Wednesday 19 October - Aachen

Where's Bertie? He's in a large, gently sloping, car park 2km from the centre of Aachen. Exact location: 50.76104, 6.06967
Weather: Sunny, after a murky start. Cooler.

I was a few minutes ahead of Mick as I stepped out into the forest for a run this morning, and almost immediately decided to try to capture the sun streaming through the mist with this shot:

I hadn't even looked back at Bertie as I left, unlike Mick, who a few minutes later took this shot of our 'heavenly' parking spot:

I was on my cool down, heading back towards Bertie, and was gaining on a chap walking ahead of me. I'd seen quite a few people out and about, but when I was just a few paces behind this particular chap the thing that struck me was that he was wearing Shokz bone conducting headphones. Bright yellow ones too - just like Mick's. Worrying that I came within two paces of my husband of nearly 20 years before I recognised him! I slowed for a brief chat before continuing on.

Next stop: Aachen. This may seem something of a contrary choice of place to visit, given that I've said so many times how bad we are at cities, and that earlier on this trip we went to various cities for parkruns without troubling ourselves to visit their centres. I have no answer for that, other than it looked logistically easy, and was directly on our route.

Even though parked within walking distance of the old town (2km to the nearest bit), we opted to hire e-scooters for the journey in and to start at the far side. That all went fine until a road closure caused us to divert into a side street that turned out to be cobbled. Scooters and cobbles are a deeply unpleasant combination. The scooters were abandoned (well, neatly parked and electronically returned) 450m before our destination. For the length of journey and the time it took, we really may as well just have walked.

It's a nice historic old town, with a centre that's much smaller than I'd appreciated from the map. A couple of days ago, in another uncharacteristic bout of planning, I'd perused the Tourist Info website and put pins in Google Maps at all the POIs. Unfortunately, after the passage of two days my memory had no longer retained the details of those POIs, and on a couple of occasions we arrived at a pin and had no idea what the significance was of the location. Yes, I could have revisited the Tourist Info website to try to find the information again, but I was doing enough staring at my phone just navigating us around.

I wasn't taken with the first side of the Rathaus that we visited

I preferred the other side

Across the square from the above, is the cathedral. With the position of the sun, I struggled to capture it. It looks a rather mismatched set of buildings from outside, and not overly cathedralesque.

Equally poor snap from the other side.

Montage of snaps of the inside. A unique cathedral in our experience (not sure if those photos even begin to capture its nature). Rather than a traditional nave, the bit between the entrance and the choir and altar is an octagonal building, topped with a cupola. Having been inside, the outside began to make more sense.

Outside the key POIs were multi-lingual information points, including short video presentations. The one about the cathedral was, I thought, particularly interesting, explaining the inspiration behind the design (which dates back to the turn of the 9th century).

After swinging by Fountain of the Day...

...we didn't take the waters at the spa, but read the history of the roman excavations contained within the same bit of parkland, before going in hunt of a late lunch.

Conrad: Does currywurst mit pommen look more appealing to you when it's got a bit of green on top, as Mick's does in this snap?

We didn't trouble ourselves with scooters on the way back, but came on foot.

Final snaps for today - current progress on the jumper I'm knitting:

A few days ago, when I was starting the orange, just after the green, I spotted this error way back at the top:

The correct pattern repeat on this band is as circled in orange. All that circled in yellow was wrong.

No way was I going to rip all that way back, but over the next few nights I managed to drop down one column of stitches at a time, correct the error and pick the stitches back up. Sometimes I manage to impress myself, and this was one of those occasions.

Must make sure to check each pattern band in future before moving on to the next!