Frankfurt; Sunday, 06 September, 2020

I grabbed another makeshift breakfast from the station and, after consuming it, checked out from the hotel. I had expected them to give me the details on how to claim back a refund, or to start the process of refunding to my card, but instead the receptionist printed off my invoice, showed me the refund owing and then handed it to me in cash from the till. Not 100% certain if he was supposed to do that, but I wasn’t about to complain.

From the hotel I walked back over to the Hauptbahnhof to pick up the U-Bahn a couple of stops up to my first attraction of the day the Naturmuseum Senckenberg. This is the city’s Natural History museum and I spent a good couple of hours looking round the various exhibits. I even stopped here for a quick lunch on their roof terrace that has a great view across to the skyscrapers of the Frankfurt financial district.

Museum completed it was a short walk over to the PalmenGarten. This is a large park and botanical gardens that includes a number of glass houses of various types. The main palm house itself was still closed as it isn’t currently possible to create a Covid-secure route through it, but the other houses were open, as were all the open-air gardens.

I spent a long time wandering around the gardens before facing the inevitable and heading into the sub-tropical house with a facemask on. It was as unpleasant an experience as I was expecting, though thankfully the route through the various glass houses has been designed so that you get some cooler or less humid spaces between the really tropical rooms.

I ended up spending a couple of hours wandering round the gardens, and by the time I got back into the city centre there was only about 90 minutes left before I needed to be on train. As my feet were hurting from all the museum and garden walking I decided to cheat and get the open-top bus to finish off some sightseeing from a seated position. Thankfully, I managed to catch one of the last round trips of the day from the Paulsplatz.

An hour later I was back at Paulsplatz and made a quick change to the tram over to the Hauptbahnhof to pick up my luggage and head over to the airport for my flight home.