Dear Liam and Francesca,

Today, we set off for Karlsruhe but we stopped on the way to see our friends Olga and Adje. They live in Mannheim. It was really nice to see them. Adje is busy setting up a new museum in Mannheim and it’s all about musical instruments. He showed me their collection of instruments and asked me to blow quite a lot of the trumpets and horns so that he could record them.

What I really liked were the pre-Columbian trumpets. These were made of clay, like pots and were all kinds of shapes. They were made before Columbus went to America by the Aztecs and Maya and lots of other people. It was a real honour to be able to blow instruments from so long ago and to record them.

Do you know though, you have to be really careful because sometimes they put poison on the instruments when they buried them in graves to stop people stealing them. It’s a good thing that Adje knew which ones we could blow, isn’t it?

After the visit to the museum, we went down to Karlsruhe by train and got to the hotel quite late. At first, we could get into the hotel because the reception had closed and we had to phone up and they told us how to get the key from a secret box. In the end, we got in and went to bed but we were very tired.

We’ll write to you tomorrow about our next exploits,
Until then, look after yourselves and be good,
Night, night,
Grandma and Grandad xxxx