We got up early and had some breakfast in the hotel and then it was off the the Mercedes Benz Museum.. This museum is brand new and it was like nothing we had ever seen. The striking 8 floor glass and concrete architectural masterpiece housed the finest collection of any museum (of any kind) we had seen anywhere in the world.
The display was amazing, everything looked like jewellery. There would have been tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in the collection.

The building itself was a piece of art and housed the full history of Mercedes Benz company with full size buses, trucks and cars on all levels.

As with all museums there was a gift shop.. Again it was the most beautiful we had seen with Benz bears, tshirts, snow domes, big pencils and every Mercedes Benz car. It was 4 floors with every model for sale and on display- there was about every colour and assessor y. We got a few brochures which were basically hard cover books.

The highlight of the gift shop were the model like car sales girls.. Rex Gorrell has got a lot to learn about staff…they were hot.  The museum also had some famous cars- they had the real Popemobile, and Lady Di’s Benz- not the one she crashed in but a nice little sports version.
We took a while to work out how they got the buses and trucks in and worked out they must have had huge lifts in the 8 storey high foyer which lifted the 40 foot machines up into the display area. It must have been an amazing task.

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After the Benz museum it was back in the car for the 2 hour drive to Munich

We got to the hotel about 4 and headed into town on the subway which took about 10 minutes. Munich is a nice old town with plenty of historic buildings and a nice shopping district- but the place is built around beer halls- they are everywhere and beer is tasty and cheap.

We went to the world famous Hofbrahaus which was huge beer hall in city. Remembering Oktoberfest was on up the road the place was still chockers with people chanting songs and doing the zikki zacki.

The beer was tasty and served in heavy glass litre mugs. We only had the one and a giant pretzel an then did a bit of a tour of the city at night visiting a few establishments.

fun fun fun on the autobahn

Thousands of trucks doing 100ks on left lane majority of cars doing 130 the car speed limit in the middle lane and a selection of fancy German cars doing what ever on right some must be touching 180 or more.

The French motorway was Peugeots and Renaults and expensive tolls we spent about 20 euro $30 au getting from Paris to the border but the German ones have been free so far.

You don’t get to see much as they bypass townships and there’s a lot of concentration needed but when there’s big distances to travel like today they are the best way.

The day started about 8 when we left Metz got petrol about 1.30 euro a litre which must be touching 2 dollars then to the supermarket next door for breakfast. It must have been twice if not three times bigger than Coles or Safeway, the bakery had the best rolls and we got some tasty cheese to go with them.

First stop was the technic museum in Speyer it was about a two hour drive into Germany

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This place was amazing but by the end of the day insignificant compared to our next stop. The Speyer museum had a real 747 up a stick which you could climb and explore. They had dozens of planes helicopters, submarines, trains and cars. Got our first scnitchel and real German beer then onto Sinshiem which was 38 k away.

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Sinshiem also had a techno museum and their spectacular centerpiece was a real Concorde and the Russian Concorde copy the TU144. Both planes were mounted on the roof of the museum hall and had stairs so you could explore them. The museum had two huge halls filled with hundreds of classic cars, military equipment, trains, bikes and planes.

It was then back on the autobahn to Stuttgart tonight’s stop. The drive took about an hour the cars sat nav is the best thing it is taking us from door to door all we need to do is follow the instructions which the device talks to us it would have saved hours of driving and frustration already.

We got to our hotel and headed straight down to the Stuttgart beer festival – “Volksfest’  which was only a few stations away -what an amazing place Its hard to believe that Ocktober fest is going to be bigger.
The place was set on about 150 acres and there was rides amusements (with plenty of carneys) and huge beer halls full of happy Germans singing Zikki Zakki ….

The beer was cheap at and very tasty and food was tasty too had some nice sausages with potato salad…yum. We took it pretty easy as we had a big week ahead of us.. but did sample quite a few nice beers… And some of the beer wenches were pretty good.

The big beer tents would have had 3 to 4 thousand people in each of them chanting and singing along to the big party disco anthems. There’s no drunks and no trouble- everyone is having far to much fun to make a dickhead out of them self.

Another laugh was the security check as you drive into the airport. The guards check every to see if people have passports- they don’t look at them and then they look in the boot. They don’t open anything just look. Maybe they are looking for big red balls with fuses that say bomb- who knows? Doesn’t seem to achieve much.
Another piece of useless item to add to our list is this train pictured that takes you about 200m from the terminal to the gate. It would of been quicker to walk, an odd thing is it had no wheels just heaps of bags like a hovercraft. it must have cost a fortune but was stupid

It held about 50 people but 100 fit somehow and leaves every 5 minutes. It would take only 2 minutes to walk if you could and you wouldn’t need 6 trips to empty a plane full of passengers.

There a quiet a few specialty shops at the airport one of my favourites was the fruit and vegetable gift shop. Here you could buy a beautifully round cantaloupe in a pretty cardboard box for 13000 yen that’s about 140 Australian. Peaches were about 30 dollars each, but the most beautiful peaches you have ever seen. And my favourite a gift box with bows and ribbons with six mushrooms for about 80 dollars.

The convenience store near our gate had some great stuff too..15 inch long pickled radishes. Every type of cryopacked sea creature and gizzard and some great hello kitty trinkets.

The plane is a Boeing 777 and is chockers, fortunately we got exit rows seats which made it a bit more comfortable but there wasn’t much shoulder room.

The flight heads over china, the Siberian dessert and flies high over the Russian federation nearly as north as you can go. Moscow is quiet a bit to the south of the flight path. it then crosses Finland, Denmark, Holland and Belgium and into France missing Poland and Germany.

The entertainment system wasn’t as high tech and didn’t have the choices like the Qantas plane we had earlier but they had a pretty cool camera mounted under the plane. You could see the plane take off and land from a camera in the nose and then there was one under the plane so you could see everywhere it was going over- sort of like a live Google Earth.

Back earlier we mentioned weird Japanese stuff- well this flight had a interesting fashion. Many of the people were wearing face masks, don’t know if it was fashion or a disease in the cabin.. mmm weird.  The meals were ok there was a choice of beef burger meat or grilled cod miso flavoured and cuttlefish and seaweed salad- not hard to guess what we had.

We got into Paris about 4PM getting through the airport was a breeze it would have only taken about 20 minutes to get out. We then picked up our lovely European car..there were some nice Peugeots and a lovely VW Golf…but no we got the  Chevy Nibira.. it’s a Daewoo or a Holden Viva back home.
We ordered sat nav in the vehicle so after getting lost a few times while we programmed the thing we got to Metz for the night.

The trip took about 2 and a bit hours we got to our hotel. Weren’t too hungry and it was about 4AM Australian time so we had a couple of beers at the bar and went to bed.

G’day folks, welcome to our holiday blog. We hope to update it every couple of days if we can get wi-fi so drop back again to see what we have been up-to.

The trip started off delayed there was some problem with the plane and it had to be swapped from a Boeing to an Airbus. We were meant to leave about 9:30 but didn’t board until about 11:30 then there was a delay on the tarmac due to some pretty wild winds and rain. But the flight was pretty good and went 10 hours went fast having 4 seats thanks to the chatting up of the check in chick and the between us and a fantastic mulitimedia screen on the back of the seats that had 100’s of hours of the latest movies, games, music and tv shows.

We got into Narita Airport at Tokyo about 8:30 which was only an hour late. Getting out was dead easy and there was a bus which only took a few minutes to take us to the JAL hotel just around the corner.

The airport is about an hours train ride from the city so we stayed close, we will have more time in Tokyo at the end of the trip. The area was a bit of a industrial airport area so there wasn’t much to do, so we went over to the Sun K Us which is sort of a 7 11 with a strong squid smell, bought a few additional beers for later and went next door to the little Izakaya Bar for some goyza dumplings and some gydon and noodles then a few beers at the sky lounge on top of the hotel before going back to the room to get some sleep for our trip to Paris in the morning.

The hotel wasn’t too bad for a ‘free’ hotel one highlight was the toilet, yes like most Japanese toilets it had all the squirty things and buttons but there was this pretty interesting sign on the bottom of the lid warning people of the dangers of the toilet.