Posted by Glyn Wade
Okay so it wasn’t the most conventional of birthday presents….but it did result in some photography opportunities.
Due to a combination of working silly hours, holidays and a coma, Claire was unable to see one of her favourite bands in Blackpool recently, so….my birthday present to her was to go and see them in Frankfurt BUT…
The only flights I could find were from Stansted…which felt like a million miles from Stoke-on-Trent on a Saturday morning for a 7.20 am flight! The return flight was at 6.30 the next morning meaning booking a hotel wasn’t worth it and we may as well just go back to the airport after the gig. We were to leave Staffordshire at 2 am….
All sound crazy enough already? Fair enough but at least we’d get to see Frankfurt and take some pictures on our phones if nothing else.
And that’s the point of this article. Yes, one of the first things we think about now is taking our cameras but still having alternatives if our main camera isn’t possible or practical. This whole photography lark has changed us so that we’re not just content with visiting somewhere but we want to take some decent pictures too (or half-decent in my case). I’m not saying it’s a bad thing because it’s a great way of recording our memories and we get to do it together.
Back to the story….well it turns out that Frankfurt-Hahn airport is a matter of miles away from Frankfurt…a massive 80 in fact! So a hire car was duly booked and a look at the map revealed we only need take a slight detour and we could drive down the part of the Rhine with all the castles on.
AND, yes, we could now take our cameras!
So we managed to stop at a castle, saw many more, visited a cuckoo clock shop, slept for 3 hours on the floor of an airport the size of a chicken coop, saw a great gig in quite a small club, Claire got 1/3 off a t-shirt as it was a birthday trip, remembered that if you ask for something in good German they answer in German which is where you come unstuck and were completely shattered when we did get home. All that and we got some pictures too. Can’t be bad.
So, cameras ready, where to next??
(Oh, and I know you’re wondering who the band were….well it was Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine ably supported by Ehrenmord and Yankee Sandwich….so now you know!)
And here are some half decent pictures….
