Construction...

As the whirlwind of scheisse continues to fly here at work, I had plans to meet with Kai last night for climbing at 8. Earlier in the day it was brought to my attention that there would be a 5pm meeting to discuss the results of the weekends investigations. Ok, says I, 5pm... done around 6:30 maybe... enough time to grab my gear and get to Düsseldorf in time. I walk into the conference room with about 5 minutes to go until 5 and there's 7 guys from the customer and none of my colleagues. The customer say's, 'ahh here's (insert my company name here), now we can start.' Not having any information or being included in anything related to the issue I smiled, laughed, turned around, and walked out. I got ahold of my colleague who said, 'oh... didn't you hear? The meeting was moved to 7pm.' I hand the phone off to the lead of the customer and there's a discussion in Deutsch. Final conclusion... meeting will be moved to 7pm.
Kai - With some Detroit love... haha

Not interested in sitting through a Deutsch meeting and missing climbing I left shortly after 6 and headed to Düsseldorf after stopping off to change and grab my gear. We had decided on Klettermassiv for the evening which is about 35km away. After getting off the freeway I find that the main road that I take to get to the gym has been completely shut down for construction. I'm not too worried as I have my navigation system. The biggest thing is that a bunch of side roads were shut down too. Follow the detour signs you would say, but you would be wrong. There were no detour signs. There was no indication that the road was closed anywhere near it. I tried bypassing it, but the cities, as I've mentioned before, are not set up like a grid. I actually found a road that was not on the map of my navi and ended in a dead end.
I bust a U turn and start reaching for my phone to call for advise and say I'm going to be late when the car in front of me throws their hazards on to talk with me. My initial thought was that it was going to be quite interesting since I don't speak Deutsch. I get closer to the car and realize it's Kai. What are the odds we would both end up on the same road trying to find an alternate route? Needless to say my calls for advise would be in vain since she wanted to know what my navi said to get around the construction. Eventually we gave up trying to get through and went back to the autobahn to go to Canyon in Chorweiler. It was a good time, my arms are tired, and I have a few new scrapes and scars.
Lesson for the day: German's are stupid... who shuts down a major road without putting up a detour?

-Side note about this picture- Kai wanted a photo to show her friends at work so they could put a face with the name. I volunteered to do a staged climbing photo (shown above). There were some jokes about smiling vs. expressions of struggling while pulling through a hard move. Here we settled on an angry face which apparently was quite hilarious to her colleagues.