S/V Tavarua

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).

We woke up to another beautiful day and we had beautiful views driving along the Alpenstrasse, a picturesque road that winds through the north side of the Alps. Along the way, we were slowed down by a small procession of Austrians in traditional wear who had decorated their cows with flower headdresses and marching the cows down the center of the road to their winter pastures. (We glanced at each other with a “Can you believe what you are seeing?!” look.) With the rolling meadows in the foreground, Tyrolean houses along the road and the mountains tinged with snow surrounding the valley, this went into the unbelievable storybook moments of travel.

As for Garmish, it looked like the most convenient town for a room that avoided the overflow of the München Oktoberfest tourists. Being tired from driving all day, we didn’t have an overly favorable impression of the town. One of the ‘attractions’ of the town is to ride the cable car up the mountain for the views. This was soon realized to be a non-attraction for us, as the weather was changing and getting cloudier by the moment and the price for two of us to go up the cable car was 90 Euros… 90?!

On the positive column for the town, we were surprised to see Indian and Vietnamese restaurants, since we just left a series of heavy tourist towns that only had a Pizzaria or Trattoria on show for International food. We discovered the reason for the existence of the International restaurants as we left the town the next day, there was an American military base on the far side of town, which did explain why the folks eating in the Indian restaurant didn’t look like your standard American tourists. We were sort of wondering what was up with the patrons.

Bypassing Munich (the town of a late Oktoberfest), we drove over to Berchtesgaden and stopped by Seebruck for lunch sitting on the Chiemsee lake. A nice lake, but it was the standard menu, the day was sunny and pleasant, and the bees were in proliferation. We’ve had bees at almost all of our outdoor meals in Germany, but this particular meal was about to be battle between whether they liked German food more than we did. We were not particularly interested in playing this game, but eventually we did. (The bees won, though.)

We had an amazingly beautiful drive over to the Alps. The weather was clear, the leaves were falling as we were driving. Nature was delivering full Autumn glory. The entire region was pure eye candy. The German’s are holding out on us, keeping this scenery in their country.

In Berchtesgaden, of Hitler Nazi fame and also of National Forest fame, we split our time between the two topics. On the first day, we spent our time heading out in the mid-morning to Lake Konigsee and taking an electric boat to the far end. The day was amazing, the lake water super clear, the temperature was warm, the air smelled fantastic and the mountains were topped with snow. We went for a short walk on the far end and listened to one of the amusing aspects of the area, the cowbells. With a quiet autumn day, the valleys echoed with big cowbells around the necks of the grazing dairy cows. We spent most of a half day day walking a bit and generally oohing and ahhing over the vistas. We found we timed it well, as we boated back in the afternoon, the bus loads of tourists had descended on the boat docks. There were over 28 tour buses in the parking lot when we left! They must be making a killing on those boat rides.

On the next day, we headed up to the Kehlsteinhaus (a.k.a ‘The Eagles Nest’, a stupid name given to the place by American GI’s who probably couldn’t pronounce ‘Kehlstein’ and who also had no idea what an Eagle actually looks like). This was a 50th birthday present to Hitler from Martin Bormann, and is now a cafe, almost no interior design left reminding us of the building’s past. This building/restaurant is perched at the top of 6,000+ foot mountain. To get there, we took a bus up the steep mountain, on a road that has only one switchback, then we walked through a tunnel 406 feet directly into the mountain, then we took a huge brass elevator 406 feet straight up. The walk down the tunnel was the most outstanding feature. As we walked with soft-soled walking shoes, our feet clicked and clacked with a military echoing precision. It was a great sound and very eerie. Now, I’ve got to say, that this was one of the easiest mountain hikes that I’ve ever accomplished, walking from a bus 400 feet to an elevator, and wallah! I’m at the top of a sheer mountain cliff looking out over the Bavarian Alps. Nice.

So, having arrived at the top of the mountain, we pretty much had the Alp views to ourselves. We watched the fog that collected only over the lakes burn off to reveal the lake that we were on the day before. Then we followed the signs for the 45 minute hike. We could tell we were at elevation, but it elicited a few ‘Why don’t we go hiking more often?’s out of us, so even with snow covering a bit of the path here and there, we were very pleased.

The folks running this tourist destination have a weird system of catching a bus back down from the building, you need to get your ticket stamped with the time you are going to leave. So, without seeing the area, you need to decide just how interested you are going to be. We opted for a full 3 hours, figuring if we got too bored we could try to negotiate an earlier ride down. Our timing wasn’t too far off, we checked out the Eagle’s Nest building (I wasn’t overly impressed, except for the outrageous location of the building), contemplated the views and settled in for a beer at the cafe after our hard walk. This beer was, of course, at a shared table with chatty Germans surrounded by white haired beer drinkers, smoking and eating Currywurst and french fries….

Later in the day, rented the audioguide from the Dokumentation Obersalzberg and took four hours to listen to the unabridged look at the Third Reich and the response of the German people. It basically covered the cult of Hitler and how he gained power and how he controlled the media to win the hearts of the people, and stacked the judiciary to get programs in place that he desired. It was a moving presentation and well worth every bit of time that we spent there. At the end of the museum is a glimpse into the four miles of the underground bunker complex that linked many of the buildings in the area. An eerie place.

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.

We decided in Prague to rent a car and do some driving around Europe. We wanted the flexibility to avoid the rain. Our other thought was to rent an apartment for a month and just stay put, but we couldn’t agree as to where. So, off to Germany where the car rentals are much cheaper than other countries.

We were pleasantly surprised by Nürnberg. It is a cute town, the pedestrian old town center is a full-fledged semi-upscale shopping district. And it provided us with a mini-Octoberfest, the Altstadtfest. It had 1.2 million visitors over the course of two weeks, but it seemed very mellow. We were there for the opening ceremony and the tapping of the kegs. We ate Nürnberg sausages (”drei im weckla” == “three in a bun”), tried out a few of the beers (which mostly tasted just like you would think a German beer should), had a Schweinhaxen (aka., pork knuckle or ham hock), ate the bread dumplings, ate the sauerkraut, and drew the line at a cold meat/rye bread, onion and butter platter that we mistakenly ordered.

This last platter of food was an epic event at the outdoor beer hall table, on the first night of the festival. We thought we were getting a mixed order of sausages to share, but found that ‘roasted’ was not one of the adjectives in the German menu, after the order arrived. We were served what looked like a huge pile of cold raw, pink pork sausages on a huge wooden platter, with raw onions, pickles, butter and rye bread arranged around them. We asked our German neighbors if the sausage was supposed to be cooked or not, and they were not sure, that wasn’t something they would ever order. So, we sat there for a bit staring at the platter and considered what to do while we finished a mug of (oh, why can’t they use more hops?!) German beer. We finally just called for our bill and decided to roll the dice on another food establishment that evening. The waiter gave us much grief for not giving the raw mushy pork looking sausage a try, so that we were thoroughly uncomfortable and the focus of much attention by the time we parted ways with him. Ah, pork, how can it be served so wrong?!

(Can you actually eat raw pork?) I just looked for raw German sausages in the wiki, and came up with a few different options, with the probable one being Mettwurst:

Mettwurst is a strongly flavoured German sausage made from raw minced pork, which is preserved by curing and smoking. The southern German variety is soft and similar to Teewurst… Mettwurst can be cooked or fried or spread on rye bread with onions and eaten raw.

Gads.

As for sightseeing, Derrell’s mom worked as a translator at the Nürnberg trials, so we headed over to the trial room to check it out. The trial room has been downsized, and it is still in use as a courtroom, so it basically looked like a standard old courtroom, if you ignore the hidden elevator built into the wood paneling that connects this court room to the attached prison complex…

The more interesting aspect of the room tour was the age of the people that showed up for the tour, most of the group would have been in their teens or twenties when the trials were happening. That had an impact on me, along with the black and white photos on the wall showing the town in complete ruins.

We also took in the German National Museum, and overdosed on the museum after viewing one too many ancient religious objects, we should have known that six hours was too long to wander a museum without lunch. Just before the museum, we saw the beginning of a bike race in the town, everyone looking healthy, awake in the early morning and ready to go. So, we got to enjoy a good dose of athletic vibe while we watched the start of the race, complete with loudspeaker announcements and pacing/repair cars following the racers.

Finally, one of the best afternoons consisted in taking a walk around one of the town’s lakes, Großer Dutzendteich, near the Nazi staging grounds and Documentation Center (in the former Nazi Congress Hall, designed by Albert Speer and modeled after a Roman Colosseum). We enjoyed the fine autumn weather, ducks and, well, not-so-much, the old men racing toy speedboats making an unqualified high-pitched motorized racket that overwhelmed some of the lake’s solitude. Ah, but I digress, the walk was wonderful, nature was showing some great Autumn colors.