And it’s cold

I love the process of organising trips. Spreadsheets of infinite possibilities gradually resolving themselves into realities. The research is like a mini-version of the trip itself. But no matter how many times we do this, there’s an underlying truth: what seems sensible from a distance is at least somewhat more painful in reality. And there are two things  which make that clear.

The first is awkward flying times. Our flight out of Sydney left at 6am. That’s early we thought, when booking, but it’ll be fine. On the day a 6am flight means an alarm going off at 2:30am. And at that time in the night, it’s not yet morning, nothing really seems great.

The other is sitting in 30-degree heat in Sydney, packing for zero-degrees in Europe. I know it’s going to be cold, but I can’t fully get my head around what that means. It means that decision about ‘Do I really need another warm shirt?’, is about to go the wrong way.

It’s when you get off the plane in Frankfurt and go – oh, this is cold, that you realize every warm thing you packed is a necessity.

After a night in Frankfurt – the first part of which involved helping Minerva deal with the fact xe had slept through xer stop and was on the way to Hamburg instead of Berlin – we hopped on a train heading North. I should clarify, ‘we’ is Jennifer and me. Minerva is spending time in Berlin. Skye and Lea are in Paris. We will all meet up next week in Northern Germany for Christmas.

So Jennifer and I are making our way through some very pretty Winter countryside, all stark trees, white-painted houses, and pointy-steepled churches. Our destination is the town of Goslar in the Harz Mountains.

But the theory and the reality are a bit out of whack. You can’t plan for Minerva sleeping through a stop. For Skye and Lea not getting to the Louvre because staff decide to strike today. For our train breaking down and having us sit in the middle of nowhere for 40 minutes.

Anyway, we have few expectations of Goslar having chosen it almost at random. A quick look around proves it to be a pretty town of medieval buildings with a lovely Christmas market. In the interests of orientation we climbed the church tower for a great view of the town. In the interests of retaining our ears in the face a brisk sub-zero wind we retreated before dark fully fell.

Dinner was a full-on German Christmas market experience of bratwurst, gluwein, and kaizerschmarren. What it lacked in even a hint of health, it made up for in taste and atmosphere.