Leaving Rome, Arriving in Germany, and Touring Europe

We got up Monday morning, our last day in Rome, and took our time getting ready for the day. Our flight to Stuttgart didn’t leave until 4:40pm, so we had some time to kill. We checked out of our hotel around 10:00am, left our bags with the bellhop, and headed out for one last tour around Rome. Because we had missed the Pantheon, that was our destination. We walked down to the Trevi fountain one more time on the way; it was empty and they were cleaning it out (both washing it and collecting all of the coins). We kept meandering down the alleys, past all of the vendors and shops (stopping in a few), and popped out in the Pantheon plaza. We went in and looked at it; not quite what we expected. It was great, but we thought there were going to be multiple rooms to go through, instead it is one massive circular room with objects around the outer wall. There were a few really neat sculptures and mementos. One that I thought was great to see was the artist Raphael’s tomb. He died and was immediately buried there in 1520.

After touring around inside we exited the Pantheon with more time than we thought we would have. We needed to kill time until 1:00pm, the time we had a taxi scheduled to pick us up at the hotel. We were also trying to not sweat too much, as we had to fly and then go to our cousin Melissa’s house, and it ended up being one of the hottest days we had in Rome. We just had to walk slower, stay in the shade as much as possible, and just take our time everywhere. Oh no!! (This is hard for me to do!) We didn’t want to walk too much farther away from our hotel, but a few blocks away was a really neat plaza, according to our tourist map, to check out. We walked through an alley and popped out into a huge, magnificent courtyard plaza, the Piazza Navona. There was a tall monument in the center, with fountains at each end. There was also a large building (I am not sure what it was) that was very ornate with a large dome. After a while, there are so many really old, ornate buildings that they sort of become “ho-hum,” but they are still always fantastic to see. There were also many, many street vendors in the plaza selling their wares. David made a purchase and then we started heading back toward our hotel.

We wandered back through some streets we had never been through, walking past some huge government buildings, and ended up back at the Trevi Fountain again. Still empty, but the area surrounding it was filling up with people. Even empty, the fountain has a special draw for people. We then walked back to the hotel area and went in to McDonald’s. We were both quite hot, and starting to get too sweaty, so we thought we would just relax in the air conditioning. We both ate a light lunch and sat there for about a half hour or so cooling off. It was then 12:30pm, so we walked the two blocks to our hotel and gathered our bags. The concierge called the taxi and he was there in less than five minutes! We then took off for the airport.

Taxi drivers are just fun. There is no other way to put it. He was flying through the streets, passing people all over, and almost making me hold on. He also took some shortcut, which made us both a bit nervous (some guy driving us through some deserted back alley on the outskirts of Rome), and we made great time getting to the airport. We walked in and found which desk we had to check-in at (which was not open yet) and saw the line for another flight. It was so long there was no way they could all get through the line before their flight left. There was one man standing in line for when they would open our desk and start check-in, so we decided to not risk having that long of a line and waited too. It took about 45 minutes before they opened the desk, and our line wasn’t that long, but we were still glad to have waited it out. We checked our bags, got our boarding passes, and then headed through the security. We figured that if the check-in lines were that long, we better not chance it. The security ended up being quite fast, so we had about two hours to kill waiting for our plane. Oh well, better than missing the plane, right? Because we purchased checked bags, we also had seats at the front with lots of legroom (and a “free” meal). As with a few other things on this trip, money well spent. It was only an hour and a half flight, but being able to stretch out was glorious!

We arrived at the airport in Stuttgart, Germany, and got our bags fairly quickly. We walked through the customs area and Melissa was right there to greet us. There are many good reasons to see our cousin, but seeing a familiar face, who speaks English!, was just a great feeling. We stopped off at a local restaurant and had dinner on our way to her apartment, which is in Böblingen, a suburb of Stuttgart. We then got to her apartment, she gave us the tour, and then we sat around visiting. As she had to get up for work in the morning, and she just got back from work after coming straight from a trip up to Sweden, Finland, and Estonia, she was very tired and needed to get to bed. She still didn’t go to bed until around 11:00pm or so! I love family J

The next two days were almost total relaxation for me and David. We slept in Tuesday morning and just relaxed until Melissa came home from work. Well, we both did laundry; clothes smelling like laundry detergent never smelled so good! After washing our clothes in sinks (except for one time in Inderøy) for the last 6 weeks, using a regular washing machine was just amazing! It is the small things in life…… I also got caught up on a few computer things that have been piling up. It is amazing how dependent we have become on Internet access. I was also finally able to post my pictures from Rome on Facebook!

When Melissa got home, she changed clothes and we went out. We first had to go to the military base to get permission for me to be able to drive her car. David was also supposed to drive, but he misplaced his international driver’s permit. (We think he may have accidentally packed it with the things he sent home.) After getting permission to drive her car, we went to the mall on base and picked up a few things and had a light lunch. We then drove to a couple nearby towns that Melissa wanted to show us.

The first town, Bebenhausen, was a small walled city. We walked around inside for a while, me taking pictures of course, and then we headed for the next town. Tubingen is much larger and is a university city. We parked the car and walked through the main part of town. There were many shops, some of which we wandered through, and many beautiful Bavarian buildings. It was like walking through a large, authentic, Leavenworth, Washington! We walked through the town and went to a park that is a skinny, but really long island in the middle of the river that runs through town. We walked down the length of the island and then back again, enjoying the scenery (many small gondola type boats going up and down the river, as well as the buildings along it) and each other’s company.

We then headed back to Böblingen and went to a Mexican restaurant that Melissa had wanted to try. Nobody was too impressed with the food, but it was sustenance. We then went back to her apartment. While Melissa was packing her clothes for her upcoming long-weekend trip to Poland, David and I visited with our cousin Sarah, back in Silverton, via Facetime on Melissa’s iPad. Technology definitely has its perks! Melissa went to bed while we were talking to Sarah, and then after chatting with her for a while, we said our goodbyes and we went to bed.

Wednesday was another lazy day. These two days of relaxation were so wonderful after six weeks of pretty much on the run traveling. Especially after 6 days of walking all over Rome! We lounged around the apartment, I finished catching up on some computer work, and we packed our bags for a long weekend jaunt around Europe. Melissa got home from work and we headed out. She was meeting three friends in Ansbach (Jim, Jan, and Joanne), about two hours away, at a house they own. They do not live there anymore, but they have rented it out to a friend of theirs. We all met up at the house and their friend that lives in the house, Bonnie, made an unbelievable meal for all of us. When it comes to hosting, she went all out! After a salad starter, we had (and of course I didn’t have everything) ham, a delicious potato dish, a yams and cinnamon apples dish, broccoli, and whatever else I am forgetting. After that she had two different desserts; a coconut cream dessert and a multilayered cake. Yes, she went all out. After we all ate, we sat around visiting for a couple hours before heading for bed.

We woke up Thursday morning and visited over pastries from the local bakery in town that Jim, Jan, and Joanne walked down to get. We then parted ways: Bonnie to work, Jim, Jan, Joanne, and Melissa headed for a pottery festival in Poland, and David and I headed out for a road trip. We drove a short distance to Rothenburg (full name is Rothenburg ob der Tauber), probably the best preserved walled city in the world. We were not prepared for what it was. We parked our car, paid for an hour and a half parking, and walked to the wall. It took us a couple minutes to find a way in, and then we entered through the opening. It was really neat. We turned left after we entered and saw some doors to go in. We walked past the doors to start with and went out to the main entrance to the city. After checking out the entrance, with a bridge across a huge moat, we walked back into the city and walked in one of the doors. It went inside the entrance buildings and we were able to walk up and around the front section of the city. We then exited this area, to the outside of the city, and walked back around through the moat (which has been turned into a nice park-type area). We then entered the wall through another door and went back up to the main entrance area. We then went in another door that went up and around the building to the perimeter wall. This was a walkway that went along the wall around the city. Not the entire walled-in city has walkways along the wall that is accessible to the public, so we hear. We never got to the end of it. We knew it would be bigger than Bebenhausen, but we didn’t expect what we saw. This was not a walled-in town; it was a walled-in city! It was gigantic! Walking along the wall we could see out over the buildings. The city is a fully functioning city; people lived in all of the houses, there were many, many businesses along all the streets that did not have houses on them. The place was huge! We kept walking quite a ways along the wall until I noticed the time; we only had about 25 minutes to get back to our car. We then went down one of the stairways off the wall walkway and worked our way back to our starting point. We walked through quite a few house-lined streets, and one of the main streets full of businesses, before we got back to where we started from. And we did not even come close to seeing a fraction of the city. Well, so much for thinking we could just bomb through and see it in a short time. Oh well, it is a place I could definitely go back to and spend some time roaming the streets. We made it back to our car with about 5 minutes to spare; not that there were any cops or meter maids in sight, but we didn’t want to have to explain to Melissa that we got a parking ticket within 2 hours of her lending us her car!

We then decided to drive to the Czech Republic before heading down to Dachau. We were not that far away, so we could go and pin another county in our map of countries visited. We drove a couple hours and went to a bigger city, Plzen (Pilsen). It was so crowded and we could not find/figure out their parking system, so we just drove around town for a while and then headed out. (My regret is that we didn’t spend more time here, figure out the parking, and get out walking around and taking pictures. There were quite a few neat park areas and plazas that were pretty nice.) I was on a mission to find at least one geocache; I wasn’t to be persuaded! I punched in the coordinates to one not too far away and we set out. We ended up going down a rutted up old road, out in the middle of nowhere, and finally popped out at the edge of a really small town. The geocache was still over a half mile roundtrip, through a farmer’s recently plowed field, with houses around us. I wasn’t about to try for this one. Disgusted, I found another one closer to the freeway, and punched those coordinates into the GPS.

It brought us to an even smaller town that had a huge building along the road. We pulled in to a small parking area close to the geocache and I went to see if I could find it. It was located down some ravine with nettles and trees along the bank. Once again, I wasn’t about to try for it. Being this far out in the Czech Republic, where very few, if any, people speak English, I wasn’t about to risk any weird confrontations. Instead we just walked through the doorway in the large building. It went through a little portico into a very large courtyard. There were a number of restaurants and shops in it (mostly closed) and a large Catholic church making up one part of the courtyard. There were a few people sitting at some outside tables for one of the open restaurants, but they didn’t pay us too much attention as we walked in, took a couple pictures, and then walked back out again. Disgusted again at not finding a geocache, I punched in the coordinates for another one at a rest area close to the Germany border. I was getting down to my last chances here!

This rest area was quite large. It not only had a large truck stop, but it also had McDonald’s at it. Thank goodness! We had not eaten anything all day and it was about 4:00pm, we were hungry! We had wanted to eat at the McDonald’s in Plzen, but we couldn’t find any parking. We wanted to keep up with our tradition of eating at a McDonald’s in every country we visit, so this was our chance. And, most importantly, the geocache was in the McDonald’s parking lot and it was an easy find! Woohoo! I knocked out two birds with one stone! I tried to find one more that was supposed to be in the rest area complex, but the road was barricaded that we were supposed to drive down. Oh well, I got one so I should just be happy with it. We then set the GPS to head down toward Dachau.

One thing to mention here: the Autobahn is awesome! I will probably not get used to it, but it is a weird feeling to be driving down the freeway at 100mph and being passed by someone like we were standing still. This happened so often, but we were still in awe. It wasn’t just young guys driving fast, it was everyone from business men driving home from work to families in the family wagon driving somewhere. It was just incredible. I mainly drove between 80mph and 90mph, where it was unlimited speed, but once in a while I got up over 100mph. Because this is my cousin’s car, I don’t want to push it too much. (I am sure I will by the time the weekend is done! Sorry Melissa J ) It is tempting to rent a sports car for one day just to take it out and drive really fast.

Anyway, the whole point of talking about the Autobahn is that we made pretty good time getting down to Munich. I was not sure what the hotel situation would be in Dachau (or in Munich, for that matter), so we punched in a hotel on the outskirts of Munich and headed there. This is how David and I like to travel, just find a hotel on the fly, but I was nervous about how it would be in Europe. We figured we would have to search for a while and try many different hotels before finding one, but we got lucky on the first one. It was pretty cheap, available, had parking, and was nice and clean. We checked in, put our bags in the room, and then headed out to see what we could find. It was about a half mile walk to the main part of the town (a suburb of Munich) and when we got to the main crossroad we smelled pizza. Sold! Not only was it good (I had pizza and David had a calzone), but it was also cheap. After we ate we walked back to our hotel and relaxed. (I also took this time to write this blog post up to this point. I had not written anything since our last day in Rome, so I thought I better write down everything I could remember before I forgot more than I probably already have.)

We woke up Friday morning, checked out of the hotel, and headed for Dachau. We weren’t sure what to expect, but we thought we would spend about an hour there and then head toward our next destination. Little did we know! Dachau was very impressive. It was a mixture of emotions to be there: sad, disgusted, intrigued, fascinated. We spent three hours touring around the grounds. We went through the prison cell block that is still standing and open for visitors. We were able to walk down the corridor and peek into many of the cells. They had a lot of information about many of the more famous prisoners in the cells that they occupied, and they had a lot of information about many of the Nazis who served there. We went through another prison building that has been transformed into a museum. It had multiple banners and boards talking all about the camp and the war. It also had a room for the survivors where many of those who survived the camp and lived to be older were honored. Of course there was also the memorial room with many artifacts, etc. We took a lot of time going through this building, but there is only so much a person can take, so we went through it a bit faster toward the end.

We then walked across the grounds, which were very expansive, and looked at the perimeter wall that was recreated many years ago to what it had been during the war. Across the grounds were all of the foundations for the other barracks that housed prisoners. We walked to a memorial that looked like it was created out of some old structure, and we also visited a church of sorts that was built as a memorial to the Polish prisoners who were killed. We then went through a gate in the wall and entered the crematorium area. This was disgusting when you looked at it and knew what it was for. We toured inside and saw the furnaces and also went through the “showers” that were used to gas prisoners. We then walked around a pathway that went back behind the buildings and walked past the shooting wall where prisoners were executed. Along this path were also many small memorials showing where the ashes of a multitude of unknown persons were buried. We had enough of this area and walked back into the main camp. We went through the one barrack that was open for touring. It showed the bunk beds (newly recreated) that were used to house the prisoners. This was neat to see to be able to understand how they were able to imprison so many people; around 60,000 at one time at the height of its use. After this we exited Dachau and made our way back to our car.

We then set out to find the Neuschwanstein Castle. This castle is very famous, even though it was built in the 1800s. It was this castle that Walt Disney modeled his Sleeping Beauty castle after. The castle was magnificent! We read up on it and decided to not take the inside tour. It didn’t seem that you would see that much more, we were running late of our “scheduled plans,” and just wanted to see the outside. We took a little bus up to the top and walked to a bridge that spans high above a river and looked out to the castle. The view was amazing! The bridge was crammed with people taking pictures, and had wooden planks for the base, so we joked about how lucky we were it didn’t fall once we got back off of it. We took many pictures of the castle and surrounding area and then walked back down to the turn off to go to the castle, and then walked up. Up close and personal, the castle is immense. We took many more pictures and then walked up the pathway to the entrance. The tour is for the interior of the castle, but we could still go inside the inner courtyard of it and look around. I did not think we would be able to do this, so it was an added bonus. Inside the walls was also very impressive. We took quite a few pictures and then slowly worked our way back down. It was getting late in the day, so the bus would not sell any more tickets, so we had to walk back down to the parking area/town. It only took about 20 minutes to walk back down, so it wasn’t too bad. We went through a few of the souvenir shops at the bottom and then headed for our car.

We weren’t exactly sure what to do. It was already fairly late, so we didn’t really want to drive to the town I had originally planned on trying to stay in. We could drive back to Melissa’s apartment and stay there, but it was about a 2 hour drive, or we could just drive closer to where we wanted to go and hope to find a hotel. We went with option B. We plugged a hotel into our GPS and drove on. We got to the Austrian border and luckily, at the last minute, I pulled off the exit. As with the Czech Republic, we had to pull in and purchase a toll pass. We bought the toll sticker and the continued on. We pulled into the small town of Rankweil, Austria, and drove to the hotel.

The lady at the desk laughed when David asked if there were any rooms available. I guess a town not too far from there was having some festival or something and the whole town of Rankweil was gone. So yes, they had rooms available. Phew! It was after 8:00pm, in the “middle of nowhere,” and we didn’t want to have to drive all over to find another hotel. She asked if we wanted to see the room before we agreed, and we said, “No, it will be perfect because we aren’t driving anywhere else!”  We dropped off our bags and walked down the street to find a restaurant that the hotel clerk said would still be open. The streets were pretty much deserted, on a Friday night! So yes, I guess the whole town did leave for the festival. We ate dinner, which took about an hour and a half, and then went back to our hotel room, now 10:00pm. The hotel had Internet, so I finished writing this blog and posted it! Yahoo! We have now been in nine countries on this trip, and we hope to add at least two more tomorrow. It has been quite the ride!