We ended week 7 and begin week 8 on Monday, November 19, on a train/ferry trip from Copenhagen toward Hamburg. This was more or less the first day of a two-day trip from Copenhagen to Haarlem, Holland, just as it took us two days to get from Berlin to Copenhagen. By this time, Hamburg was a "been there, done that" kind of destination, so we pressed on to Bremen. Just as Hamburg merited a whistle stop for its place in Beatles history, Bremen merited a whistle stop for its place in Obbie's family history. In 1909, the ship carrying Obbie's great-grandmother and her two small children - one of them was his grandmother - sailed for New York from Bremen. His great-grandfather had already gone to America some time before (we still don't know exactly when or through which ports).

So we wanted to go to where the emigrants boarded the ships for America in the early 20th century. By the way, many people make pilgrimages to Hamburg for the same reason ... a lot of people embarked for America from there. When we found the tourist information office outside the station (which, like Hamburg, was a very crazy station), we learned that this was not to be. The docks are actually at a place called Bremerhaven, about 50 km to the north. It would have cost us another day to make that trip, so it will have to wait until some time when we come back.

We got booked into a fairly decent room about a 10-minute walk from the station for 110 marks (about $50) including breakfast. We took a walk around the neighborhood and found some decent Chinese food. On the way back we stumbled onto a cyber cafe where they said we could plug in. By this time we'd had the week 6 update written for several days, and the web pages for that week were ready as well.

With a good, fast connection, we decided to invest a bit of time into figuring out what it would take to move our mail away from Earthstink and into purplearth.net. Having feared that we'd need to use some sort of web-based mail system (a la hotmail, yahoo mail, etc.), this bit of research had been put off. But lo and behold, all we had to do was change a couple of settings in Eudora and we were good to go. We pointed Eudora at purplearth.net, and viola! Mail went in and out just as if we were at home. We sent a test message to our earthstink address, checked from webmail, and there it was. Success!!

That was the night (day, for most of you) that you all got three weeks worth of travel updates all at once. The next day we set up earthstink to forward all incoming mail to our purplearth.net address, which you should all have by now. In a few days, our earthstink account will be history, so make sure you have our new address in your address books, or future messages you send to us will bounce.