German Tales: I title this one…RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!

When things do not go as planned, life gets interesting.

Here’s the story…

A few weeks ago Geoff, Jacob, Savannah and I decided to use up the last few days of our eurorail to take a trip to Marseilles.

The day started out like every other day here in Düsseldorf. The sun choked out by the clouds, the air crisp, and the birds signing their lovely morning melody. But heading out, I was a wee bit late.

Instead of class as normal, we were to meet one of the AIB staff at the HBF (the main train station) to go on a class trip to Neuss to visit the Museumsinsel Hombroich. Then Jacob, Savannah, Geoff and I were going to leave the group a bit earlier to catch a train to begin our journey to Marseilles. Well, that was the plan.

Our field trip to Museumsinsel Hombroich was pretty neat. We got to see all sort of things. Basically it is a playground for architects, combining nature and art. There are buildings and sculptures scattered everywhere. Of course the weather didn’t cooperate so that was kind of a bummer. But with umbrellas in hand, we survived.

After lunch is when the real adventure begins however. You see, we were supposed to catch a bus that would take us to a train that would take us to the Neuss HBF where we would catch another train that would take us to the Düsseldorf HBF where we would begin our journey to Marseilles (which involved changing trains a few times). Sounds simple enough, right? The catch was that if we missed our train in Düsseldorf, we wouldn’t get to go.

Well to make a long story short, our bus ride that was supposed to only last 6 minutes took 34 minutes. Meaning, we missed our train to the Neuss HBF. Trying not to panic, we found a Taxi and hopped in. At this point our Marseilles train was scheduled to leave in 30 minutes. No problem right? Except, the taxi driver told us that where we needed to go was 30 minutes away. YIKES!!

As soon as the Düsseldorf HBF was in sight, we threw money to the taxi driver and began sprinting with our heavy backpacks as fast as we could to our gate which of course had to be on the complete opposite end.

The gate we needed was 16. At around gate 13 I started noticing my vision was slowly fading and I wasn’t exactly breathing right (thank you asthma). After a quick stumbling blackout, I decided to use a quick walk instead of a sprint.

At the final stair case to gate 16 I regained courage and ran up the stairs just in time to see Savs, Geoff, and Jacob hanging out of the door yelling my name. After diving into the train, the doors closed and we were on our way.

Apparently Geoff had been the first one to the train and had just barely caught the door before it closed and held if for Jacob and Savs. Then they held the door until the last minute when I arrived. Thanks guys! We just barely made out trip!

Marseilles was amazing! We mainly just walked around and enjoyed the town. We also took a 3 ½ hour boat tour to the cliffs and such. It was beautiful.