Spent the first day in Heidelburg with Simon and Sam wandering around the city trying to stay awake to get over jeg lag. We ended up at Heidelburg castle, wandered around the grounds and stopped to enjoy our first german beer
Then we had to go to work.... but it wasn't all work as our German collegues had organised visits to a winery, brewery and few castle's (there's one on every hill). We also had a day trip by train to Wuppertal, about 3 hrs north of Heidelburg. Wuppertal is home to a suspension monorail system which of course the engineers loved (they were pretty cool)
On the way back to Heidelburg we stopped in Cologne and visited the famous cathedral nearby. We climbed up to the top and then back down via the medieval bell, which just happened to chime while Simon and Sam were posing for a photo, giving us all a heart attack
The following weekend we drove south to the Black Forest on a mission to buy a "real" cuckoo clock. We ended up stopping at the first town at the edge of the Black Forest called Baden-Baden and after walking around the main shopping area finally found one shop selling cuckoo clocks, but the owners had closed up for the day and were not interested in opening up for us. A few minutes later Sam spotted the owners walking down the street so he ran after them and managed to get them to go back and open up the shop for us so that Sam and I could buy our cuckoo clocks. The next day Sam and I had a few hours to spare before heading up to Frankfurt airport so we went for a drive along the Nekar river and found some old castle ruins in some of the surrounding hills.
The drive from Heidelburg to Frankfurt airport gave Sam the opportunity to try and beat Simon's top speed on the autobahn
I was looking forward to getting home. Managed to get the cuckoo clock through customs with no problems. Even the box had its uses....
