by - PatBee

July 23 was the day we had been looking forward to for almost a year. We had flown to the Newark, NJ, airport and were boarding a Continental jet flight to Brussels, along with our two grandsons--Robert, 12, and Douglas, 9. It was the beginning of an adventure that would introduce them to (and make them huge devotees of) Germany.

The fun started as soon as we took our seats on the plane. I sat with Douglas, while Bud and Robert were in seats behind us. Douglas was excited about everything. "Look, Grandma, they gave me a pillow--and a blanket! And look, there's a radio headset -- and a little TV screen!" That was just for starters, because when they served the standard dinner meal, Douglas was intrigued by the little salt and pepper shakers, the plastic-wrapped main course, and the FREE COKE! Off to a good start, with a couple of kids who found even the simplest things an adventure.

The next morning, upon landing in Brussels, we went to the Europe Car desk to pick up the compact car we had rented. But, instead of a VW Golf, they upgraded us to a Mercedez-Benz! Yeah, this was going to be a good trip.

Off we went, headed toward Germany, and when we crossed the Mosel River, we felt "at home" once again. After a brief stop in a Trier supermarket to load up on basic grocery supplies, we drove on to tiny Fohren-Linden, near Baumholder.

Ferienwohnung Diehl
Haupststraße 1
55777 Fohren-Linden (near Baumholder)
Tel - 6783/5623
Email - renate.diehl@gmx.de

Our hosts were waiting for us, and showed us to our ground-floor apartment--two bedrooms, nice bath, fully equipped kitchen and living room with cable TV, of course (€35 a night). We asked where the nearest bakery was, and learned that it was in the next town, several miles away. We didn't feel like driving anymore, so decided we'd just have some cereal and fruit for breakfast the next morning.

After the boys had explored the back yard (adjacent to a pasture where a shiny brown horse and its little colt were trotting around) and kicked around the soccer ball our host had provided, we had a simple supper and went to bed early. The next day we woke up at 12:45 p.m. (yes!) and found a bag of Brötchen hanging on our front door handle. Bless our landlords for that wonderful surprise. We had a proper German breakfast, with boiled eggs, Brötchen with cheese and wurst, fruit juice, and coffee. The boys loved every bite, and after the breakfast things had been cleared away, we set off to visit the Sittich Farm in Baumholder. This is a breeding farm for parrots, parrakeets, and other exotic birds--as well as being a source of fresh honey, collected from the many beehives on the grounds.



Next day, we drove to Burg Thallichtenberg, an old castle atop a hill near Kusel. Bud and I watched the boys as they climbed winding stairs to the castle turrets, explored dark passageways, and sat on crumbling walls. It was hot work, and we finally sat them down in the castle Biergarten for refreshments--ice-cold Cokes served in real, old-fashioned green glass Coke bottles--which the boys instantly declared to be "the best Coke I ever tasted!" Another promising sign for our trip.



After visiting the Smith Barracks Kaserne in Baumholder (kind of deserted, since most of the men were in Iraq) to use the computer, we went to a nearby country restaurant known to everyone in the 1970s as "The Washrack", and introduced the boys to their first REAL Schnitzel dinner--which they pronounced "The BEST schnitzel I ever ate!"

On Saturday morning, we drove to Glan-Munchweiler to take the boys on a Volksmarch. As avid volksmarchers during the 1970s, Bud and I were looking forward to another wonderful Saturday morning. But we forgot that we were now 30 years older, and the temperature was hovering around the 90s. The first three kilometers seemed like a hundred--straight up under the broiling sun. By the time we reached the check point, I was in the first stages of heat stroke and some good Samaritans drove me back to the start point, where I was laid out on a bench and fed mineral water to cool down. An hour or so later, Bud and the boys arrived, and the kids claimed their reward -- a beer glass with the name of the town etched on it. I am sorry to say that I've resigned from the happy Volksmarching days of the past.

Our next move was to Finsterlohr, a town of 200 inhabitants just a few miles northwest of Rothenburg. There, for €36 a night, we had rented a 2-story house with 1½ bathrooms and a large, covered porch filled with lawn furniture.

Haus Rost
Finsterlohr Nr. 102
97993 Creglingen
Tel - 7933/1548
Email - rost-juergen@web.de

We got settled in and drove to nearby Schonach, another small town with two nice restaurants. A Sommerfest was going on at one of them--complete with brass band, jumping tent for the kids, ice cream and cake, and--of course,-- plenty of beer on tap.

We stayed there for a while before checking out town restaurant #2, where we had dinner. A small Edeka market and village bakery were one block away, so we could shop for fresh Brötchen every morning or pick up a carton of peach ice cream for an afternoon treat.



We spent a day in Rothenburg, where the boys posed with a “gold” woodsman before going through the Kathe Wohlfahrt wonderful Christmas shop, visiting her Christmas Museum, and taking a tour through the Kriminal Museum. Robert and Douglas liked all the horrible punishments devised for medieval sinners!

After a few days in Finsterlohr, we moved to Bavaria, where we checked in at a FeWo in Pahl.

Familie Stechele/Brigitte Themel
Hesseloher Straße 31
82396 Pähl
Tel - 8808/548
Email - info@familiestechele.de

Although it was described on the Internet as a farm the only animals we saw were a grumpy old dog, some cats, and a pair of ducks followed by six fuzzy yellow ducklings. No matter, the boys had fun there, playing on the swing set and rolling down the steep hill behind the barn (a treat because we don't have hills in Florida.) It was a comfortable enough place, with a long, shaded balcony, and a tiny closet under the stairway to the fourth floor that was barely big enough for a toilet (€32 a night). The sink and shower were in the kitchen. The kids thought the tiny toilet was extremely funny, and made dopey kid jokes about it.

During the next few days, we visited Linderhof Castle (Douglas's favorite of the entire trip) and took a train to Munich one day to visit the Glockenspiel, Toy Museum, and Viktualienmarkt, where the boys had a bratwurst lunch, which they pronounced "The BEST Bratwurst I ever tasted!"



On Sunday afternoon, we drove to St. Albans, on the Ammersee, where Bud and I sat on a bench under a huge shade tree and watched Robert and Douglas swim and splash in the lake. It was a picture-perfect day, and when we left, the boys were starving (nothing new!) so we stopped in Raisting at a hotel Biergarten, where we ordered bowls of Spätzle and Dumplings with gravy for the kids. A perfect filling meal for two hungry boys.



After leaving Pahl, we drove to LegoLand (an expensive outing, but worth it kid-wise) and spent the day watching the kids have enormous fun going on the rides (Feuer-Drachen roller-coaster was--again, in their words--"The BEST!") Late in the afternoon, we left and drove on past Ulm to Machtolsheim, where we checked into the FeWo Schwendemann, a very nice place with (hooray!) a washing machine in the bathroom! They also had a kitchen outfitted with about every kind of cooking implement ever invented! (€35 a night plus end-cleaning fee)

Ferienwohnung Schwendemann
Am Großen Stein 7
89150 Laichingen
Tel - 7333/5814
Email - info@fewo-schwendemann.de

We spent Saturday afternoon watching the opening of the Olympics, which were--in a way--kind of scary. All those thousands of people, operating together like a perfectly programmed single entity was a bit daunting to me, in spite of the dramatic effect.

We took the boys to nearby Merklingen, where they were fascinated by Europe's largest model train exhibit--and on Saturday we drove to Ulm for market day in the platz at the Ulm Cathedral (tallest church spire in Europe.) Inside the church was a display of the various church bells that have hung in the spire--along with the history of each bell. They are so enormous that it's difficult to imagine how they were created and hoisted into place in the steeple in the days befoe modern machinery. One of the bells is still rung every year on the anniversary of an American air raid on Ulm that destroyed a good part of the city. I always have mixed emotions about such events, because I know the devastation and human suffering such raids caused. But only a few years earlier I had taken my church choir to Coventry, England, where we sang in the ruins of the Coventry cathedral, which was flattened during a firebombing of that city by the Luftwaffe. (As an interesting aside here, Churchill had learned that the raid was planned, but knew that warning the citizen of Coventry would inform the Germans that the Allies had broken the German codes--and it was decided that it was vital for us to keep monitoring the German messages, and so the people of Coventry were not told to take cover--a terrible decision for any leader to make, but perhaps a necessary one.)

Next stop, the Black Forest. We checked into our most wonderful FeWo (Haus Huber) where we paid €38.50 a day for a spacious apartment with beautiful flower-laden balcony overlooking a million-dollar view.

Anna und Ludwig Huber
Am Eckenacker 45
77740 Bad Peterstal-Griesbach
Tel - 7806/8260 ~ Fax - 7806/910650
Email - Haus.Huber@t-online.de

A bakery downtown delivered fresh Brötchen to our door every morning at 7 o'clock, and there was an amazing playground at the bottom of our street. We spent several quiet and very enjoyable days there, making visits to the Vogtsbauernhof open-air museum in Gutach. The boys also loved their six-ride tickets on a Rödelbahn that pulled them in individual little cars up to the top of a small mountain and then turned them loose to ride the twisty-turny rails to the bottom. Bud and I sat and ate pretzels and drank beer while we watched the kids going up and down the hill.



When we weren't out seeing sights, the boys played Slapjack, Rummy, and Poker with Bud (Douglas kept winning and got hysterical with laughter every time he won the pot!) We were able to do laundry once again in our bathroom washing machine, and decided that Haus Huber was--on a scale of one to ten--at least a 12½! (Bud even received a happy birthday letter from the Hubers a few weeks ago when he turned 84!)

Then we headed for our last destination--Wadern in the Saarland--where our Ferienhaus, which looked so spacious on the Internet, turned out to be just about the size of a small garage. In fact, it might have been a garage at one time. It had a bedroom, and an all-purpose room that contained a table and four chairs, two beds, two china closets, a TV stand, and about 20 square inches of open space. The kitchen was so tiny that only one person could walk through at one time, but our stay there was the opportunity for the kids to make up jokes about how small it was.

Ferienhaus Sunny
Egon-Reinert Str. 18
66687 Wadern
Tel - 6871/8188
Email - Info@Ferienhaus-Sunny.de

We drove to Trier one day, because I wanted to take the boys inside the Basilica built by Emperor Constantine (the first Christian Roman emperor) around 313 A.D. It is an amazing structure, built to impress--and subdue--the surrounding Barbarian tribes with the power and might of Rome. It is an enormous building with NO interior supports, which is a reminder that there have been engineering geniuses throughout history. The walls and floors were double-layered, with space between where heated air from underground charcoal fires was forced by bellows in the wintertime. It was perhaps the first "radiant heating" in Germany, and served to warm the enormous building.

One day, we took the boys to a “Bärfuss Park,” where they walked along the path barefoot. Every few meters, there was a patch of bark, moss, pebbles, straw, or mud where you are supposed to treat your feet to new physical sensations. There’s a water faucet at the end of the trail so you can clean the debris off your tootsies before leaving. The kids had fun—but I kept my shoes on.

On our last full day in Wadern, we visited a very nice--and very large--mall in that little town. They had a nice cafeteria, with a great assortment of dishes at very reasonable prices. We decided to eat our last meal there, and then paid a visit to the Lebensmittel in the basement, where the boys invested the remains of their carefully hoarded spending money in Milka bars, Haribo gummi bears, and other incidental "necessities of life."



Next morning we were out of our teeny tiny "Ferienhaus" and on to Brussels, where we turned in the car and took a taxi to the Holiday Inn Express hotel. It was a good enough place to spend the last night (free buffet breakfast and shuttle bus to the airport next morning) but there wasn't a restaurant within miles, except for the next-door Holiday Inn. We walked over there to check out the situation, but discovered that they were selling hamburgers for ten Euros, and Cokes for five Euros, so we took an evening shuttle bus from our hotel back to the airport and had dinner there. Not a festive way to end such a wonderful vacation, but by then we were turning our focus toward going "home" again.

Holiday Inn
Brussels Airport
Berkenlaan 5
Diegem, 1831 Belgium
Hotel Front Desk: 32-2-7253380

Our trip home on Delta was fine. The boys had kept a journal of their travels, and we even had a little money left over! We flew into Atlanta and then to Buffalo, where we had left our car at daughter Christina's house. After one day of rest there, we headed south on Friday, straight into the aftereffects of a hurricane. On Saturday, in the midst of a cloudburst, we had to brake to avoid a stopped car in front of us--and hydroplaned off the Interstate, down an embankment, into a thick patch of reeds (thank goodness) which slowed us enough so that when we crashed into the divider fence, we only smashed our left front fender.

A state trooper came and called a tow truck, which hauled us to Waltersboro, S.C., dropped us off at a motel, and took our car to the junk yard/body shop owned by the tow-truck guy. We had to rent a car from the only place open on Saturday afternoon--a used-car lot that gave us a car for $50 a day! We called GEICO, reported the accident, and headed home to Jax, arriving there around 3:30 in the afternoon. We dropped the boys and their gear off at their house and headed for the European Street Cafe, where we ordered a Warsteiner to celebrate the official ending of a wonderful four-week adventure with two grateful, non-greedy, adaptable, loving little Engelkinder.

Was the trip a success? You tell me. A few days ago, we were playing a Rick Steves video that featured an Oktoberfest scene with someone about to chomp down on a big, grilled bratwurst tucked into a crispy Brötchen. Douglas looked at it and shouted, "Take me back to Germany, please!" Enough said.

p.s. GEICO handled everything--moved our car from the junk yard to a really good body shop in Beaufort, SC, arranged for us to turn in our $50 rental car for an Enterprise rental that was completely covered by our insurance. We picked up our smashed car ten days later, and last week I received a partial reimbursement from GEICO for the rip-off rental. That little lizard in the commercials is telling the truth--they really took good care of us!