Today was a travel day, and since we traveled a very familiar route, we took no photos whatsoever. The day started out with a run for me and a lovely breakfast with my mom for both of us, and then we gathered our last few things we hadn’t packed up yet, said our goodbyes, and walked our suitcases to the bus stop just before 10 am to go to the train station and travel to Hamburg with a stopover in Bremen. Things went well until Bremen: We were running a tiny bit late (less than 10 minutes) and thought we needed to rush to catch the connection to Hamburg, but then the train to Hamburg took its sweet old time to arrive and then was stuck on the tracks several times in the course of the journey. The upshot was that we were over an hour late and had to take a slighly different route than planned. We also ended up having a class of adorable but very noisy first-graders on a field trip in our train car for about 20 minutes, which made for a bit of an adventure. But it was perfect travel weather (sunny and in the 70s), and to sustain us we had sandwiches that I had made in the morning, a little sweet bite from the bakery at the Osnabrück train station, and our water bottle, so we had a good time all in all. Continuing on Hamburg’s excellent public transportation was no problem at all, and we were at our friends Andrea and Peter’s apartment before 4 pm. We were immediately treated to apple strudel with ice cream (and coffee in my case), took a lovely walk all the way to Barmbek (and back, in Mark’s and my case–4 miles total) while talking and catching up on a year’s worth of news. Then we had salad and bread for dinner, looked at some family photos the two of them had not seen yet, and called it a day pretty early. Glad to be in Hamburg with wonderful friends.