses, .. Can you see it coming? We’re going to the snow! I use my trusted packing check list to catch up, we hug the cat goodbye and then we’re off.
We’re going all the way across Germany, to the most south-easterly corner of the country, in the foothills of the Alps, a total of 920 km which we’ve divided into unequal bits: today we drive about four hours to arrive nowhere in particular, to have a schnitzel for dinner and a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow a few hours to Konstanz, where we lived for 13 months in our younger years. We’ll walk around town, reminisce, have a nice dinner and a good night’s sleep, after which we’ll drive the final stretch to Inzell.
This first leg goes smoothly, the sky is grey and we have some rain now and then, but the temperatures remain just above freezing so there’s no risk of ice on the roads. We avoid the major arteries and get to Eisenberg without encountering one traffic jam. We do slow down for a few long stretches of construction on roads and bridges, but we’re not surprised. Germany is great fun for driving because of the good roads, but to keep the roads good they have to be maintained..
Once arrived, the evening proceeds exactly as planned, at least to start with. We check into the hotel, go have a schnitzel and are back at the hotel around eight thirty. The surprise is that we’re supposed to register our entry, we hadn’t checked that beforehand but only realize as we have a look at the nationnal and local coronna regulations. After dinnnner, I take some time on the laptop to fill in the Einreise Anmeldung – or registration of entry for Germany. I have to fill in our personal details, where we’ve been recently (Belgium – a high risk area for COVID), the exact address where we’ll stay the next few days and then upload our vaccination certificate. It’s all pretty efficient and something we should have done before arriving, but let’s stick with the fact that I completed it on the day of entry.
Febe writes 