I joined VT (see my page at http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/a040a/) three years ago because I needed to get some info for my traveling. I lived in Eindhoven at that time and I saw there was a VT meeting in nearby Maastricht. I decided to join the meeting and did not regret my decision. It was quite a big meeting of about 40 people and I met really nice friends from the Netherlands Belgium, and German. After that I was invited to several small meetings in Eindhoven and Antwerp. I have to admit that I am not that active to join the meetings or to build my travel pages, but I had several best friends whom I kept contact almost every day. We shared the same addiction to travel, it's just nice to share our travel experience and to get some travel tips from someone who have visited or even from someone who lives at the place where we want to go. For me, a nomadic person for the last five years, it's even better. For example, when I moved to Duesseldorf, I had a friend already in this area and he invited me to join the VT group in NRW.
Last weekend, we had a EuroVT meeting in Karlsruhe. It was my first time to join the EuroVT meeting (it was the biggest VT meeting so far with 139 people) and I was so excited to meet some friends that I have met before. There were five-day program of the event, but I decided to only join the weekend session. I took train to Karlsruhe, around 4-hour trip from Duess using IC/ICE train. I arrrived at 9am, dropped my bag at the hotel and joined Karlsruhe walking trip at 10am. I met Sabs and Thomas, my neighbor in Duess, Carin from Eindhoven, Ilse's family from Breda, and Win from Remagen. Karlsruhe is a relaxing city and it has beautiful castle and botanical garden.
I joined the excursion to Ettlingen after lunch. I was not quite sure to join it at the first time, since I did not know anyone who joined it. But the excursion was really nice, had a great time in Ettlingen. Ettlingen is a small pretty town close to Karlsruhe, only a tram ride from the city center (about 30 mins) and I have to admit I got to know some nice friends from this excursion, it was like we knew each other for so long after the excursion :-)
We had a big dinner event in the evening, it was nice event since we had it at the same place where VT was born nine years ago. The restaurant building (it was a brewery actually) is quite impressive. Again, I knew some new people from this dinner.
The next day, I managed to join the brunch session, though I woke up late :-P. My train was at noon, but I still had a nice time to chat with some people, especially with Win who just arrived very late the previous day. Somehow this trip made me realize that I need to explore Germany more...it has been a while since I travel around Germany...
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