Cologne

The Australian manufacturers of the Dream baby range were showing there products for 3 days in Cologne and had invited us to help work at the Fair representing our business for the Benelux, which comprises 2 European countries, Beligium, Netherlands and Luxemburg, where we had distribution rights for the products. We planned to travel the day before the event and help with set-up. Roland was traveling in his quite newish Audi A4, complete with a fast Diesel turbo motor, with his wife and Trish and I were traveling in our old Ford Mondeo, complete with an engine! The plan was to travel the 250 kilometres to Cologne via the Autobahn, and hence talks about how fats we were to travel began.

Roland wanted to travel at 180-200, but I doubted my cars bolts would keep it together at that speed, and hence Trish complete with her lead foot was chosen as the driver.

 

About 2/3 of the way there, we happened to notice quite an amount of smoke blowing from Roland’s car, so we called him and then we stopped at a service station where he inspected the engine, but only to find nothing. We continued the trip all-be-it a little slower and arrived at our accommodation. Then Roland went off in search of an Audi dealer to fix his car, and I was worried about my car… LOL

 

Trish and I made our way to the Fair and then tried to find the stand we were supposed to help at.

During set-up of these fairs it is quite confusing as not many things are signed and as we hadn’t been to such a big event before it was a bit over whelming. After searching through the hall for 30 minutes we finally found the stand and met with the other distributors. We had packed a few more things we were to provide for the fair in our car and after a while and a few pleasantries we returned to our car to get these, or tried to return to our car… we proceeded to get lost in this event hall and then couldn’t find the car! About 30 minutes later with our bearing intact we did eventually find the car and returned for set-up.

 

The next few days were long and hard as we met various potential customers, but at night we ventured out into the city and managed some sight seeing. I had never been here before so it was good to actually get a way from work for a while. I liked seeing the history of the city and we even got to see some street performers. I’ll definitely be coming back here to explore more.