Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Trip to Germany and Austria

Made a one-week trip to Germany and Austria. It was awesome and I just have too much to blog about. So I am not going to even try to pack too much in this article. I went there with 4 other Malaysians; Nik, Aeni, Fairuz and Zak. We met in Dusseldorf; I flew from Stansted and they from Glasgow.

The map above was the route that we took for our trip.

Dusseldorf - Cologne - Iserlohn - Munich - Neuschwanstein - Salzburg - Vienna - Frankfurt

We rented a car. It was long-distance, so getting a fairly new car was important to make sure that we have a hassle-free journey and most importantly, arrive safely. We also thought that it was appropriate to get a Beemer to run on the Autobahn.

There were only two drivers to rotate for the entire journey; Fairuz and myself. At first it was quite unusual driving on right side of the road and having the driver's seat on the left. As a leftie, switching gears with my right hand has proven to be a challenge especially at tight winding corners where we have to readjust our mental image of more right space and use the left road marking as guide instead. It was the other way round in Britain. O yes, and also the left most lanes were for high speed and overtaking and the right for tortoises.

The Beemer has proven to be quite a "pain in the ass"; well, literally. Back passengers were complaining of getting aches on their bottoms after a few hours on the road (including me during "off-duty") and could not do without pulling over for body stretchings. Can you imagine getting a Deep Vein Thrombosis (or economy class syndrome) on your ass??? But it was nevertheless a fun car with impressive sound system and a very smart GPS guide. O yes, it does speed too even with 5 people in its body.

180kph on the Autobahn seemed pretty okay. Did I remember a Toyota Yaris zoomed passed us even with that speed...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The pics of you with the BMW easily look like those you'll see in ads! :)

I liked all of your travel pics. Makes me want to visit Europe!

Teri