Friday is a travel day to get from Haarlem to Freiburg, Germany. This is where we’ve stayed with our friends Bobber and Elena a couple of times. Bobber is planning a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for Saturday, and we’re invited.

We waited for the morning commuters to clear out before getting on a train to Amsterdam.

Now that Ben & Jerry is owned by a Dutch food conglomerate, there’s a B&J store on the platform of the Amsterdam train station. They have it in England as well, for double the American price. It must cost a lot to ship ice cream across the ocean, and it’s a price we’re not willing to pay.

Our rail passes get us on the trains, but they don’t guarantee that we’ll have a place to sit. For that you need a reservation. Since we’re traveling on a Friday afternoon, we anticipate a lot of traffic on the trains between here and Freiburg. So we visited the ticket office in Amsterdam to buy reservations.

To get from Amsterdam to Freiburg requires a change of trains in Köln (Most English-language maps call this city “Cologne.”). The train from Amsterdam to Köln was sparsely populated, and it flew along at what seemed like upwards of 120 mph.

We scheduled an hour and a half layover in Köln because we’d heard of (and seen pictures of) the their enormous old cathedral, conveniently located right next to the Bahnhof. We popped out the front door and into the plaza outside the Bahnhof and took our pictures from there. This is one of those churches that took hundreds of years to build, and you have to be there to comprehend its enormous size.

Köln is to Germany what Chicago is to the United States: it’s a major rail hub. Its station is the busiest we’d seen in Germany, and after Hamburg that’s saying a lot. There are plenty of good places to eat on the main concourse, and we had a fairly decent meal at a place called “Casserole.” Yep, their specialty was casseroles.

Our train to Freiburg is the main line train along the Rhine, with hourly service each way from north of Hamburg to in Basel, Switzerland. When we bought our reservation back in Amsterdam, non-smoking first-class seats were sold out, so we had to settle for non-smoking second-class seats (as far as we’re concerned, any seat on a smoking car is fourth-class).

Riding with the “huddled masses” isn’t so bad; the seats are only slightly smaller than first-class seats and we don’t have to hang out with suits for four hours. We got to do a lot of work processing photos and writing these stories while the Rhine valley passed by in the late afternoon darkness.