DAS ROAD TRIP The Suspects Sammy - the boy from Darwin who called everyone "blue" even confusing the Germans who spoke fluent English and a tendency to donate a shower gel to every hostel we stayed in. Matty - conservative country Victorian but prone to sudden outbursts of crude comments. Gins - girl from same place as Russell Crowe who needed 3 layers of thermals, sleeping bag and blanket to sleep and was permanently attached to her mobile phone. And yours truly, Treggas All packed in with 4 huge backpacks and 2 tents into the Silver Bullet (Opel Vectra) for 16 days of crazy times. I began the trip by myself and met some other Aussies on the plane to help navigate the Silver Bullet to the campsite. Unfortunately, they didn't know a map from a beer so our hope turned to asking the local constabulary. They pointed forward then drove through the red light...so we followed them and overtook them when they stopped. Love the Germans! Sammy woke up next to a fat chick so it was a very, very early start to Austria. Upon approaching the Austrian border control I flashed out the old Australian passport to be told we were trying to drive into a secured military base. Stayed in Salzburg, a nice town with "No kangaroos in Austria" T-shirts everywhere. We made up our own "Sound of Music" tour from a brochure even though none of us had seen the film but it was beautiful scenery, especially Hallstatt. Hallstatt had a Beinhaus (bone house) where for centuries they had been burying people (dead of course) for 10 or so years. They then dug them up due to lack of space, painted their skulls and stacked them on a table with the rest in a small building in the cemetary, with the rest of the bones stacked underneath. Those crazy Austrians! Stopped in at a huge festival in Linz with the biggest bratwurst any of us had seen. While Sammy visited every bank in Vienna trying to work out the PIN number for his Australian account the rest of us saw the sights, especially the numerous differently painted horses. Returned to Munich for another dose of Oktoberfest. The tents were too crowded so we returned to the campsite and sat by the beer vending machines (love those Germans!) playing cards and fooling some South Africans that we were actually here on a Christian Camp. Yeah right! We decided to leave Munich for health reasons as the campsite was beginning to flood turning into a giant mudpit, we were unable to have showers, our tent had leaked, all our clean clothes were in a car miles away which Sammy had the keys for and was off somewhere. So we went to Stuttgart which has their own version of Oktoberfest, Canstatter Volksfest. 1/4 price 1/2 chicken under the table from a Rusian guy. To expand our culture and language we learnt a new song: "Eins, zwei, drei, vier (literally 1,2,3,4) Let's drink some beer" Drove to the Rhine wine river region with an excess of castles. We managed to stay in one perched on a cliff. Matty and I tasted the local specialty, riesling, at a small Weinhaus (wine house) since 1579. Cheap as anything we drank bottles of it which helped us to sleep with the hundreds of little kids also staying at the castle and running rampant. Surprisingly, no hangover or ill effects from the wines at all. Drove through the Moselle wine region and arrived in Cologne seeing the sights then settling into one of the many private breweries that has been serving the local beer type, Kolsh, in tall thin 200ml glasses since 1318. Europe truly is an old place! Dusseldorf makes another type of beer, Alt, which is dark and semisweet so we stopped for a try and arrived in Bochum, a town none of us had ever heard of. Luckily, we were meeting our German friends, Janine and Malte. Even luckier, Malte's parents, Heike and Klaus, owned a pub and seemed only to happy to feed us and give us free drinks as long as we send them a postcard in the future. Sammy almost ended up staying in Bochum to work in the bar and help one of the patrons set up for a Sex exhibition. They took us to a nightclub that looked like a discount store. A mass exodus of people at midnight had us querying the selection of place until we were informed all 16 years olds had to leave at this time. Great work! The even better thing was that all drinks were 1 Euro ($1.70). Trekked on to Berlin, which is a magnificent city, to allow our livers to recover. Our last night we stayed in the spacious Italian Embassy in Nuremberg. This town was once the centre of Hitler's SS rallies. Cheers Mark