Dusseldorf; Saturday, 01 May, 2010

There is a problem with a very good hotel with exceptionally comfortable beds. If you forget to set your alarm the previous evening because you’ve been naturally waking up at 6:30 every morning for the last three weeks, even at weekends, and think you’ll do the same, you end up sleeping in, and in, and in.

Thankfully breakfast was served until 11:30, possibly because they have experienced a number of their guests getting rather too good a nights sleep and not waking up until gone 10am.

By the time I finally got my stuff together and got out of the hotel it was already gone 11. I walked the, now obviously, short distance to the S-Bahn station, and then was slightly shocked to find out that I had a near 20 minute wait for the train. This appeared to be a little odd for a Saturday, for the trains, one stop from the Hauptbahnhof to be so infrequent.

It was only after I had walked from the Hauptbahnhof to the Tourist Information and gone to purchase a Dusseldorf welcome card that I found out, for the very helpful man in the office. Today is May 1st (that I knew), it’s May Day (that I knew), It’s a public holiday and most things are closed (that I didn’t know). It transpires that the Germans have their May Day public holiday on May Day, none of this shifting it to the following Monday (unlike us workshy Brits!) Consequently all the public transport was running to a Sunday timetable. Just to add further confusion Sunday was going to be the Dusseldorf marathon, so none of the guided tours would run, and there would be substantial disruption to Public Transport. This is what happens when you just pick a destination at random without reading up on it in advance.

From the tourist office I caught the tram out to the TV tower to take in the views. It took some time to work out which way I was looking, partly due to the massive curves in the Rhine as it snakes its way through this part of the country, and partly because I had forgotten that Dusseldorf is mostly on the Eastern bank of the Rhine, and thought that it was like Cologne and mostly on the West. Realising this simple mistake also helped resolve the issues in my mind with why the river appeared to be flowing up stream through Dusseldorf!

From the TV tower I caught the tram back to the station to pick up the city sightseeing tour. 90 minutes later I was back at the station and taking a tip from the tour caught the U-Bahn north from the city centre to the Suburb of Kaiserswerth to have a look around the remains of the palace there.

By the time I got back to the centre of Dusseldorf there was just time to hot foot it back down to the river to catch the last Rhine Sightseeing Cruise of the day. Arriving back just gone 7pm it was time to find somewhere to get dinner, and then after another bit of a wander around the Altstadt to head back to the hotel for another good nights sleep.