…we also like Amstel should that provide itself available in Heineken’s place.

After a day of running around Cologne we saw the Roman-Germanic Museum, visited a lighthouse that was no where near any water, the Lindt Chocolate factory, the head house of the WWII Gestapo, and the place where Eau de Cologne was invented… we have now found ourselves in Amsterdam- the land of Heineken.

We like Heineken.

Posted by Caitlin

After a long night of trying to upload our video I was finally successful at 2:10am and was able to sleep! Today we thought we’d take it easy since both of us were sleep deprived! So, we woke up around 9am, went to breakfast just a little after 10am, and finally checked out of the hotel at 10:30. After reading the challenges last night, we already knew we wanted to go to the Drachenburg Castle for our first challenge…and hoped that we’d have time afterwards for some more challenges in Cologne before we had to leave on the train. Before leaving the hotel we did some extra research to make sure we knew how to get to the place and that it’s open. After checking out of the hotel we went to the train station to store our luggage, then took the train to Konigswinter in order to take Germany’s oldest train up to Drachensfels Ruins and the Drachenburg Castle. Once we got there we were told immediately that the castle is closed until April 1st. Well, we were a little peeved by that since when we checked their website this morning it never said it was CLOSED!!! So the first thing we thought was, oh great…we just spent an hour to get here and we can’t even do our challenge. Well we decided to go up and check out the view and the ruins anyway, and at least do one part of our challenge. It turned out that the view was amazing, and we spent so much time there that it was totally well worth it. The tain we took up there was also very nice, and we definitely enjoyed today to the fullest.

When we got back to the train station to head back to Cologne, we tried to purchase a train ticket for our return trip, but it was disastrous! There was one machine that only took the EC card and not cash! The other machine that did take cash was out of order! And since the train station was also closed and unstaffed, we couldn’t get a return ticket! There wasn’t really anything we could do, and we saw a train coming, so we broke the law, and hopped on without a ticket! We knew what the consequences would be since we were already fined last night, but we really had no choice because we didn’t want to be stuck in the middle of nowhere. I thought, it’s ok, we will just hop off at a large enough station, perhaps Bonn, where we would be able to purchase a ticket from a train station staff. As we were approaching the Bonn station, someone was approaching us! It was a train police! As he was entering our car, we slowly got up and casually headed toward the exit. Our hearts were beating so fast, thinking, oh crap, this time we’re going to jail! Luckily, the train stopped and we hopped off in the nick of time. We walked briskly toward the ticket booth at the Bonn station, and successfully purchased a train ticket to take us back to Cologne. We did have to take the next train, which was a half hour away, but it was better to waste a half hour than to go to jail in Germany =(

Once we got back to Cologne we did not have time left to do anymore challenges. Instead, we decided to head out to check out the Dom, as well as some of the plaza streets and go shopping! We had a great time in Cologne and took many photos. We then headed back and meet Steve for our train ticket and destination for the night. After finding out that we’re going to Amsterdam, we went and bought some take-out to take on the train, and picked up our luggage then boarded the train! We had our meals on the train and it was delicious! We both ate way too much! Jen had chicken and I had currywurst. Mmmmm!

When we got to Amsterdam we took a taxi to our hotel. Jen was having a lot of pain with her foot and her back and we just didn’t want to take the tram all the way to the hotel. When we got into our room Jen said, “Casey Anthony, in prison for murder of her own daughter, has a larger cell for one person than the room we’re in.” I thought that was really funny, but who is Casey Anthony? She opened our closet, and said, “Oh look! The seven dwarfs can hang their clothes here!” Hahaha, Jen is too funny =D

So our videos have been uploading on Youtube for the past 45 minutes, and only 1/3 of the way one. Seeing how it will be midnight in 20 minutes, we’re sure the videos won’t make the deadline tonight. Oh well! =( Time for sleep, more tomorrow!

Alex reporting here from Amsterdam as David is passed out asleep from a long day.

Today was amazing. We opted to take the long train down to St. Goar out of both strategy and intrigue.

When we got to the cozy town along the Rheine we were both amazed at the beauty of the region. There are castles built into the mountainsides across the way in St. Goarhausen mixed with stone-paved streets and small old-style German buildings. A spectacular area and a good change of pace from Dusseldorf and Cologne.

Our first task: Find the statue of Loreley, a mermaid that lured ships into the rocks alongside the river. We crossed in a ferry into St. Goarhausen, ran down, and got a great video of me singing Loreley’s song to the tune of “Gilligan’s Island”.

Next we backtracked and made our way up to Rheinsfels castle. An old castle overlooking St. Goar and the Rhein. It’s kept mostly in its original state and it’s seen some wear and tear, but it’s hard to feel more connected to the town than we did walking through the castle. We got a nice view from up top, before it was my task to crawl through the unlit, muddy, and 3 ft (at their highest) tall mine tunnels. I can’t imagine how scary it was to try and invade the castle through those tunnels. It was pitch black (except for my headlamp) and there were many many dead ends. We then examined the smaller than expected dungeon and headed into town.

While I loved the tunnels, the town challenges was perhaps the highlight of the day. First we examined the beer stein headquarters which had both the largest beer stein in the world and 3,000 custom ones to examine. Several were made with Berlin on the side and a piece of the Berlin wall on top. Unbelievable! We completed the task there, then checked out the world’s largest free-standing cuckoo clock. We learned key info about the song it plays when it chimes (‘Edelweiss’) but couldn’t get anyone to perform. Until….

Searching for the eiswein (ice wine) challenge, we found Stefan’s wine shop. It looked like a typical gift shop from the outside, but inside me met Stefan, a key element of the day. Stefan’s family has been making eiswein for more than 500 years. Needless to say, they know what they’re doing. He was very happy to see Americans in his shop as his eiswein is frequently shipped back to the States and he’d spent a few years living in New York. Stefan sung Edelweiss for us, gave us the history, and then had us sample 2 of his eisweins and some of his peach brandy. Delicious! The wine is very sweet and goes down smooth. The brandy had a strong peach flavor without as much of the alcohol taste. We bought a few small bottles of his flavored brandy.

That wasn’t all Stefan helped us out with. After discovering that nobody in town sold or had heard of a Loreley Sundae, we did some research and improvised. We purchased a vanilla sundae with fresh whipped cream and walnuts (no rum, grapes, and raisins available) from an ice cream store and then took it back to Stefan who graciously topped it off with some of his chocolate brandy (he didn’t think eiswein would taste as good on top). One of the best sundaes I’ve ever had. Thanks for everything Stefan!

After that we grabbed some food and a return train back to Cologne. We were able to squeeze in one more challenge before the 5:15 PM deadline and got back to the train station. From there we got our info for the next day and took a train to Amsterdam.

Tomorrow’s challenges? Much closer to town in general, but we’re looking to go the extra mile….

Auf wiederschen Germany!

After a 36 to 41 hour day for many of us, we were spent. Nearly everyone had issues with the T-Mobile connection in Cologne, but Steve has promised that this won’t affect anyone’s standings.

I gave up at 1:30 a.m. and tried again the next morning. Not only did I manage to get the contest videos up, but I was able to upload my daily report for Gadling as well, even if it meant we’d be 20 minutes late out the door for our challenges for a second day in a row.

Here’s a run down from our perspective of the race. (we spent most of the time in Dusseldorf and Duisburg)

One thing is for sure, there are some really nice people competing in this event. We really do like ‘em all!

We’ve just arrived at our next city, Amsterdam, where we’ll be competing tomorrow, Wednesday. So far, the WiFi looks good!

We are on the move!  In fact yesterday the only time we ever sat ourselves down on was something that was moving.  Respite in the form of a flying plane or a moving train or a rocking bus, or a teenager with the pedal to the metal helping his new American friends get to their next challenge.  

Reminded again of appreciation for most of life’s necessities and creature  comforts–  especially after an hour or so spent with the Romans- many of them had it pretty good in a different kind of way.  

Emotions are cycling the gamut–  mostly highs, but we’ve also come face to face with some of life’s and histories more tragic moments leading to poignant reflection and even the shedding of a tear or two.   Steve has spent an AMAZING (there’s that word again!) amount of thought and time arranging the challenges and the cumulutative effect thus far is profound (there’s the cycling emotions again!) and heck its only day two!

More later!  I’m late to meet Steve and the gang now can barely tear myself away from this warm and fuzzy and delightful and FASST internet connection!  

Off to our next mystery city….
Sincerely

Frau Swiz

Breathe in. Breathe out.  Breathe in.  Breathe out.  Dave and I have finally gotten to a point where we can take a respite from the daily challenges.  We are in the Köln altstadt looking out at cobblestone streets, Rhein River and hundreds of years of history as we catch our breath and have a few Kolsch, the local beer.

Day one went by in a flash having perhaps a somewhat aggressive schedule in how many tasks we wanted to complete.  Mission accomplished, but we were run ragged.  We accomplished a number of tasks in Koln and Dusseldorf before making our way to Duisburg and ran out of time to complete so much as a single task in Duisburg.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained I guess.  We did however contribute to the local economy at the local kniepe, a.k.a., bar.  Having closed down more than one bar last night with another team, we figured it best to get a few hours sleep inasmuch as we only had a few hours of airplane sleep the night before.  Not before recruiting a new member (pilot for UPS) to Flyertalk though.

Day two was far more low key, not just in the number of challenges we attempted, but in our level of vim and vigor after two nights of limited and marginal sleep.  We did however visit a perfume museum, a light house and had some locals eat chocolate with us, among other things (I don’t want to give it all away).

We get back on a train shy of six o’clock and the word on the street is that we will be heading in the direction of AMS.  We have to get to uploading the videos from our days challenges so I will leave it here for now…

Day 1 

Omigod! You wouldn’t believe it!  

  Met all the other teams in Newark, a real mixed bag.  Got very little sleep, arrived in Frankfurt at 8:30AM, got on a train to Cologne, where we checked into our hotel and dashed out to meet our first challenge(s).  

Here’s how it works, all eleven teams choose from a big pool of multi-part challenges to complete that day in different parts of the region, video themselves (Let’s hear it for Flip!) doing it and then get back to the hotel and upload them to a private YouTube account for judging by 8pm., 

So what do we choose? We chose to get back on a train and go to Dusseldorf.  How far is Dusseldorf?  31 minutes on the Express and 29 minutes on the Local. 

 We floored ourselves by finishing 3 challenges which included going into the Japanese section of Dusseldorf and asking for three Japanese items that even the Japanese didn’t know what they were.  We surprised ourselves by completing not only that task (sounds easy, trust us, it’s not)  but three more as well.

Returning to Cologne it took us 40 minutes to buy the ticket, and an hour and a half to get back travel because we got off three stops too early. Finally got back to our hotel exhausted, but decided to get the dirty work out of the way first and upload the videos at Starbucks for judging first before treating ourselves to a nice relaxing dinner.  

Wrong.

Seems no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t access the internet, so we did what any smart women would do, we asked someone else to do it for us.  Long story short, we ended up at the apartment of a 26 year old    dentistry student, a darling Israeli girl, (not Jewish), Iman who made the mistake of asking if she could help us. Two hours later, three frustrated non-internet connected ladies went to dinner.. Bid each other a fond farewell –  

Got back to the hotel around midnight, tried for another hour but still no luck.  Lucky (for us, not him)  Fran’s son was still awake so we brought him into the Frustration Loop.  An hour later, still, no internet-connection. Did this stop Fran? Not a chance.  Luckily a half hour later as Fran was on the bed with her computer pulling her hair out, Judie heard voices from Team #3′s room next door, knocked on their door to see if they could help and discovered that almost everyone had been having the same kind of evening (minus the Israeli)  due to an as-yet undiscovered – let alone unresolved – problem.

Oh well, as our  favorite role model says -”Tomorrow is another day.”  We’ll think about it then.

If it`s Tuesday (it is … right?) then we must be in Köln! We are in Köln and finally figured out that we`re not in Kansas … er … Texas … anymore, and the internet is not exactly what we`re used to! And, that German keyboards aren`t what zou expect them to be (fellow Competitours appreciate this!) We are having fun, however, so we are successful. Bob sleeps well on planes; Ally takes triple espressos from Starbucks and babbles alot of things that are difficult to understand! He, he, he …  (this is Bob giggling now!). So, as we write, we are finally getting our uploads from Day One on UTube. Oh well! We have some good videos of Swizzle videoing a runnaway van from a higher elevation and other videos not on the list, but sorry! We have taken enough time out of our day in an internet cafe to share these! It was pretty weird walking up to the Marksburg Castle, turning around and seeing an empty van rolling down the hill! That alone was worth the train fare! Ally (that`s us, Plan B) as well as Caroline (from Swizzle) are resourceful and a little wicked … watch out for them! Bill (Swizzle) and Bob (Plan B) watched in awe as they took charge of things. Women rule (right Bill? Say “Right, Bob”). Hopefully we will get a system for more efficient uploading and share more with everyone … the week is still zoung … young, that is (darn these German kezboards!)

Hey everyone this is Alex,

It was a long night last night getting videos uploaded. So long, that we might have left out a few details on exactly where we went on yesterday’s trip.

Here are a few of the highlights:

- Decided to head up to Dusseldorf. We checked out a lot of the local architecture including Roggendorf Haus, the Colorium, and a bunch of awesome Frank Gehry buildings.

- We then walked up into Dusseldorf’s Altstadt district to grab some altbeer (altbier?) at the town’s oldest brewery and learn the local drinking song (it’s more of a secret than you might think). We also saw St. Lambert’s Church, which has a bizarrely twisted spire.

- From there we took the U-Bahn into Dusseldorf’s Japan Town on a scavenger hunt for Japanese goods sold in the stores there. It took some asking around, but… success!

- Next it was up to Duisberg where we said hi to the town’s “Lifesaver” mascot. From there it was a tram ride up to Landschaftspark, an old metal works factory that’s been converted into a very unique park. It was a great sight and one of the best parts of the day.

- From there it was a nice train ride all the way back to our hotel in Cologne (or Koln)!

That’s all for now. What are we doing today? Well we’re doing challenges in the same region in Germany, but like birds in the winter, we’re going………….

- Alex & David