At last a moment to....

...a moment to sit still and write a few thoughts down on our trip so far. Here's what we have done so far in a nut shell

• Flown from Melbourne to Frankfurt
• Trained it to and from the following cities Frankfurt, Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice
• Walked around looking at Art in ALL Cities
• Walked around looking at Shops in ALL cities
• Walked around a lot in ALL cities, *this close* to being lost OFTEN
• Braved 3 underground public transport systems, successfully
• Argued with officials on Trains and buses in at least 2 countries

The weather has been fabulous, the prices reasonable and tourists everywhere, now I know what it feels like to be stuck in a crowd at a Grand Final - without the atmosphere- meandering pushing shoving queuing. It has all been worth it though, I will do it again at the drop of a hat, especially Florence, or should that be, Firenze?

Day 1, Melbourne to Paris

The flight on Singapore Airlines went quickly, they had awesome inflight entertainment, I didn't even turn on my iPod, the inflight entertainment on the Lufthansa leg (Singapore to Frankfurt) was not as entertaining, but it had, I felt, better service. We landed in Frankfurt tired but glad to be there. With lots of time to kill we caught the train into the station from the airport, after a kindly chap helped us with the ticket system. Once on the station we stowed our gear, and hit the streets, Frankfurt seems a nice city, on the surface, we were only there for a couple of hours after all, clean and comfortable. We boarded our train to Paris with no worries and off we trundled. So far so good. Our first 'encounter' occurred when we crossed over the border between Germany and France. A ticket inspector comes into the carriage asking for our tickets, (we had purchased a 3 country Eurail pass)no worries so far. However, he 1 misread our tickets, and 2 we had not marked them appropriately. He then proceeded to tell us in broken English that this ticket was expired and he was going to have to 'void' it and charge us a fare from Frankfurt to Paris, €150.00 each! He left with our tickets, despite Nik's protestations and returned with a portable card machine. Charged us the appropriate amount and despite Nik's questions left with our ticket. ( All this was being discussed in poor English through his side kick, a Bridget Bardot lookalike with a train conductors hat). Several minutes later she returns with the ticket and her side kick who was apologizing profusely, He had read the ticket incorrectly, however we had failed to fill in our travel details, so he wrote us a note about the mix up and left us to our devices. We than arrived in Paris in one piece, with the station coming to life as these places do at this time of night!!