after a very hectic week of renovating dorothee’s kitchen, living room, and bathroom, we are going up to the baltic sea, to fischland darß today — and as always, by train the 9:10 ICE from erlangen to nürnberg, then by ICE to hamburg, from where we’ll catch an RE train to rostock, change again, this time to the train to stralsund — which we’ll leave at ribnitz-damgarten around 17:25. from there the plan is to take a taxi to our hotel in dierhagen…quite a trip and we hope to arrive at the hotel at about 18:00.

we are both quite knackered from filling holes, painting, fixing, redoing the kitchen top, exchanging the kitchen sink and lots of trips to our local DIY store, obi (and i’m still a bit worried whether pipes to the kitchen sink will suffer a bout of incontinence or not — i hope not, but just to make sure we’ve turned off the water in the kitchen :-/

the train trip up to hamburg is not overly exciting…hamburg main station, however, is busy as if they just opened it: it’s friday early afternoon, lots and lots of people are going back over the weekend. it seems that a large chunk of that flood is going the same direction we are going: the train to rostock is chock full, overcrowded really, and the first class is soon flooded with overspill from the second class. as we leave hamburg and travel east, the weather turns: from grey, wet, and foggy to, increasingly, spots of sunshine — together with the rain clouds and the north-east german landscape it provides for some rather dramatic scenery! fantastic

inspite of being chock-full, the train is pretty much on time when we reach rostock and we do make the connection to our last train for the day to ribnitz-damgarten. the weather has cleared up almost completely and we enjoy the sunbathed landscape: rolling hills with little forests dotted around, and the occassional, very romantic lake rushing by. we do arrive almost on time in ribnitz, have no trouble getting a taxi and in no time at all are being chauffeured through ribnitz-damgarten, along the bodden (to our right), and arrive just shortly before 18:00 at the hotel blinkfüer! we’ve booked a suite — which consists of downstair-upstairs combination of lounge and bedroom with attached but self-contained bathroom with shower — very nice!

our first impression: very nice hotel.