Opinion: Attractions of the Rhineland (Day 1/5)

May 2009. A school trip to Germany is on offer. I, enthused, take the offer. Five days in the Rhineland, with a coach and several activities, as well as four nights stay in the wonderful Hotel Lindenhof.

This piece is an Opinion because it's more of a recall diary than a review, and much less proffessional than a normal review.

This particular piece focusses on Days One, a turbulent day on the trip, in which I contemplated returning home...

Day One

We arrive the the coach at around midnight, where the coach is waiting. I've got a bag of stuff, and I'm wearing jeans, boots and a tee shirt. I sit next to my partner, who I allocated myself with at an earlier date. He;s not the closest of friends, but I can trust him.

Of course, it's my idea that I might be able to get some sleep on this coach, being past midnight 'n' all. But that doesn't come to pass for quite a while, with screaming and singing kids all over the coach. The seat and my position in it is uncomfortable, and the mix of fatigue and confusion left me confused and slightly mad. Luckily, around half-past twelve, they were told to shut up and I got some kip.

Only four hours kip, if I remember. When I woke up, we had gone into a service station, where the drivers of the coach swapped over, and a few boys were allowed off the coach to go to the loo. When I got back on the coach, I took an empty set of two seats. Much more comfortable. We were driving for the next three hours, with a few more stops for whatever reason, until we got to Dover.

It was a foggy day on the channel. I'd never seen the White Cliffs before, and so it was an interesting thing to do. We waited a bit but then got on an earlier ferry, which was another new experience. After a kip and a good walkabout, my thoughts of confusion were wiped out by my intrigue in exploring the ship to its limits, going through all sorts of halls and balconies. I was hungry, as it was seven in the morning, so I decided to go to the "Parisian Cafe" and order a Pan au Chocolat. I wasn't really in the mood for French, so I asked the waiter in English. What I get in response is a long string of seemingly-nonsensical sentences that I neither understood nor cared about. I think he was saying that there were none left. Regardless, I just gave an apprehensive, "Ok" and walked off.

Thinking I'd get better fare downstairs, I went down to the Economy Area, where most of the others were getting their food. It was a horrid imitation Full-English. I wasn't going near it. I even took a photograph of it, that's how much it disgusted me.

One of the things I loved was how I could stand at the bow of the ship, watching the cliffs of Dover dissappear and the beachy-coastline of Northern France emerge from the fog. I managed to stave off sea-sickness for a while but eventually I gave in and sat down near the four teachers, who were telling each other stories of their childhood ( horriffic, horriffic things).

The coach passed through France (one service station), Belgium (one very rude service station) and The Netherlands, before we entered Germany. On the way into Germany we hit noon, and so we stopped off at a German side-of-road restaurant that had lots of lovely food, a semi-pornographic gift shop and an automatic handdryer.

Eventually we got to the Rhine, which was a lovely sight. The sparkling, golden waters of the Rhine, with the vineyards on either side. Our hotel was a small one on the surface, but it had Tardis like qualities. Behind the fascade out front was a large quad of newly built hotel rooms. We were in room thirty, a rarity as it had the single, two-matress bed and little else. Oh, and there was a TV full of German Channels. (Except at six in the morning, at which it was English stock markets.)

Our first dinner was in the function room; a vegetabley soup for starters, fish and chips for main and then a pudding that not many people liked but I thought was passable. And then we found out someone had brought, "And Now For Something Completely Different" on DVD. I would have run in fear, but I had not been exposed to the genius of python, nevermind the dark absurdities of their first film. Not dark as in content. Dark as in the sheer lack of god-damn funny for the first hour.

Anyway, after that pain we went to bed and it was there that I began to break down. My partner was tired, as I was, having had about five hours sleep out of the past fourty eight. You could say that he was tired enough to snore. And how. I was surprised he wasn't disturbing the neighbours. I tried to wake him up, but every time he came close to consciousness he fell back into sleep within seconds.

I had my escape all planned out. I would walk down the Rhine until I came to a dock, and then I would hijack a boat, travelling up the Rhine and across the North Sea to Hull, where I would get my Euroes changed back into pounds and take a taxi back to Manchester, where I could catch the bus home and enjoy the rest of my holiday. Fortunately, I managed to get some sleep after an hour of reading. And thus ends Day One.

Thanks.