As much as I enjoyed my trip to see my family, it is exciting to be heading home.
My parents still live in the same house that I grew up in, a house that housed six people for much of my childhood. Over the Christmas holidays it gained my paternal grandparents, bringing the number to eight. So it’s a large house, too large for my parents who live there alone, along with Kara the cat.
Destination: Sleep
Whist it is filled with childhood memories, it is no longer the place I think of as home—that’s the flat in Weimar, where my Ikea Bed awaits me with freshly laundered sheets and a stack of books to read. I should be home around Noon Monday, depending on my flight and the vulgarities of Die Bahn and the Frankfurt-Leipzig substitute InterCity trains—I’m willing to be that I won’t actually get home until later in the afternoon.
December promises to be a busy month work-wise, at least until the 18th. On the 19th the carpets will be cleaned and we are banished for 24 hours—effectively pushing us into the office’s holiday break season. I don’t currently have any travel plans for December. I’m glad I didn’t book a trip to Thailand, but I hope the situation improves so that J (Germany Doesn’t Suck) can enjoy his annual holiday.
For awhile I was thinking about heading to far northern Norway, but then, much to my surprise, I discovered that I am not the only person with such an insane idea: plane tickets were well over 500€ (requiring overnight stays both coming and going), and hotel rooms were in excess of 120€ a night. Such prices killed heading north of the Arctic Circle to the land of 24 hour nights.
I also tossed around the idea of popping over to Prague, but what used to be a simple connection in Dresden has turned into a nightmare double connection in Leipzig and Dresden, with train timings that make me suspect that what used to be a four hour journey will turn into a five or six hour trip, complete with an uncomfortably long layover in the Dresden Hbf. The current InterCityExpress train situation is a real headache.
Maybe it really will be a home-bound month—I certainly have the stock of movies and books to keep me entertained—all I need now is a supply of hot chocolate, cookies, and blankets to snuggle under.
See you on the other side of the pond.
best hot chocolate is awaiting you at the office! welcome back!
Hope you had a good trip back across the pond.
If you want to travel North, instead of Norway, how about Iceland? The price is right, but not sure how feasible it is from ‘your’ side of Germany. I went last year in November (from Frankfurt) and found it superb–although prices are much better now.
I cannot wait for break…I also have a nice reading list. 🙂
@nts: Danke… I’ll be there Thursday morning
@heather: strangely, I suddenly have plans for travel in December… but the Iceland tip is a good one. I might try to do it sometime in 2009, depending upon work.
@koko: We can share what we read…