After leaving our dear friends in Braunsweig, we took the ICE to Hamburg. As I did not really have a chance to double check our hotel on google maps, I went with the old traditional way. . . an address and a map. Before I got on the train, Yvonne and I found a street with the name as our hotel's on the Hamburg map. The street was in the North Western part of town, this was a bit odd since I vaguely remember wanting to rent a hotel near the main train station to avoid travelling too far with our suitcases. But I blamed it on baby brains. We decoded to get off at a secondary station in order to be closer to our hotel. After getting off the ICE, we took 2 metros to get closer to the hotel in order to save a bit of cab fair. To our surprise there were no elevator to go to the lower platform to catch the metro. So we had, or should I say Nicolas, had to lug our lugguage 5 flights of stairs in two trips and then come back to help me with the baby and stroller, and this at least 4 times (due to transfers of metro). We got off at the Hoheluftbrueke station, after deciding in which direction to go, we opted to walk since the weather was so nice and our hotel was less than 1 kilometer away. The street we were on was to change name to Steindamm. After walking, I am sure more than 1km the street name finally changed from Hoheluftchaussee to Lokstedter Steindamm. It is then that I realised that Lokstedter was actually part of the street name. And not a third name for this street, therefore there we were walking on and on the wrong street, more specifically in the wrong neighborhood! Our hotel was not here, we looked at the map again, found another Steindamm street downtown, indeed our hotel was downtown near the main train station. At that point we hopped on the bus that would bring us to the main train station, hence near our hotel, passing right where we had started over 2 hours ago!
We finally found our hotel nestled between Turkish fruit stands, sex shops and peep shows. Overall our hotel was brand new, nice and safe. Needless to say that after this little map reading mishaps I am fired from giving directions, at least for now....
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Location:Hamburg, Germany
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