After those few hours spent in Munich, today marks yet another day spent mostly travelling throughout the whole day. As big as Germany is, it’s nothing unusual that you have to spend that much time “on the road” to get from one city to the other. I won’t actually be on the road today, since I’m taking a couple of trains to get me to Dortmund, but you know what I mean. Starting to write this post around 15 minutes into my first leg of the train ride, I can already tell that it’s a much more comfortable and enjoyable ride than the bus I took yesterday was.
It is true that I decided to throw a bit more money at it, and booked myself first class tickets, so that I’m sitting by myself, and with a bit more room around me. The train itself doesn’t really look too busy, at least not from what I was able to see when walking down the whole length of it to get to my car, so I probably would have had enough space in second class as well. But you know, if you can do it, why not. The price difference wasn’t even that big so it was pretty much a no brainer. Although one station later, at least my car, got a bit more busy, but still nothing serious.
This first leg of the trip took me from Munich to Frankfurt, where I had to change trains from an ICE train to a regular IC train. And the difference was pretty obvious. The ICE runs a lot smoother, and much faster as well, but at the end of the day, the whole trip to Dortmund was still quite enjoyable despite that. I quite like riding the trains, especially as good as these in Germany are, and when you have some more space to yourself, it just makes things a lot better.
As I arrived to Dortmund around 3pm, there was not a lot that I could have done today, or rather yesterday, since it’s already past midnight at the time of trying to get to the end of this post. The hotel I’m staying in, the Steigenberger Hotel, is quite a bit further away from the train station than the one in Munich was, so it took me some time to get to it, check in, and then be able to explore the area a bit.
Of course I had to check out the sim racing expo hall first, naturally only from the outside, and since the hall is right next to the Borussia Dortmund’s stadium, called Signal Iduna Park, I took a few more steps to see that as well. Since I’ve already been to the Allianz Arena, I had to see this stadium then as well! At the time I was there, there was a lot of fans around the stadium, it looked like a match was going to happen, but I have no idea what it exactly it was.
I did take a trip back to the city centre and explore a bit more, but being that late in the day, and with me being tired from all the travelling, I decided to just head back to the hotel, get some food on the way and call it a night. Well – that didn’t happen! As with some of my (gaming) friends also here in the city for the expo, it was time to finally meet in person and how else would you do that, than go have a few drinks!
It was a tiring day once again, not the last one of those during this trip, but at least it ended up meeting some great people in person finally, have a few drinks and just end the day not thinking about anything else other than having fun. In the morning though, it’s right back to business, with the visit to the expo happening, and then who knows what’s in store for us in the afternoon/evening. So stay tuned for more!
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