March 30: Frankfurt, Germany

Today, we checked out of our hotel in Bad Gastein and then drove and drove and drove.  This is Katarina's mom filling in for Katarina because she is staying in Frankfurt for two nights with her friend Judi.  Judi was on exchange living in Courtenay and going to Isfeld Secondary during first semester of this year and she and Katarina became friends during that time.  It is terrific that it has worked out for them to spend some time together while we are here in Europe.  Judi lives in a small town just outside of Frankfurt so Katarina and I drove from Bad Gastein, Austria to Frankfurt, Germany today.  It took about six hours to get there.  Katarina experienced her first Stau (this translates to 'traffic jam' but somehow it seems worse than that).  Just outside of Munich, we were sitting bumper-to-bumper in traffic for about half an hour - not fun!  Fortunately, the GPS in the rental car re-routed us and that took us through some nice villages and, when we got back onto the Autobahn, the Stau was gone and we drove without any problems the rest of the way (we really like the GPS!).

After I dropped Katarina off at Judi's place, I headed straight for the hotel where we will be staying during our second week here.  It is in Bavaria in a small town called Oberstaufen.  I knew that I had to be here before reception closes at 10 p.m. so I drove straight through at average speeds for the Autobahn, approximately 120 - 150 km. per hour the whole way (well, until the last 50 km. when the snow hit).  Of course, lots of BMWs, Mercedes, Porsches, Audis and other vehicles went flying by me!  Driving on the Autobahn is great, though; what a fantastic highway system!  During our travels today, I was on the following: A1, A3, A5, A6, A7 and A8 as well as a few Bundesstrassen.  Other than the Stau outside of Munich, the driving was super (although I'm feeling a bit dizzy from ten hours of it).  It's fun to check the license plates, too; we saw vehicles from all over Europe, including Estonia, Serbia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and the closer central European countries.  It is Spring Break here and it seems that people do a lot of travelling.  That includes us; we have put more than 4,000 kilometres on the car since we got here a week ago (today's 1,000+ kilometres really bumped up the total).

Katarina has her camera with her so there aren't any photos today but she will write about her time in Frankfurt and post some photos when she is back here and I'll try to write a bit each day while she's gone.  She asked me to continue with the hockey updates so here's the news on that for today...

Hockey update:  The Canadian AAA Explorers won all three of their games today so they have four wins and one loss in the round-robin play of the Igor Loro Cup; here is a link to the website: http://www.igorloro.net/.  They played in an outdoor arena up in the Italian Alps today which sounded really neat. Matthias played all three games; they won 7 - 3 against a really good team from Hungary; Brad said that the boys played their best game yet against them (after a good night's sleep); the score of the second game was 8 - 0 and the third game was 3 - 2 (Brad said that they should have won about 7 - 2 but the other team's goalie 'stood on his head').  They play tomorrow at 9 a.m. against Mannheim; Mannheim and the Austrian Selects (we had our one loss against them) both have 5 - 0 records so it will be a tough game.  They play against Hungary again at noon and I don't know what happens after that.  I will be driving down to watch both games.  We are not sure yet if Cameron will be able to play.  He has a terrible stomach flu and we feel so sorry for him and his mom Lori.  We know how we would feel if Matthias were here in Europe and had to stay in the hotel room and mostly in the WC at that :(.  Cameron is getting better and is holding down liquids now so we are really hoping that he will be able to join the team soon and at least have a good second week here.