So, as advertised, it's time to head off.

Saturday was D Minus 1...

It was cold and beautiful for our last walk into Belper. The last one for the time being, I mean, as we'll certainly be back unless something major stops us.






We said the last of our goodbyes. Always the worst bit...

Then we galloped round doing all the stuff you have to do before you move on.

And we went to bed early, because on Sunday morning -- Day 1 -- we needed to be up at 0530. Which is not early back in Kuching, but since we've been here in the British Isles, we've moved our day forward a bit to make the most of the light.

Up. Last-minute jobs.

Cold again. We had to de-ice the car (but we'd equipped ourselves with a bottle of room-temperature water, so that wasn't too hard). And by 0630 we were on the road to London.

We had a very good run. Mist rose from frozen meadows. The sky moved between bright blue and oyster grey. We stopped briefly to eat our breakfast sandwiches, and then cracked straight on.

Driving into the centre of London is far from fun, even on a Sunday. SOOO confusing. Even when Ms G. Maps is right (and sometimes she isn't), it's often hard to marry up the representation and the reality. But the Driving Tern did a really excellent job, and we were able to hand over our hire car well before time.

So there we were, just us and our rucksacks... There's always something nice about this. It has been great to have the car, and the ability to motor has given us way more opportunities to meet up with family. But it also feels good to be a backpacker again. Everything you're travelling with is on your shoulders. I'm aware that we won't always be able to travel this way, so it's good to make the most of it while we can.

A bit of a walk and a bit of a tube ride, and we're at St Pancras Station. Where there's a simply splendid Christmas tree... Featuring 3,800 hand-painted books, it comes courtesy of Hatchards and Penguin Books. Definitely my kind of tree...


Next up, the Eurostar. Surely the slowest one we've ever encountered... We had wondered why the scheduled travelling time seemed longer than we were used to, but when we unexpectedly stopped in Lille, and then turned off the high-speed line to begin a protracted wander round the historic towns of northern France, it became apparent that the dreaded engineering works had struck.

Not initially a problem. What can be wrong with having plenty of time to eat your Pret-a-Manger salad; listen to a fair chunk of your audiobook; make inroads into your overflowing email inbox; and take another book a substantial leap forward?

The trouble was that we were getting later and later... We had guessed as much, looking askance at maps and watches, but then they finally fessed up. Yup, we were running more than 20 minutes behind schedule, and we were still travelling painfully slowly. Originally, we had about an hour to change trains in Paris, and the steady erosion of this interval was a little stressful.

But all's well that ends well. It's a quick and easy walk from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de l'Est. We had time to buy a sandwich. And then we were straight onto the train.




We were notified a little while ago of a delay to this second train too (amounting to an extra half an hour of travel time). When we boarded, the nice young train captain (Cornelius) told us we'd be doing a loop round Stuttgart, and approaching it from Esslingen, which is east of the city. Engineering again (we assume).

Again, though, as the journey went by, extra delays kicked in, and kept lengthening... We weren't particularly stressed by this. Yes, we'd had a long day, and would be glad to see journey's end. But Stuttgart was our final destination, so we had no connections to potentially miss. And we'd rebooked to a different hotel and organized a late check-in as soon as the original delay notification came through. What was also done really well, we felt, was that Cornelius kept us constantly up-to-date with what was going on, always chirpily and often humorously.

As it turned out, we arrived in Stuttgart early... Instead of a detour round Esslingen, we were ushered straight into Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof. Cornelius didn't share the ins and outs, but we wondered whether we'd been delayed so much that the engineering works had finished for the evening...

We overnighted at the Hotel BaWu, which we would really recommend. You never get a big room in these city hotels, but what we got was comfortable, and worked well; the staff were really helpful; the location is just steps from the railway station; and the price was pretty good.


We'd return. And I hope we will return, because our brief experience of Stuttgart today (Day 2) was really positive.

The day wasn't stacked up to be that easy. It was one of those transition days when you have a lot of hours to fill between checking out of your hotel and boarding your next conveyance (in our case the hours between 1100 and 2030); the weather forecast wasn't terrific; and it was Monday, so most of the museums were shut.

But it all worked very well. As we moved through the hours, different opportunities kept opening up to keep us amused for a bit longer. The weather turned a bit drizzly in the afternoon, but nothing unmanageable. And the city has a relaxed, friendly vibe that's really endearing. Whereas Munich was fun, but somehow a little frantic, Stuttgart comes across as much more laid-back.

We trotted out to buy some breakfast materials from Rewe, which is now our preferred German supermarket. And once it was throwing-out time, and we'd entrusted our luggage to the hotel staff, we kicked off with a walk through some of Stuttgart's extensive parkland:








Lunch was at Back-Factory, near the station. This is an airy, spacious, self-service joint where you can get good sandwiches and pastries:


And then we discovered that Stuttgart was putting the decorations up, and setting up the Christmas market:






Next stop, the Hegel-Haus. This is the birthplace of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), one of the Germany's most famous philosophers. The house survived World War II, and has been sensitively modernized to incorporate an exhibition on Hegel's life and work.






A bookshop trail kept us busy for a little while after that, as I was looking for a couple of titles that I couldn't get hold of electronically. I eventually tracked them down in the Oxfam Bookshop, but it was fun to take a look at the bigger players en route. They're doing Christmas too, but still in a fairly restrained way.


Next up, the Koenigsbau Passagen, which constitute a kind of mall:




So we ended up putting in the day quite nicely.

After all that, we just needed to collect our luggage, return to the station, and wait for our next train, the Nightjet from Stuttgart to Venice:


We'd booked a compartment for two. It's a little on the bijou side:




So here we are. Settled in. During the night ahead, we'll call at Ulm, Augsburg, and Munich. Then we'll transit Austria for the fourth time this year (on the next trip we're SO going to spend some nights in Austria, because we feel kind of bad about all this just-trotting-through). We're due to stop at Villach (where we had all the train-shunting on the trip from Ljubljana to Munich), and also Salzburg (which we walked around in the interval between trains on the same journey).

But hopefully we'll be zzz'ing through all that... Day 2, done and dusted.