A Short Trip to the Beach

Since we were all exhausted from the previous day in Hamburg, we ended up sleeping pretty late and didn't have breakfast until around noon. After cleaning up a bit, Arne took me to a great beach out toward the lighthouse where the sea and harbor start to meet. We walked along for a bit and check out some of the stuff in the water, and after a bit I came across a squishy blob. I asked what it was and it turned out to be a jelly fish. I kept nearly stepping on ones in the water and that had washed up on the beach, and as I was warily looking at it, Arne picked it up and threw the whole huge blob at me! Only afterward did he explain they're not poisonous, but even then it was weird to hold and I threw mine back in the water pretty quickly.

It was really beautiful and the wind was coming from a slightly different direction than the previous day so some of the larger ships had their sails up. It was great to just walk along and hang out on the beach for a bit, especially since they're pretty sparse at home in the middle of the States.

After a short time we had to head back and grab our things. Arne arrange a ride for us on the "Mitfahrgelegenheit", which is essentially hitchhiking that you pay people for. It's actually a really cool system and way cheaper than using the trains. Basically you go to a website online where you find people who are going where you want to go, then you ride with them and pay something like 5 euro per hundred kilometers. We met our ride at the main station and I was immediately amused. It turned out to be two sort of hippie surfers with an old Mercedes MB1000 camper van. Arne and I got a sweet couch in the back, complete with a table and the soothing sounds of some kind of weird Bob Marley-Enya-beach-Indian-flute hybrid sort of music. The van was pretty slow and there was more construction so it took a while to get to Köln where they were going to drop us off, but we got there earlier than expected and were able to once again have McDonald's in the Hauptbahnhof. Our hunger satisfied, we sat on the platform for a bit, jumped on our train, then finally got in around 1. Definitely a lot of transit time, but it was an awesome weekend.