We picked up our Ford Focus rental car, then started berating Ford for all the cars eccentricities. It was lightly raining, so Derrell soon found out that trying to get the back window windshield wiper to turn off was a bit of a trick. Oh, and visibility when trying to back up was missing. And the driver side mirror had printed across it: ‘Caution: Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear’, which looked more like an ‘object’ itself than a helpful message. Oh, and if you backup, the rear windshield wiper goes off again. Ah, but it had a heated windshield which was good for defogging. It was a weird set of ‘features’.
For lack of a better plan, we headed off down the Romatic Road, and wound through all sorts of cute Bavarian villages. The road was empty because it was raining, which suited us just fine.
We started out with an afternoon in Würzburg, checked out the Würzburg Residenz and considered how much reconstruction of the place that they had done. They had a few pictures of the destruction of the place from World War II, and so we determined that what we walked through was quite a, um, remodel. The outdoor gardens of the Residences were lovely enough even in the misty rain and it was our first spotting of some original garden gnome statuary. Mind you, the gnomes were gray stone predecessors’ of the current modern day colorful gnome, but gnome-like they were. On the way to the Residenz we decided to try a CurryWurst sausage. To All That Is Porky, that was a mistake. It was a big pork sausage, cut up into bitesize slices, with a tomato sauce somewhere between sweet-n-sour and ketchup poured over it with a sprinkling of mild curry powder. Why?! We finished it off, but what we don’t understand is why these things are so popular. We saw signs for Currywurst everywhere and people eating them everywhere. Go figure.
From Würzburg, we drove through the scenic countryside (only needing to turn around a few times due to missed turns) to Rothenburg. Been to this town back in 1992. It still looks rather the same, cute, touristy, and completely void of any activity after 8 PM. We had a nice misty rainy walk around the outside of the walled city with the highlight finding a fresh crisp apple from the many fruit trees around the town. It seemed like all the trees in the area were bearing fruit, everything from apples, pears and plums to walnuts and chestnuts. A fine fall day when it cleared up, after a minor lightning storm. With too much time on our hands, we walked the covered walls of the city, with finally an early 5PM at a restaurant. More goulash, this time venison, along with a mixed salad filled us up. (The mixed salad being the standard carrot, pickled beet, pickled bean sprout, and/or cabbage salads that come from a can, lying in wait under leafy butter lettuce lacerated by an overly sweet white dressing. Germany’s traditional food is still scaring us.) We tried the Federweißer, which is grape juice in the process of being fermented into wine. It can range anywhere from super sweet fresh pressed grape juice to almost dry, almost complete wine. This was our second sample, and this particular one was definitely on the super sugary side. It made us a bit more curious about wine making, though.
As for our second meal in Rothenburg, which came from our overly cute hotel, we were woken by great smells of coffee, fresh bread baking and bacon in the morning. We headed down for breakfast and ended up in a small room filled with only a few bed and breakfast patrons, with the ‘chef’, an odd old British chap, sitting down and chatting with the couple next to us. He was so chatty that we gave up any hope of getting anything out of the kitchen from him beyond coffee. With the great smells filling the guesthouse we were relegated to the standard hard roll and slice of ham breakfast. He was still talking up a storm when we asked to check-out. When discovering we were from California, he leaned in as if offering great advice, and informed us that we should really like Arnold Schwarzenegger as our Governor. I wanted to whack him and demand bacon. What a very odd man.
With a short drive, we finished our Romantic Road travels and headed into Augsburg. We didn’t find a room in Augsburg directly, so we ended up just outside of it in the suburbs of Inningen. This was a surreal stop because, one, I’m an idiot, and two, we received a good dose of agriculture/business class Germany at the guest house. Okay, for the idiot part. I was off by a week as to when München’s Oktoberfest started, so I had us head out early and take a train ride over to Munich for the day. It wasn’t until I was in the Tourist Office there, asking for a map that I discovered that it was going to start a day and 1/2 later (not last weekend as I had thought). Bah. We had a full day in München and ended going for a walk in the park out to the lake. We sampled the HofBrau Oktoberfest beer (it was already in full flow in the city) and gave it a thumbsdown. The beer is light (as in, flavorless), sweet (as in, does it have any hops at all?) and it is low in carbonation (so at the end of a glass, it seems completely flat!). Well, honestly, this was a cheap way to enjoy the hubbub of Munich getting ready for the crowds and not be trapped by millions of tourists trying to get to/from the event. (Oh, all right, I’m an idiot.)
As for the dose of German businessman, our guest house was full of business travelers (SAP software salesmen, that style of business/sales work, not the spiffy suit and tie crowd). We were shocked at how much everyone in Germany smokes, but was even more apparent as we tucked in for a dinner from guesthouse, at a standard shared table with three men, being served the standard schnitzel, goulash or saurbraten. As we looked around, everyone was drinking beer huge glasses of beer and smoking. It is a social style of eating, sharing your huge tables, but the menus so far have seemed the same in the last few towns and the heavy smoking has been a terror. And the food, we are so ready for a non-fried, non-cholesterol, non-greasy meal that we don’t have to procure ourselves from a grocery store! Yikes. And thus began the start of our ‘the Germanic region of Europe has the worst diet ever’ banter. Sigh.
