Germany 2024

Tourists- Zio, Big Pete and KB were the tourists this year

The tour started off in the traditional way in All Bar One at Edinburgh airport where the standard of nonsense to be talked was decided!

Unfortunately, the Eurowings flight to Düsseldorf is now departing later and later which meant we wouldn’t make any Friday night game, perhaps in future we could fly to Amsterdam on an earlier flight then get the train which wouldn’t be any more expensive.

As a result, it was getting towards 9 o’clock before we managed to get to Schreckenskammer and into our normal part of the ‘Snug’ bar. It was apparent that the stories we heard about how well the Tartan Army went when in Köln for the Euros were indeed true and the phrase “No Scotland, no party” was heard several times over the weekend!  We ended the evening with an excellent mojito (or several) in the Santiago de Cuba cocktail bar.

Saturday provided a first as the plan was for two games, FC Düren/Sportfreunde Lotte in the Regional League in the afternoon then Fortuna Düsseldorf/Kaiserslautern in the evening. This plan worked out really well, although we did get a bit sunburnt at Düren in the afternoon! Results were 2-1 for Düren and 4-3 for Kaiserslautern respectively. After all that football, ok and beer, we decided to have an early night.

Sunday was a football-free day so we became WWII history buffs by visiting Remagen, scene of a bridge and battle and indeed a film from 1969! After our tourism we stopped of in Bonn to ensure Beethoven was still in the Paulaner brewhaus!

On returning to Köln, we managed to visit Peter’s, Früh and Gaffel, their closing times making that possible!

Our journey home was via Amsterdam which meant a train, changing at Utrecht where we again visited some old haunts, Café Belgie, Lebowski’s and Ubica for old times’ sake naturally!