It is 12:45am Tuesday German time!

We have had a great and very full day.

We left Newark on time after meeting up with all the teams and swapping stories.

Upon landing we took the train to Cologne and checked in to our hotel.  Lunch and some reconnoitering and the games were on at 2pm.  We had a list of tasks to choose from that divided into a northern and southern route.   We took the northern route and completed everything on our list, pretty much in the time we had planned.

We were pretty pleased with our planning and will try to keep the same strategy going forward.

We were able to send our picture evidence along the way and only had to worry about loading up the You Tube videos for the judges this evening.  This was more problematic than we planned and we’ll start on this earlier next time, though we did meet the deadline!

We were on a lot of trains, trams and subways today and were able to see a lot of Dusseldorf and parts north.   The new modern architecture is great and the old style Alt beer is pretty tasty too!  We visited Japan town, some old churches, a renovated factory that is now a very cool park and some pretty interesting monuments!

We paired up with Team Stimulus Package and had a lot of fun with Mike and George!

In the middle of video uploading, Alex crashed and burned due to a sleep shortage.  He’s had only four hours sleep since we woke up in NY on sunday morning at 8:30am.  I’ve had about 6!

Tomorrow is eight hours of challenges and then we take the train to our next city, which we won’t know until 5:30pm tomorrow.  We are partially planned for Tuesday and will have to finish in the morning as Alex is fast asleep!

For those of you familiar with Alex’s active sleeping habits, you’ll know what I mean when I say that I hope I don’t wake up bruised.  We are in twin beds, but they are right next to each other and not separable.  I hope he really has become as calm a sleeper as he says he is.

We are having a great time!  Thanks for all your support!

David and Alex