Needless to say, having only made it back home at 5:30am from the disco party, we spent the majority of the day sleeping in and having nightmares of Big Tom. Connie slept in as well as she had stayed up waiting for us in case we needed a ride back and was still up when we arrived home. It was just after noon when we got up and we set about going through all our things and packing up. It wasn't as much fun disassembling and packing up the bike without little Hugo’s help to spin the wheels, play with the chain, jump in and out of the box, play with the tools when I needed them, and generally just getting filthy and greasy. Although we didn’t really buy that much this trip, or at least we didn’t think we did, our luggage was pretty full and we packed and repacked a few times using Isa’s handy little luggage scale to move our stuff around so as not to be overweight. That took up pretty much all afternoon and by 5pm Isa and Hanno had awoken. We all felt pretty good despite the partying we did, but nobody felt like cooking and as it was our last night in Stuttgart we decided to go somewhere in the Stadtmitte to grab something to eat.

We ended up at a cool new Gasthaus called Carl’s Brauhaus, which used to be a bank and was adjacent to the park in front of the Stuttgart Palace . The name Carl was in reference to Carl Dinkelacker, the Braumeister and founder of Dinkelacker breweries. The Stuttgart Jazz Festival started on Friday of this weekend and was being held in the square in the centre of the u-shaped palace. Although it was cordoned off so we couldn’t see the stage, the artists playing were easily heard and made for a great background while we sat in the courtyard of the Brauhaus having a very traditional meal of schnitzel and beer. Even Connie had a beer, albeit an alkohol frei one. We could see a storm brewing up and luckily we finished our meals before the first sprinkles of rain began. We took our stuff inside and not long after the heavens opened up and it poured down quite heavily. Loads of people started coming in from the jazz festival as there was only overhead cover over half the crowd. The inside of the place still had remnants of the original bank, for instance the bathrooms were built inside where the old safe was and you had to go through the big safe door to get to them . They also had a big cage with small lockable compartments available for rent for patrons that wanted to keep their favorite beer mug there to use. While we were there Hanno signed up for one for EU20 a year. His offices were a short walk away, and it was a nice place, so I’m sure he’ll be putting it to good use.

We hadn’t planned on being there for so long, but before we knew it the time was 10pm and Hanno and I had consumed 3 masses of beer. The rain had pretty much stopped by now so we paid up and made our way back to the car. We passed the Hamburger Fisch Markt, which was being torn down as today was the last day. When we passed by on the way to Carl’s it was still running, but it was now closed and it was amazing to see how quickly they had already packed up. Before long we were back in the car and made a stop at Hanno’s office so he could pick up some papers he needed for a court case he had early the next day in another town. We were home soon after and as everyone had an early day coming up we called it a night.