4 October

For a full list of all trip photos, click here. For more on the technical specs behind these photos, click here. To read the corresponding text entry accompanying these photos, click here.

First four photos: Yet another great German breakfast with Dirk and Sonja (actually, after-breakfast photos, while Sonja got her timesheets from work ready and I drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and thought about how lovely it was to be on vacation).

Back at the Hauptbahnhof, about to make my way to the transport hub of Koblenz, where my friend Karin was to pick me up after her day at work and drive the two of us to the medieval village of Cochem, where she and her husband Ricardo live.

Next two photos: the inside of the ICE (InterCityExpress) train, the nicest in the fleet - notice the spaciousness, cleanliness and luxury. Whoo man are they expensive. (Click here for a page of comparison photos from all the different types of trains I rode on this trip, including trams, U-Bahns, S-Bahns, Rs, REs and ICEs).

Next eight photos: on the road with Karin, making our way through the Mosel region. This is an idllyic land, full of sharp-angled mountainsides covered in grape vines, and quiet villages tucked into riverbends with crumbling castles still keeping guard for them. Sure, the region's full of the German version of Jerry Springer guests, as Karin was always reminding me, but it's breathtakingly beautiful nonetheless.

Ah, Cochem! Cochem is yet another of these tiny little hamlets dotting the Mosel river (populaton 500), theirs a little more famous than most because it's the only major train stop in that particular region of the country, so is visited by many more tourists than most of the other small villages. This is literally the street on which Ricardo and Karin live; I still cannot even begin to imagine waking every morning and having this sight greet your day.

Next eight photos: One of my great regrets of last year's tour is that I got hardly any photos of Cochem (that is, I took a lot on Ricardo's borrowed digital camera, but it turns out the lens was out of focus and they all came out blurry); I vowed this year to make up for it. The photos speak for themselves, I think: this fairytale of a city, where everything is so old and so quaint and at night it's lit up like a Christmas tree.

Next five photos: "Louisiana," the American-themed restaurant where Ricardo works. It has the crappy suburban TGIFridays/Bennigans experience down so cold it's scary: from the oversized steaks to the Bud Lite neon to the kitschy antique shit nailed to every wall. Man oh man, what a trip for me to eat here in the middle of nowhere Germany.

For dinner: a gigantic 16-ounce steak, slathered in butter and sour cream, complete with toothpick Stars and Stripes. Viva la America!

Copyright 2004, Jason Pettus. All rights reserved. Although this material is presented here for your enjoyment free of charge, it is still illegal to repost this material without my permission, and especially so if you charge others money to see it. I am usually happy to let others reprint my work in the context of a free artistic publication, so please don't hesitate to contact me at ilikejason at hotmail dot com if you are interested in doing so.