Ken's Dirty Dives

  Deutschland! Very happy to be back in the Mutterland. It's been, oh god, probably 22 years since I was last here and to say I was frothing for a schnitzel and a stein would be an enormous understatement. It's kind of hard for me to say that I'd been to Germany before since the last time I was here I would have been 12 or 13 at a bloody push. But even at the ripe old age of a bakers dozen I was able to determine that I very much liked a lot of things about Cologne, Frankfurt & Stuttgart, expect I was never able to figure out the Germans weird take on breaky. I'm happy to expand my horizons beyond a fry up, but ze Germans seem to fill up on a smorgasbord of meats, cheese, olives and bread before heading out for the day. Maybe I'm just a bad tourist, or maybe the Poms have just perfected the art of a bloody good breaky better than anyone else? Who am I to decide?  That said, on a sunny Tuesday afternoon we crossed over the channel and motored into Düsseldorf for ...

It took a day or so to dust ourselves off and get back to feeling like a human being after the Frankie's gig, but once we did, I took sometime out of Syd and headed into the mountains. As a lifelong rev head, there's certain race tracks in the world that you're obligated to visit. Indianapolis, Le Mans, Silverstone, Daytona, Spa, and of course, Bathurst. Home to the 1000 every October, this track for me, is the greatest of them all. The rivalry between Ford and Holden is synonymous in Australian motorsports. Many have tried, but few have succeeded at conquering the mountain. It took a 6er of Cooper Mild and a tank of oxygen to help me reach the top, but on an absolutely gorgeous Monday afternoon, accompanied with a cold beer, and an endless view from Skyline, I felt in my own small way, I had conquered it.  Turned out Bathurst was a nice old town but had no rock bars to report on sadly, just a plethora of old school Aussie pubs and inns serving Toohey's and a cheeky chi...