Thu 3 Oct 2002
Posted by Ken Atherton under germany, vacation
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Grandma and Papaw Atherton are coming to visit us in Germany. Since we plan to take them touring to many of the interesting places we’ve gone, we decided just to make it official and play the part of a travel agency. Here’s the itinerary we sent them:
Sun 6 Oct 2002
Posted by Ken Atherton under germany
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Carissa and I picked them up in Munich yesterday. They had a long flight but they made it.
Carissa was happy to see them. We made a little sign like the ones that taxi drivers hold up that said “Atherton” on it. Carissa held it while walking through the airport.
The Munich airport was a lot further away than I thought. Carissa and I left at 6:00, thinking that it would take about two and a half hours to reach the airport. That way, we would arrive about the time Mom and Dad got their bags and made it to customs after their plane arrived at 7:55 in Munich. Unfortunately, it was a little after 9 when we arrived because the ariport was further away than I thought, and then it took us another half-hour to find them.
Carissa and I went to the wrong gate, but it didn’t take too long to realize our mistake.
Mom and Dad were waiting for us, having sailed through customs and retrieved their baggage in record time. It was after 9:30 when we found them.
We aren’t planning to spend any time in Munich during Mom and Dad’s stay, so yesterday was a good time to go to the Dachau concentration camp, which is very near the airport. Dad mad mentioned it as one of the places he wanted to see while he was here.
While we were there, there was a work crew working on the Russian Orthodox memorial, which is a small church of remembrance for the thousands of Russian officers killed by the Nazis at Dachau. The renovation was nearly complete, and the crew was re-installing the cross on top of the building. After they placed the cross, they crew sang a short Russian hymn.
After we left the memorial site, we drove into the old center of Dachau to eat at a small Biergarten I read about in one of our travel guides.
I thought I spoke enough German to at least communicate a food order, but this was a special case. I think the waiter was speaking a Bavarian dialect, or at least had an accent that I didn’t understand very well. In addition, he was the only waiter working at the time, so he was running around like his pants were on fire. Or as Dad said, the waiter was as busy as “a one-legged man at a butt-kicking contest.” You get the idea.
When he first approched us for our drink order, we didn’t know what we wanted, so he dropped off a menu and left. When he returned, he took only our drink order, and left again. When he returned with our drinks, we tried to order, but he rushed away too quickly. That wasn’t such a bad deal for us though– we were having a lot of trouble understanding the menu. After that point, everytime he brought someone’s order out of the kitchen, he stopped at our table first, and tried to give it to us. We kept trying to explain that we hadn’t ordered yet, to no avail.
I finally got his attention long enough to give him our order. By that time, we had decided to order something different based on the meal the people at the table next to us. Once we ordered, it didn’t take long for the food to arrive.
We had a dish called “Krustenbrot’n”– at least that’s what the menu board said. It consisted of pork roast in a dark beer sauce and was served with a spiced Knödel, which is somewhat similar to the type of wet dressing that is often served with Thanksgiving dinner. It was really good, and it was a good way to start off Mom and Dad’s trip. Dad and I also had a dark beer brewed in the building right next to the restaurant.
Funny story:
Mom needed to go to the restroom while we were there. She asked how to tell the women’s room from the men’s, and I told her that they would likely be labelled “Herren” for men and “Damen” for women. She left and returned shortly thereafter. By that time, I decided I needed to take my turn in the restroom. So I went into the restaurant, and found the rooms, but they were labelled differently than I expected. It was no big deal, though, because there was a picture of a man on the men’s room, and a picture of a woman on the women’s room. I noticed as I entered that the men’s room consisted of a pissoir (meaning that you pee on the wall and it drains into a trough on thed floor) and a toilet in the back of the pissoir. After I finished, right as I walked to the door, Mom and Carissa (who had decided she needed to go too) came walking in. Mom, after having not seen the words on the door I told her to expect, and having not seen the pictures, had used the men’s room earlier. But hey, there were no urinals, so how was she to know?
On the drive home, the long trip started to catch up with Mom and Dad, plus it was past time for Carissa’s nap. I would hear Carissa and Grandma talking in the back seat, then there would be silence. I would look back and both of them would be asleep. A few minutes later, I hear them talking again. Carissa would say, “I went to sleep just like you, Grandma!” Dad would ask me a question, I would answer, and then he would nod off. We were driving into the sun, and he says that hen you are tired, it’s hard to squint without falling asleep.
I thought it was funny. It was like driving with a carload of talking ground hogs. The groundhogs would pop out of their holes, say something, then disappear again for a while.
Carissa and Papaw at Dachau KZ. As sober as the concentration camp site is, it’s hard not to be happy when your three-year-old grandchild is happy.
Here is the Russian work crew putting the cross back on top of the Russian Orthodox memorial church.
Here comes CeCe to greet us when we arrived in Niedereschach. She was a little unsure of Grandma and Papaw at first, but it didn’t last long.
This is the floor of our house five minutes after my parents arrived. They brought a lot of stuff from the states for us, plus a lot of gifts for the kids from all four of the grandparents. It looked like Christmas morning!
Fri 11 Oct 2002
Posted by Ken Atherton under France, germany
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Here’s the vehicle we have been using to tour German, France, and Switzerland:
For those of you not used to to such trickery, the sign you see on the side isn’t really there. It sure does represent how we feel when we drive, though.
Our station wagon just will not fit 4 adult and 2 children in car seats. We first thought that we would rent a small car and drive separately to all of the places we planned to visit. After talking to several local car rental places, it just made more sense to rent one big vehicle.
The behemoth you see above is a Ford Transit. It is a 9-passenger van with room for luggage. It has a diesel engine, stands more than 6 feet tall, and drives like a bus.
On American roads, most people would never even notice such a vehicle, but in Europe, this is one BIG vehicle. When we went to Paris, we spent an hour looking for a parking garage that could accept a vehicle more than 2 meters tall. Trust me, it wasn’t easy.
The van slows down badly going up hill, which makes it hard to really make use of the autobahn. It also doesn’t corner very well, so we have to drive most of the smaller roads in this area very slowly, since the roads tend to wind through the valleys.
On the other hand, it is very intimidating to most of the tiny little cars we share the road with. When I turn on the turn signal, the other drivers tend to make way in a hurry.
Local Tags: autobahn, cultural differences, France, germany, paris, park, rental, switzerland
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Tue 15 Oct 2002
Posted by Ken Atherton under germany, vacation
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After almost two weeks of fun and excitement (ask Susan about her adventures in Paris, for example), Wayne and Susan left Germany this morning. the whole family drove with them back to Munich, and their flight left on time. By about 6 PM Indy time today, they should be back home.
As I mentioned, we had a lot of fun, and we visited many places during their short visit. I’ll start posting some of the pictures over the next few days.
Yeah, yeah, I know I said the same thing about our trip to Italy. Now that Mom and Dad have gone back home, though, I should have more time to finish up that project too!
Assuming I get done before the baby comes.
Local Tags: baby, germany, grandma atherton, italy, munich, papaw atherton, paris, wayne
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Tue 15 Oct 2002
Posted by Ken Atherton under germany, italy, vacation
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There are probably few things worse than watching someone else’s home videos, but decent production values and massive editing (read cuts) might help a little. It’s probably still a worse experience than having your wisdom teeth pulled without the aid of anesthesia, though.
One of the many reasons why I haven’t gotten all of the Italian vacation messages posted yet is that we’ve been working on such a video of our vacation. After a lot of work, we finally finished the layout just before my parents arrived for their visit.
We picked out our favorite video clips and pictures from the vacation, set the whole thing to music, and created an 18 minute and 6 second documentary of the trip. Yeah, it’s really that long.
We think it turned out pretty well. The girls like to watch it, especially the parts at the pool and the beach.
[Update, January 9th, 2009]
In order to make the video available on YouTube, I had to split it into 2 pieces. You can watch them embedded here, or you can go directly to youtube to see them. It might be worth your while to go there, since you can choose to view the “high quality” version. The embedded version can only be viewed in youtube’s “standard quality” mode, whereas you can select “high quality” mode if you go to youtube to view it directly.
Sun 20 Oct 2002
Posted by Ken Atherton under germany, italy, vacation
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Today’s trip was actually a very simple one. We drove from our hotel to the Amalfi (aka Amalfani) coast, drove around it, and returned. It sounds simple, anyway. Allow me to let you in on a little secret: Even though the coast is located on the outskirts of Napoli, the only way to reach the coast until the 1950s was to take a boat. During the 1950s, ambitious road engineers managed to carve a road out of the rocky terrain. Today, the engineering marvel of the coast road is passable for all kinds of traffic-mostly.
Imagine a normal two-lane road. Now imagine it without shoulders–one side has a railing, the other is a sheer cliff face. Now imagine that the lane widths are about 30% narrower than you are used to. Furthermore, imagine that the road consists of mostly hairpin turns, sharp inclines, and equally sharp descents. Finally, imagine that the most prominent on-coming traffic is tour buses.
The Amalfi coast is a place filled with amazing visual delights and is a wonderful trip for everyone except the driver, to paraphrase our guidebook.
And that is true. More than once, we were trapped in a comer by one of the tour buses, and working through the difficulties of passing each other made the trip difficult, and even in the best of times with no other traffic the curves were often harrowing . The drive is difficult and hair-raising, but it’s worth it. There are several towns along the coast. Each one developed surrounding one of the many inlets that can be used as safe harbors for fishing boats. These are the towns that you think of when someone says, “Mediterranean-style.” The buildings are beautiful and dangerous as they seem to be one good mudslide away from the water. They are filled with even narrower streets that run in circles. Each town has three or four circular roads that are used to access all of the town. One circle will lead down the hill, past all of the shopping area and the dock. Another will lead up the hill through a residential area. And so on.
Between the towns, tourists are treated to beautiful views of the sea, and equally beautiful views of the local agriculture, which consists largely of groves of lemon trees. The trip takes a long time not because of the distance but because ofthe driving conditions. Needless to say, we had to make a bathroom stop for Carissa. We did so at a restaurant that effectively had valet parking-but there really wasn’t anywhere else to go-so it was hard to go to the restroom without having to eat at the restaurant. After we discovered that we couldn’t just order ice cream, we politely disappeared. We did find some ice cream in the gift shop, so we didn’t feel too bad. Besides, Sandi found a plaque to buy.
There are towns spread throughout the many inlets that can be used as safe harbors for fishing boats. These are the towns that you think of when someone says, “Mediterranean-style.” The buildings are beautiful and dangerous as they seem to be one good mudslide away from the water. They are filled with even narrower streets that run in circles. Each town has three or four circular roads One of the coastal towns. Through the middle of the picture, the road we travelled on is visible. Note that even in town, it takes several exciting twists and turns.
This is a view down the coast from a restaurant we stopped at so that Carissa could take a potty break. At the horizon, just barely visible, is one of the larger islands off the coast. It’s not Capri, but it is close.
Mon 28 Oct 2002
Posted by Ken Atherton under Daily Life, germany
1 Comment
The weather here continues to be very strange. For more than a week now, it’s rained multiple times each day. In between, the sun comes out and it can be very beautiful outside.
An interesting side effect of this (or maybe it’s a consolation prize) is that we have had lots of rainbows during this time. Since a week ago Saturday, I have seen at least 6 different rainbows.
It’s pretty amazing. This morning as I was driving to work, a rainbow appeared over the downtown area of Niedereschach. The rainbow reached right down into the valley and looked like it touched ground right in front of me just down the hill. I almost expected to find a pot of gold in the city center.
Still, a little more time with the sunlight and less with the clouds would be nice.
Local Tags: driving, german weather, germany, ken, niedereschach, rainbows
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