hi from germany.

we arrived here on june 18th - tired from a 10 hr flight from south africa. it was a night time flight, but didn't get much sleep. the kids seem to catch a few zs though. arriving in madrid a bit late, we had 30 mins to go thru customs and catch our connecting flight to frankfurt. sound easy - not when the terminal buildings are a 10 min train ride from each other..and finding the right gate once you get to that terminal area was quite a mission. but thanks to nicola, we had our gate no before we left the plane , none of us had looked and wearrived at the stn terminal not knowing where we were going. quite stressful, but phew we made it and then we get on the plane, and had no food or drink for two hours because you had to pay for it, and we had no euros, isabel grizzled a bit , but luckily i had some sweets somewhere!

arrived in frankfurt and after a bit of fluffying around managed to get the bus to get our brand new citroeon on lease....very nice. the guy did a quick run thru the paperwork and then the controls and then sent us on our way. very scary. we carefully poked our nose out onto the road and managed to navigate our way on the wrong side of the road all the way to leverkussen on the outskirts of colonge, where we stayed here for four days.

-did some lovely walks in this area, and visited my friend's workplace, called a nature centre, where they had some fantastic hands on stuff for the kids all about saving power, how power works and solar powerstuff. the kids held torches to some toys with solar panels and they worked. they used power plus to plug into driers, radios etc to find out which one used the most power. there were computer games and videos and simple hands on things - great.