After exiting Italy (past Fortezza / Franzensfeste), we drove through the Alps, no stops for dressed up cows this time, though. We overdosed on more autumn scenery and ate lunch at a tourist trap of a restaurant with great views overlooking the town of Innsbruck.
We headed to Füssen in Germany, and after checking into the Hotel Sonne (with a great sauna and bathrobes!), we headed out for some touristing. We drove by the Disneyland castle Neuschwanstein, but didn’t go in, and checked out the interior of the Wies church. The latter being a Rococo style church full of scary looking cherubs, which just made me want to check out the ultimate Rococo residence, the Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg. (The summer palace of the tzars… Now that’s some interior design!)
We had decided to head up the village of Hees in the Netherlands, as in Voorhees, or at least the town before Hees. This sounded like a grand plan until we went to leave Füssen and found that the Ford Focus locks the trunk when you put the lid down. (Well, only if the doors to the car are locked. The mighty Ford Focus doesn’t lock the trunk, if one of the car doors is unlocked.)
Now just how did we discover this nuance in fine automobile design? Ah, by locking our keys in the trunk… So, we rechecked into the hotel without our luggage and spent the day getting ADAC (the German equivalent to AAA) out to unlock the car. Since every good German is a member of ADAC, only non-members pay for this rescue service… and pay we did. We found out it costs 110 Euros to have a guy in a spiffy yellow jumpsuit come out and, in less than two minutes, use two blood pressure cuffs to push the top of the door away from the frame and insert a state-of-the-art coat hanger to pull the door handle open. It was such an easy job, it made us wonder why Ford even bothered putting locks on the car. Derrell was also quite amused that the anti-theft red light in the dash was blinking contentedly throughout the entire procedure.
Well, anyhow, that pretty much blew our chance of getting from South Germany to North Netherlands and still get the rental car back in time. So, Hees was a short-lived destination.
Füssen, even for an additional day, was another cute place. It had the standard Alps in the background, autumn leaves falling, river through the middle of the town… Y’know, the old ‘bowl you over with the scenery’ that is starting to look standard in Germany. The tourists were missing, that was a fine thing. And the owner of a winestube adopted us, along with two chaps from Scotland and fed us a mighty fine fried wiener schnitzel (with only a touch of actually tasty brown sauce).
