6:30 i’m awake since a couple of minutes ago, woken up by a car starting outside (well, it couldn’t have started inside the hotel now, could it?). talk to doro and then get ready: shower, packing, breakfast and off to the railway station. struer at 7:15 in the morning is not much livelier than at 23:10 in the night, you will be glad to learn.

my friend, the drizzle rain, has gone as well and a mixture of real rain and dry-ish weather comes along on my way from north of denmark all the way down to hamburg. i change trains in fredicia and padborg and arrive with the FLX by the nord-ost-bahn in hamburg dammtor at 14:16 almost on the dot. interestingly enough the conductors in the FLX don’t verify my online ticket (which really is not online but rather printed on paper and thus as offline as one can imagine, i only bought it online) instead they just take a close look at it and then decide that “it’s just fine, thank you”.

hamburg dammtor station turns out to be much nicer than hamburg main station: the audience is not as “deprecated” (no heroin addicts street worker outside the station, for example) and at the south end of track 4 on the ground floor is dö-bab which does a very decent döner kebab (lots of salad and meat, good sauce, good value @ EUR 2.99). in the bakery i buy two raisin brötchen and at the coffee to go… a tall caramel macchiato. the ICE to munich arrives on time and i manage to allocate a double seat and settle in.

14:56 we leave hamburg dammtor on time, outside it’s raining steadily, the next stop is hamburg main station followed shortly afterwards by hamburg harburg and then it’s roughly 90min through north germany to hannover and slowly it’s becoming dawn and then dark.