Wow, from 9pm me, the sunrise seems like and awfully long time ago! Even further back, was waking at 1am after a broken 4hr sleep. All in the name of relaxing holiday haha!
It was a fairly standard trip through Stansted Airport and plane journey was mainly me sleeping so I don’t remember a lot of of that but it must’ve been smooth. Frankfurt Hahn is a tiny airport that was full of workmen bashing and crashing and they only had two border police so it took ages to get through. Luckily, I had booked to collect the hire car at 10am, so plenty of time, as we landed about 8:30 am. Flex to go through Booking.com was our car hire for about £150 – unfortunately there was extra cost insisting that we took insurance through them as we had no credit card(!). We had money to pay them; we had debit card; we had American Express; we had Apple Pay. But no, they wanted a credit card. It was going to cost us an extra £240. So we went over to enterprise to ask them (exceptional customer service and we got a tip to go to Traben Trarbach, so all for a reason!) and it was going to cost about the same. Also, we would’ve lost the original £150. So we went back over to Flex to go, and coughed up. She did give us a free upgrade to a bigger car and said we could return the car without any petrol rather than full to full. She also said that we could cancel the full insurance through Booking.com, so we did recoup about £35. Ahh well.
We found our car a Citroen C4 and set off to Traben Trarbach. This was about a 25 minute journey towards the Mosel river. It was a very straightforward drive for Leon and we chose an automatic on purpose so that there wasn’t the issue of the stick being on the wrong side… sorry the other side (we all know it’s wrong!). We arrived to a postcard perfect town beside the river, quirky German architecture with a little classic gingerbread houses, under a rather incongruous metal bridge stretching across the wide river. It was quite an overcast day and looking like it was threatening to rain. Nevertheless, we made our way up to the monstrous bridge and climbed up the metal stairs. Either end of the bridge were classic German turret/gate style buildings. The longest boat I’ve ever seen made its way underneath! As we got to the end of the bridge, there was a ticket office selling wristbands for a cellar Xmas market! There were five different points plotted out on a map, and it was only €5 so we thought that seemed like a great deal, and something focused to do. The cellars were really unusual, with huge arched stonework lit by all the fairy lights was quite a spectacle to see and felt very cosy and Christmassy. They had traditional toys, decorations, star lamp shades, cheeses, alcohol, and fur rugs for sale on numerous sprawling stands. Third cellar in, and we realised they were all mainly selling the same kinds of things. It did occurred to us that we have basically just paid to go into a Christmas market. Perhaps they do it to keep non-serious Christmas buyers out! That might just take advantage of all the tasting platters of cheese and salami. 
After all that walking, all I had on my mind was shutting my eyelids. I nestled into the comfortable bed and Leon set off to the thermal Spa to bake himself in the sauna. And we met several hours later after said refreshing ablutions.
We wanted to get some bits and bobs for the apartment, so we set off to Aldi/ Lidl, to pick up some drink and crisps. To my great delight, I could use my Lidl plus card by changing the country in the settings. I am yet to find out if that affects my card when I get back to the UK. (It didn’t, I just set it back again!)
From Leon’s trip to the Spa earlier, he had spotted a really cute looking Italian restaurant that he quite fancied for the evening called Mamma Mia. So we took about a 10 minute walk to the restaurant at about 7pm. It was really welcoming and the hostess was very sweet and kind. We chose to have some stone baked pizzas that they made fresh, and shared a tiramisu for after.
