July 19- Waterloo

Napoleon had a great disaster because he went to Waterloo. We felt like we weren’t far behind.

We had to face the reality that we couldn’t cram in all the things we had been hoping to do. It wasn’t realistic for us to drive into Amsterdam today AND get to where we wanted to be tonight. So Anna Frank wasn’t going to be able to visit the Anne Frank house this trip. We also had to put in a long day of driving today, so that Paris and the last week of plans would fit. Dad actually apologized to the girls at breakfast today, because he knew it meant a long ride in the car for them.

So we started on our way through Holland and almost immediately met frustration. Before we left our hotel, the three girls went to the restroom next to the reception desk. As they went to leave, Julie found that the door lock on the stall was stuck, and she couldn’t turn it. She and Emma were both locked in it together. Anna had to be sent to the reception desk to get help, and even the receptionist had trouble opening the door. It was a traumatic experience for the two in the stall, apparently. Julie gets a little claustrophobic sometimes, and said her heart was racing, and her hands were shaking afterwards. It didn’t help matters that Emma was crying and saying, “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” The morning hadn’t started well.

A new system of signs meant that we had to accustom ourselves to looking for the signs in new places. The Dutch put their direction signs right in the middle of the traffic circle! Who does that? We also faced frustrations with the road construction we encountered. More than once, we started off thinking we knew how to go and the entry ramp to the expressway would be blocked, and we’d have to find a new route on the cruddy AAA map.

So far, no European country has labeled its routes with directions. If you want to go on the Thruway at home, you really only need to know one thing: East or West? Sure, sometimes you might say “towards Erie” or “towards Albany”, but you’ve always got the other designations to fall back on. If you’re in a part of the United States that you don’t know and you get lost, you can still be heading in the right direction if you follow the signs north or south, east or west. You just plain can’t do that in Europe. All of the road signs are labeled with the towns that they head towards, and nothing else. Oftentimes, there isn’t a route number either. That means you have to be searching the map constantly, trying to figure out which towns are going to be the ones that you have to head towards. That’s extremely frustrating because you guess that it will be the next city up the road, it will end up being the small town next door. That’s part of what makes the AAA maps so frustrating. Since they don’t list all of the small towns, you’re left staring at them and blinking (or swearing) as the traffic circle’s signs go by. It might be an OK system for the locals, but they already know where they’re going. Anyone else who visits the area has to constantly be aware of the town names around him and the directions that they are all in. It’s even worse when the language is different. The German towns were something we could deal with but in Holland, we’ve seen to many vowels and Js and Rs. They all sound like goobledy gook to us. Imagine not being from Buffalo, trying to follow signs like these, and all of a sudden having to figure out whether you need to head in the direction of Tonawanda, Lackawanna, or Cheekotwaga, especially if your handy AAA map only lists one or two of those. That’s what much of the trip today has been like.

Holland is flat. Very flat. At one point last night, Julie commented that the architecture of the houses had changed. Scott simply looked left and right and left and right and left and right, very slowly. At that particular moment, it seemed like you could actually see for several miles in every direction, and it was nothing but fields and a few cows, and maybe a modern windmill or three. There was not a building of any kind to be seen anywhere. Julie wanted to pinch Scott for his ability to make fun of her statement without saying anything.

There were actually some picturesque parts of Holland but we were lost when we were passing them and were too busy following road signs and trying to read maps to take any pictures or videos. We passed over several canals. We saw a few of the old-style windmills, the kind that you think of when you think of Holland. The one we got closest to was also at the spot where traffic was stopped for a drawbridge to go down. It had just let a boat through the canal lock. We saw lots of animals. There were sheep, cows, sheep with cows, goats, sheep with goats, sheep, a few camels, and sheep. We don’t know what the camels were doing there.

It’s been varying from rain to sun and back again over and over today. We’ve lost count of how many times.

We made it through to Belgium and entered our second country today. Belgium was only a little bit better than Holland as far as signs go. We made our way to Brussel where we found a rest-stop shopping area that sold the things we needed for some ham sandwiches and ate lunch as we rode.

Anna had been sitting in the trunk up until lunch. Julie discovered yesterday that there is the possibility of a third row of seats if you lift up the bottom of the trunk. She had noticed them because of the seat belts that were there. That gave the girls the novelty of being able to ride in the back and the ability for us to split them up on these really long drives. All four of us appreciated that. After our lunch stop, it was Emma’s turn. They’ve been doing pretty good in the car, in spite of the long drive today. When we were gathering our things at the end of the day, Anna said she had her three necessities-- her candy, her Fanta, and her DS.

Our touring for today was at the Waterloo Battlefield. We were optimistically hoping to get there by 1:00. It was actually more like 4:30 when we arrived. We had a little trouble finding it because we followed signs into the town itself. Once we finally got out of town to the south, there was actually a lot to see.

There’s a cluster of buildings near what was the center of the British lines, and they gave the battlefield a “Gettysburg” feel to us. (That’s good.) The first building has a gift shop with a large selection of books and goodies (Hooray! says Scott). You can buy several different ticket packages there. We didn’t have time for the full battlefield tour on a bus, though that would have been fun, but we did just about everything else.

We started our abbreviated but intense Waterloo experience with the “Audio Visual Show.” It’s comparable to the old Electric Map in Gettysburg, but with two interesting twists. It tells the story without narration, because of the diverse groups of people that come here from France, Britain, Germany, and all over. It also has a series of slides that accompany the changing map. The slides and the music make the phases of the battle not to hard to follow-- the opening of the fight near Hougoumont, the various infantry and cavalry engagements, the arrival of the Prussians on the battlefield to aid the British, and the eventual defeat of the French, down to the famous “Last French Square.”

The next phase of the tour of the battlefield is a film made up of a series of clips from the 1970 movie, “Waterloo.” It stars Rod Steiger as Napoleon and Christopher Plummer (aka Captain von Trapp) as Wellington. The movie does an amazing job of staging the battle, and even tops “Gettysburg” that way. The various phases of the battle were covered again in the film. Oddly, the British soldiers were dubbed over in French, but subtitles in several languages linked the scenes together. Scott was excited to see these scenes again, because he loaned his copy to a friend back in Petersburg and never got it back. He hasn’t seen the movie itself since then, because it’s currently not available in America. That’s hard to understand, because it is a great film. It was available in the gift shop, but Scott was afraid that it wouldn’t play on an American DVD player, plus it was only “full screen” not “wide screen.” That’s a tragedy. He did end up buying several postcards and a booklet about the battlefield. Julie later surprised him with an early anniversary present-- a t-shirt from the battlefield and a pin.

The next stop was the panorama painting. Like other panoramas we’ve visited, at Gettysburg, Atlanta, Moscow, and Volgograd, this painting is done on a canvas that surrounds you for 360 degrees. In some ways, this painting didn’t seem as well done as some of the others, and was showing some kind of damage in places. It certainly hurt that there was no narration to point out the details in this one, but that’s no doubt a result of the diversity of languages among the visitors again. Still, there were times that it did have a disorienting illusion of movement, helped no doubt by the real objects and figures in the foreground that try to add to the appearance of depth.

Following that was a wax museum where the leaders of the armies are featured- Napoleon and his French field marshals and generals, and the three Allied commanders, the Prince of Orange for the Dutch, Wellington for the British, and Blücher for the Prussians. There were also artifacts found on the battlefield. All in all, it was an unexpectedly complete series of museums.

The highlight that dominates the battlefield itself is the “Lion Mound” (or Buttes de Leon, which we naturally referred to as the butt of the lion.) After the battle the Prince of Orange came back and erected this gigantic monument to himself. The mound is 41 m (more than 120 feet ) high and has a statue of a lion on the top overlooking the battlefield. It is quite a climb up, but we made it to the top. Mom and Dad were huffing and puffing, while the girls marched back and forth playing. After admiring the view and taking some pictures we hurried back down, partly because we had more traveling to do, and partly because Emma didn’t want to be around when the re-enactors fired their cannon again.

We had dinner at the only natural place to eat at after doing our battlefielding- the nearby McDonalds. And now we’re in…. France! We found a nice, American style hotel along the expressway on the road to Armiens (in the Somme Valley, where World War I battles were fought). We’ve got a room with two double beds, though Julie misunderstood and asked for a cot as well. They brought up a baby crib. We told Emma it was for her because they heard her yelling when she was trying to scare the birds in the parking lot.

July 18- Lauenburg

The girls woke up on their own this morning, and Emma had slept through the night. We had breakfast at the hotel and headed north to Lauenburg, which is a town on the Elbe river just east of Hamburg.

In 1857, Joseph Langhans and his family left Lauenburg and came to America (using the port of Hamburg, no doubt). The family lost a child on the trip, but by January 1858, they had arrived in New York City. They moved to Cattaraugus County. The oldest son, John Langhans, eventually joined the 154th New York Volunteer Infantry to fight in the Civil War. He was Scott’s great-great-grandfather, on his paternal grandmother’s side. Our trip to Lauenburg today was to see what the community is like now.

We crossed the Elbe River on the bridge from the south and after a quick view of the riverfront, we parked by a riverboat at the docks, and walked inland. We found signs for “information” which directed us uphill to the Schloss (castle) tower. The information center wouldn’t be open until one o’clock, but we looked around the tower. The tower itself is one of the icons of the town, and the girls were excited to see the bride to a wedding party arrive in a limousine. We explored the tower itself and climbed to its top. Scott hit his head (twice, on the same beam) as we came out onto the highest point. Two bells are hanging up there, but the platform was quite small. Julie wanted to take pictures quick and work our way back down the steep stairs slowly.

We walked into the business district in town, not knowing exactly where we were headed, but hoping we might find an internet café or a Laundromat to use. We passed a bookstore where Scott bought a book on the town and a couple of CDs with music about the town by local artists. (The music didn’t end up being all that good, but they’re interesting to have.) We asked about an internet café in several stores and eventually found the public library. One of the people working there was kind enough to log us on to use the computers. It’s a good thing too, because people at home were starting to panic. The last time we had a chance to log in was the morning of the 13th. Today is the 18th, so people at home were in the dark. Scott’s parents sent an e-mail asking if we were ok. Julie’s dad sent one asking if the computer was “kaput.” There were also several birthday wishes for Anastasia. We answered the e-mail, but the computer wasn’t recognizing our thumbdrive, so the postings would have to wait.

We went back through the town, and found our way back to the dockside again. The old town is along the river, of course, but we were surprised that there were not the very old buildings that many other towns have had. The town of Lauenburg celebrated it’s 800th anniversary this year, so it has been around for awhile. Flags were flying around town with the celebration logo on them, and there were several displays that we found on buildings that showed what those buildings looked like back in 1900. But by European standards, 100 year old buildings aren’t that old. We wondered why the town was like that.

In addition to the schloss tower, another emblem for the town is the statue on the waterfront of a boatman calling out. He’s called “Der Rufer.“ We saw him on posters and all sorts of things throughout the town. We ended up eating lunch at a restaurant by the docks, and we sat outside at the table that was closest to that statue. The girls had spaghetti, Julie had a salad and Scott had schnitzel. We took our own photos of the statue and the boats.

After lunch we continued through the old town section, and found the Lutheran church. We don’t know if the Langhans family attended here, but it is a pretty church with a high steeple. We didn’t find a date for the church but the interior of it didn’t seem that old. We then went back to the car, and drove to the visitor’s center that was closed earlier. Scott bought a pin there and a few postcards for the scrapbook. We then crossed the bridge to the Southern shore of the Elbe and took a few quick photos of the town from that perspective. By then it was time to leave Germany.

From Hamburg to Holland. That was almost the title of this blog entry, just for the way it sounds to someone from Western New York. In fact we drove from Lauenburg, avoided the traffic in Hamburg by swinging on the autobahns furthest south around the city, and continued on to the Netherlands. We’ve seen a lot of windmills over the past week, but as we drove west, it sometimes seemed like forests of them. These are the large ones like the kind that they just put up in Lackawanna. The cows have changed too. We’re now seeing the more familiar white and black Holsteins. Schleswig Holstein is the German state that is just north of Hamburg, so the cows are close to home.

After a rest-area dinner that none of us really liked, we continued on to Holland. We splurged tonight and got a “real” hotel that we saw from the road. We should have internet access tonight, so with any luck, this entry will be posted to the blog by the end of the day. [Note: Well, that didn’t work as we had hoped.] The girls are in the pool right now. It’s not really a kid’s pool. It’s deep and marked with lanes for competitions, it seems, but Anna is in and Julie is sticking close to Emma. It’s actually in a field house, back behind the hotel complex.

July 17- Anna’s Birthday at Heide Park

Many of the cheap gasthauses we’ve stayed at have had an out-of-date sort of feel to them. This one does too, but in a weird sort of way. In addition to the 1950s colors, there’s a large pheasant like bird in the hall way that the taxidermist has mounted like a crowing rooster. There’s a creepy mannequin at the entryway, standing next to the bar. And among the real deer heads on the wall is a pair of fake one- a Mr. and a Mrs., because the doe is wearing an orange wig between her antlers. (Are does even supposed to have antlers?)

Scott was so exhausted that he layed down almost immediately on the extra bed in the room (since the three girls usually take the large one, if you can call it one. It’s almost always made up of two twins pushed together, and since they are always wooden boxes for their frames, there is always a gap down the middle of it). The maid had to ask him to move so she could make it up. The blog from yesterday is one of the few times we’ve had to go back and do the actual writing on the following day. Usually Scott’s been very good about finishing the draft before bed and the girls listen to him read it like a bedtime story.

The ever shrinking bathroom has magically disappeared altogether. You’d think that a singularity would be a great place to dispose of bodily waste, since everything would just disappear down the black hole forever, but that’s not what happens. Instead, it becomes a public bathroom that the whole floor shares out in the hallway. We knew to expect these in Europe, but this occasion marks the first time we’ve experienced it. At least the bathroom itself is large enough to do things in.

We let the girls wake up on their own today, at least as much as that is possible in a hotel room. For the first time on this trip, we didn’t have to pry them out of bed and face Emma’s morning grumpies. We all needed the rest.

Since today is Anna’s 9th birthday (and also because we’ve spent a lot of time in the car over the last few days), we gave her the choice between an amusement park or an animal park. She chose the amusement park when she found out for sure that there were roller coasters. Because of that, we chose this hotel, which is near Heide Park (pronounced- Hi-dah, not Hi-dee). We can tell from the multi-park passes that they sell that the park is owned by the same company that owns Gardaland (which we passed several times when we were staying in Garda, Italy) and several of the Legolands that we’ve seen advertised. As we were looking over the place, Julie thought that it was a lot like Hershey Park. Scott was reminded of King’s Dominion or Bush Gardens in Virginia. In other words it’s a pretty nice park and has nearly all of the standard things that you’d expect at parks of those sizes.

Epcot and Busch Gardens both show their theme-park versions of Germany. If you’ve ever wondered what Germans would make of America in one of their theme-parks, Heide Park offers an answer. In the middle of a lake stands a rather large replica of the Statue of Liberty. Nearby, is the Capitol Restaurant which has an intentional resemblance to the U.S. Capitol building. (The Senate wing is the restrooms.) Around the lake paddles a Mississippi River steamboat (though much smaller than the ones at Disney World). Nearby, is the wild west themed area called “Lucky Land” which is supposed to resemble a desert mining town. There is a large area in the rear of the park called Mayatal (“Valley of the Mayas”) where all of the atmosphere is supposed to resemble Precolumbian Mesoamerican Indian cultures. There’s an Bavarian Alpine area, a half-timbered town trying to mimic the real ones that we’ve seen recently, and some smaller themes specific to some of the rides.

We started out on the rides near the front of the park. After getting pictures with some of the costumed characters, the girls rode on a two story merry-go-round, choosing to ride on the upper deck, of course. Anna and Emma each drove an old-fashioned “car” with Dad and Mom riding in the back, respectively. A slow moving raft took the four of us around a large tranquil pond, where we saw families of ducks with babies. “The Bounty,” a large swinging pirate ship, became the first repeat ride as Anna first rode with Mom and Emma, and then with Dad. The girls then got to drive “race cars” around a track, similar to how they had with the antique cars. Julie warned Scott that a “water ride” was coming up, so he sat out what ended up being a very peaceful cruise through the simulated and idealized canals of Amsterdam. We then rode sort of a mini-monorail that gave us our first real overview of this half of the park. Because of its elevated track, we were able to see both where we had been and where we were going. The Panorama Tower is a ride in a revolving elevator (similar to that in Hershey and other parks) which gave us an even higher view of the rest of the park. Emma rode a cart drawn by a large monkey on a ride that only she was small enough for. The monkey took her past several characters that are from this area of northern Germany, including the Pied Piper, Baron von Münchhausen, and the four Bremen Town Musicians, but the thing that Emma wanted to make sure we all saw as she left the ride was the monkey’s butt. We rode a very fast spinning type ride around Wumbo, the park’s mascot bear. Then Anna and Emma got a kick out of the log flume ride with Mom, as Dad took videos. So far the crowds had been very thin and there was no real line for anything.

From there, we entered the park’s desert mining town area, “Lucky Land,” and rode a small ferris wheel where the buckets were made to look like mining buckets. We sat down for lunch at the “Apache Pub” hoping to maybe get the hamburgers that we didn’t have yesterday. They were serving very German sausages instead, but we enjoyed them under the roof of dining area. The sky had been overcast for the morning, which made the temperature comfortable, especially after yesterday’s hot sun. However, things changed about that time. A heavy downpour began quite suddenly and caused everyone to go running for shelter, including Anna and Emma who had finished eating and were playing on a playground nearby. We laughed at the image of this simulated desert town being drenched with rain. The downpour left almost as quickly as it began, but the sprinkle continued on and off for a little while. We’ve learned not to let the weather get us down, because it changes so quickly. So many of the last few days have started with a little rain somewhere and became sunny by the end of the day. This one did too.

We finished up in the mining town area by riding a small roller coaster that had an Indian chief’s head on the lead car. Anna and Emma each flew in a little bi-plane, similar to those at Fantasy Island. Dad and Anna rode another spinning ride, and Emma and Anna together paddled a little canoe around a track. Anna was just a little bit too tall for the canoe ride, but the attendant let her go with her sister. These canoes had to really be paddled, but the track was narrow enough to guide them the right way. Anna, Emma and Mom rode a large tube through water rapids, while Dad took video and tried to stay dry, though the returning drizzling rain made that difficult at best for the moment. A larger, open monorail gave us a view of the remaining half of the park. A gentle boat ride, similar to the one that took them through “Amsterdam” before took the four of us past fairy tale scenes. The girls were excited to see several that they knew from our recent readings of Grimm, like the frog prince with the girl’s golden ball, but there were several that we haven’t done yet, like Snow White and Rose Red. It was harder to determine the theme of the neighboring boatride, but it took us past a unicorn, trolls, cavemen, and a mammoth. There were two very large playgrounds that featured enormous slides and lots of nets, ladders and stairs to climb. They reminded Scott of the way Children’s Village used to be at Ontario Place. The four of us rode a roller coaster shaped like a train that is very much like Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disney. It’s a short track but they send you around twice to make up for it. Anna rode again with Dad so Mom could get video this time, but she wasn’t able too.

The Mayan Valley was mostly made up of thrill rides that Emma was too small for. The park seems to have both a height and an age restriction on its rides, and enforces them both. Emma’s age was questioned a number of times earlier in the day because she is so petite. (She was the second smallest in her kindergarten class.) There was the large swing ride that the three girls could ride. Anna went on it once before we saw that Emma could go on this one too. The girls got icey drinks that turned their tongues blue. Anna went on a big spinning ride with Dad and then on another one with Mom. While they rode, Emma had the whole family laughing by her funky dance to the South American drums. Mom got a little dizzy from her ride, but pulled it together to take Anna on the Huracan, one of the big spinning wheels that is her favorite. Dad then took Anna on a ride that was similar to the one that he and Julie rode on their first date to Darien Lake.

Emma didn’t want to see the “pirate show” so we skipped that and went to the Mississippi River boat together. The family then split up so that Anna could ride her much-anticipated roller coasters. While she wasn’t tall enough to go on the largest ones, she was able to go on several. The first was called, “Big Loop”, and it went through several loops and inversions that she loved. The second was the Swiss Bobbahn, which offered some steep drops. While Mom and Anna rode those, Emma explored one of the big Children’s Village-type playgrounds, and then rode the showed Dad the Amsterdam ride that he had missed before. When the family regrouped, we rode the small train to the front to front of the park, where we all rode a tea-cup ride together.

One of the last things that we saw was the “elektronishes Vogeltheater,” (the Electronic Bird Theater). When one enters the theater, it is obvious that the show copied the layout and theme of the Tiki Birds at Disney parks. The seats in the darkened theater surround a central fountain and the “performers” are hanging, asleep, around the ceiling or behind doors. Once the show starts, it seems to owe as much to Chuck E. Cheese, because the host of the show is a (poor) audio-animatronic version of Herr Wumbo, the big fat bear mascot whose images and statues are all over the park. When he talks, the rest of the characters are introduced. They are birds, mainly, but there are talking trees in the walls and frogs that rise out of the fountain. The entire show is in German, obviously, but the sappy songs aren’t hard to follow.

We left the park at about 5:30, and it was closing at 6:00, so we did just about as much as we could in the day. Anna was sad to go and was making plans for how she was going to buy the three-day pass when she comes back here when she grew up. It was nice to hear that she enjoyed it so. Emma kept going all day long, but was asleep as soon as we hit the car. She slept through Burger King, and she’ll probably be out through the rest of the night (at least, we hope so). Though we drove through Munster looking unsuccessfully for a laundromat and internet café, we still arrived back at the hotel room for one of the earliest evenings this trip. (Julie has been watching the other people staying here that she suspects raise German shepherds. They have two specially made trailers out back. Julie saw a couple of dogs, including a puppy.)

July 16- Hamburg

After breakfast, we drove the rest of the way into Hamburg. Unlike most of the places we’ve been so far (with the exception of Munich), Hamburg is a large modern city. It has the huge buildings and busy expressways that any large American city has. It requires a bit of patience and planning to navigate. We found our way into the city center, and parked in a parking garage. We then found our way to the large Rathaus (City Hall), which we’ve learned is always a good place to start looking for information.

While following the signs to the information center, we also found places to do our tourist shopping. We bought the mandatory a pin for Scott’s hat and a patch for Julie’s jacket. (We also distracted Anastasia while we bought a scarf she liked to give to her for her birthday tomorrow.) A rather large film crew was filming a television show or a movie, and we were yelled at in German to get out of their way.

Eventually, we found the tourist information desk, tucked down in the underground shopping areas towards the subway tunnels. The man there gave us directions to the museum we wanted to visit, but didn’t ask if we were driving or walking. He assumed we’d want to take the subway to the docks and then catch a ferry across the Elbe River to the museum. Ultimately, we would have been better off if we had driven to the museum and parked there, but we felt like we were up to the adventure of traveling in these different modes of transport.

We did all right on the subway. Julie figured out how to by our tickets from the machines, since all the ticket sales are automated. We read the signs and maps and got to the right train. We only had to go two stops, where we got off. This portion of the docks is filled with tour boats, restaurants and shops. We were told by a person working there that we wanted “Dock 10.” We found our way to dock 10 and bought our tickets. Then we went to get lunch, because it was after 11:30.

We wanted to get hamburgers, because we were in Hamburg, after all. But the restaurants along the dock all specialize in seafood. We found the word “Hamburger” in three different items on the first menu we looked at, but none of them seemed to have anything to do with beef. One was a soup (perhaps with shrimp) and one was an ice-cream dish. We went to a surf and turf place further on, but still didn’t find hamburgers. We found salads for Julie and Anna, chicken “nuts” for Emma, and got Scott a steak and potato. We never added up the total of what we were eating, but when the check came it seemed awfully high. Either we were ripped off (accidentally, perhaps) or they were charging us more than 5 Euros for each drink. We paid it, and it was only afterwards, when Julie and Scott started comparing notes, that we agreed that there was something wrong. We didn’t go back.

Instead, we went to Dock 10 where we expected the boat to be arriving. The woman who sold us the tickets looked shocked to see us. We had expected the boat to leave at 12:35. In fact, she said it had left at noon, and there would not be another boat until 14:00 (2:00 PM). When we read the schedule originally, we were looking at the time that it left the museum, not the time it was leaving from here, so that was our mistake. (The ticket seller also pointed out that she had sold us only three tickets. For whatever reason, Scott still needed one. We don’t know why she didn’t see that before. We assumed Emma didn’t need one.) So anyway, we had some choices to make and weighed our options.

We decided to wait for the next boat, but that meant we had more than an hour and a half to kill. We walked back along the docks for a ways. We visited some of the gift shops filled with nautical nonsense. We watched the boats coming in and out of the busy harbor. But ultimately, we waited in the hot sun, and this would eventually make us extremely tired when evening came.

Scott enjoyed a nice moment of his own when he took out his mp3 player. There’s been several times during this trip when he wished he had loaded up the right music before we came (Mozart for Salzburg, Wagner for Neuschwanstein, and so forth) but this time he had exactly the right music for exactly the right moment. He listened to “Songs of German Emigration” while watching the ships leaving and coming from the harbor and Hamburg. He was hot and sweaty, but content for the moment. The other three were just hot and sweaty.

When the boat came, we boarded it (along with a noisy party of older Germans who were drinking the beer that the mate was selling from the boat’s stock). We were expecting a water taxi, but instead it was more of a sightseeing cruise. We took a circuitous route around the harbor, which could have been interesting, except that the captain was narrating in German, the boat was small, crowded, and hot, and we really just wanted to get to the museum.

Then we arrived at the focal point for our day- Ballinstadt. Ballinstadt can be seen as the beginning of the road that ends at Ellis Island. Millions emigrants from many European countries funneled through the port of Hamburg on their way to the promised land of America. Ballinstadt was begun in 1901 as a place for those travelers to find shelter and food while waiting for passage to America. Today, several buildings from that complex survive and it has become a museum about the emigrants that traveled from and through this city.

The museum itself is a nice one, and tells many versions of the story that Scott and Julie have had to teach about many times. The first building is where you buy the tickets and orients you to the others. It also has computer terminals to search the Ballistadt records, but since these were in German and were basically coming from datebases that are available in America, we skipped past these.

The main part of the museum starts in the second building. As you enter, there are several mannequins and each represents someone from a different country at a different time. Next to each of these people are phones to listen to their stories, and a button to choose German or English narration and you are introduced to some of the “typical” stories of the emigrants who passed through Hamburg. The next exhibits show what kinds of things that they had endured in Europe, what made many people decide to emigrate, and what Hamburg was like when they made it this far. A large boat-like structure divides the building down the middle. It sits in water and invites you to enter it through gangplanks. Inside of it, the trip across the Atlantic is represented by films and artifacts. After you leave it, you are in America. One can see what it was like for the different classes of passengers as they arrived in Ellis Island, and what the neighborhoods were like that they often populated in New York, Milwaukee, and other American cities. Some people chose to go to South American countries, and their stories are represented here as well. The exhibits are interactive and creative. The final room in the main building has mannequins representing the people who we started with. They finish their stories and we find out what happened to them after their journey. Scott was most intrigued by the German from 1848 who had fought for a united, democratic Germany, but having lost, left for America with people like Carl Schurtz, and ended up fighting for a united, democratic United States in our own Civil War.

The next building is set up to show what Ballinstadt itself was like, being a small community of ever changing members with the steady flow of emigrants coming and going. Dorm beds are set up, and trunks between them explain daily life for the people there. Then the most exciting part-- for Scott anyway-- was the gift shop. While browsing through the many interesting items, Julie found him a CD called “Via Hamburg to the New World: Emigration Songs.” When Scott saw it, he did the happy dance. He bought it, of course, and later had to go back for an English language book about German emigration through Hamburg. You can probably see now why listening to his other songs about German emigration while sitting on the Hamburg docks had been such a moment for him, in spite of the hot sun.

We then had a journey of our own to complete. We had to catch the boat at 4:35 from the Ballinstadt docks, ride it for the rest of its tour around the port of Hamburg (past at least a few interesting ships, anyway), catch the subway back to where the car was, and then find a place to sleep for the night.

We stopped for “Joey’s Pizza” along the way. “Joey’s” is a German chain that we’ve seen before. We were still hoping for hamburgers, but the girls are really enjoying the European style pizza that we got in Italy and other places in Germany. Its crust is very thin-- about the width of the “thin and crispy” crust at Pizza Hut, but it isn’t crispy like that, usually, although “Joey’s” is crispier than the others. The pizzas are maybe ten inches across and are meant for one person to eat. Since we’re used to ordering the thick American pizza, and since we’ve got three girls that usually don’t eat very much, we’ve been trying to make due with two of them. It hasn’t been enough. We ordered three of them tonight, because Anna especially enjoys wolfing down the thin slices.

After we got the car, we were stuck in rush hour traffic jams like you’ll find in any big city, with stop-and-go, bumper-to-bumper traffic on both the city streets and the expressways. We finally found our way out of town.

Our plans had to change at this point. The original hope was to visit Lauenburg today, where the Langhans family is from (Scott’s paternal grandmother’s family). Because of our delays, we had to scratch that from the agenda, at least for today. We also scrapped the bigger plan of going on to Copenhagen, Denmark. We had hoped to drive at least part of the way tonight, and finish the drive tomorrow. We could then take Anna to the famous Tivoli amusement park for her birthday and visit the Little Mermaid statue in the harbor as part of an abbreviated tour of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. The fact of the matter is that we’re just too exhausted to do that. We’re tired, and all of us are getting grumpy, and none of us wants to spend the time in the car that it would take to get there and get back. That means that Hamburg will end up being our northernmost point on this trip (Hallstatt, Austria, was our easternmost point. The waterpark near Verona, Italy, was probably our southernmost point.) So we headed south, and found a little place to stay just outside of Munster like the cheese, (we think), but not like Hermann (we hope). If the signs on the roadside stands are anyway to judge, they are more proud of their Kartoffeln (potatoes) than their cheese, anyway.

July 15th- Fairy Tale Road, Part II

After a quick breakfast in the hotel and a stop at the ATM machine, we were on the Fairy Tale Road again. Like Hansel and Gretel, we pressed on into the unknown leaving nothing but a trail of breadcrumbs (and Pringles) behind us.

Our first stop this morning was at Hessisch Lichtenau, which was listed in the Fairy Tale Road brochure as “the gateway to Snow Fairy country.” It would probably have helped if we knew who the Snow Fairies were. Snow Fairy Park is supposed to have “Life size fairy tale figures.” We didn’t know what to expect or where to find it, but we did find an interesting little park that may have been the right place. In addition to having some interesting things for the girls to run around on, there was indeed a life size statue of a woman shaking a large pillow out of a window. There were even stone feathers on the ground in front of her. In addition to that, there were other objects that were on display in some interesting looking wooden pillars. Of the ten objects, we were certain that we recognized Cinderella’s slipper, Rumplestiltskin’s straw and spun gold, the golden ball from the Princess and the Frog (which we only learned about in the stories that we read yesterday), and Snow White’s apple. We had some guesses about the others. And then there were the feathers…

The Strong Museum in Rochester says that there are several stories that practically every American knows well enough to tell. (Are there 6? 7? 10? We’ll have to check on the number when we get back.) Among these are The Three Pigs, Jack and the Beanstalk, Snow White, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and several others. Mother Holle is not on this list. She apparently is much better known in Germany. After leaving this park, we read her story in the Grimm collection that we bought yesterday as we drove on to the next stop. During the story, a girl falls down a well, and in a magical land meets a woman who calls herself, “Mother Holle.” The girl begins working for Mother Holle, and among her duties was shaking her bedding out of the window. The feathers that fell from her bedding became the snow the falls here in our world. That explained both the statue that we saw in the park and the feathers that were encased in the wooden monuments.

The next stop was the city of Kassel. We are really not at all happy with the way the Fairy Tale Road itself is marked, though yesterday we really stopped trying to follow the official route at all. We are also not happy with the way that major stops on it do not have signs. The city of Kassel is pretty good sized, and we had no idea where to find the Brüder Grimm Museum that was supposed to be in town. We followed signs to the middle of the town, and found a place to park. We were only a few blocks from the Rathaus where the visitor’s information center was. Coincidentally, that was only a few blocks from the museum we were looking for. We got lucky this time.

The museum was nice, but they were apparently getting ready for the opening of a new exhibit there. Both the people in the visitor’s center and the people at the museum desk told us that only a small part of it was open. Again, like the Grimm House in Steinau yesterday, all of the exhibits were in German, but we were still able to enjoy them. We saw more portraits and illustrations by Ludwig Emil Grimm, and lots of illustrations of stories from the many different editions of the stories that there have been. The new exhibit seems to be about how the Grimm stories have been used in education, and we saw a little bit of it. The museum was nice, but we preferred the one in Steinau.

We stopped at a Woolworths before leaving Kassel, and the girls bought some sandals and some sunglasses. We found our way out of Kassel, and went to Hofgeismar, which is a meaningless little town as far as our Fairy Tale Road goes, but we were getting hungry and it was early afternoon. We found a bratwurst stand and ate a few while standing on the sidewalk. We used the stop for some general shopping too. We got some snacks at the grocery store. We bought a box from the Deutsche Post office to pack with some things to ship home, and Julie bought a few shirts for Scott from a sidewalk sale where they only cost less than three Euros each.

We pushed on to Trendelburg, where the town’s castle has a large, reddish colored tower that is now a hotel and restaurant. They claim it to be the tower that Rapunzel was kept in. We haven’t seen any of the documentation for that claim. There probably is none. It’s probably just a way to get the tourism dollars from the Fairy Tale Road program, but we’re not here to criticize. We want to believe. So we took some pictures, and gathered some postcards. Really, we were only disappointed in two ways. First, we weren’t allowed to climb the tower to get to see the view from the top. Second, we called, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!” and no one answered. We did read “Rapunzel” from our book as we continued down the road, though.

We’ve been getting the hang of following the road signs and using the map, but we were pretty sure that we left Trendelburg on the wrong road when we passed a herd of authentic German camels. There may have been ten or so, including the babies, grazing in a field. Maybe they were Repunzel’s camels, we don’t know. (The story says that after she escaped from the tower, she went to live in the desert, so…)

On the road, north of Trendelburg, Anna finally got a chance to practice her fairy catching technique. Emma was being bothered by a fly in the back seat. Anastasia took out the book that she has been keeping her journal in, laid it open on her lap, and sat very still. This technique is the very one that Lady Cottington used to catch her pressed fairies in England. When the fly landed on the book, Anna slammed it shut and pressed her first “fairy.” Dad was very proud of her. However, the dead fly seemed to freak Emma out even more than the live one did, so Dad had to put the book away in the glove compartment. (We tore the page with the fly on it out and threw it out later, but not before we photographed it as a trophy.)

The next stop that we had may have been the best one, but we hadn’t originally planned to stop there. Bodenwerder is the historical home of the man who became known to the world as Baron Münchhausen. The lies that he told about his life became the type of legends that Americans might call “tall tales.” For example, he claimed to ride to the moon on a cannonball. We saw his statue riding that very cannonball, and we wanted to stop for a picture. While we were there, we saw the only logical thing to put in the Baron’s hometown-- A bobsled run! The girls had to ride (twice) and reported it to be even better than the one the rode yesterday. It had two tunnels along the way, and lots of smaller rides and playthings in and around the track. The girls particularly liked a large barrel that you could run in like a human hamster-wheel, though Emma slipped in it and got a bit of a brush burn on her arm.

If anyone is reading this blog to find information about the Fairy Tale Road and is going to be traveling with children, plan some time in Bodenwerder, with the baron. In addition to this mini-theme park centered around the bobsled run there is the Münchhausen Museum across the street. We were sorry that we arrived too late to see the inside of the museum because the gardens and surroundings were very charming. Oddly, there are not enough attractions for children along this Fairy Tale Road, but this stop is cute and fun.

Our last stop on the Fairy Tale Road was the town of Hameln (in English, Hamlin), famous for its Pied Piper. The girls said they didn’t know his story and Dad told it as best as he could remember it as we approached the town. We were hoping to see the “Figure Play”, where the story is retold on the side of the Rathaus with the clockwork glockenspiel. We found the old part of the town and ate a dinner at a Subway. Then followed a path of white mice on the sidewalk, because we figured that they would lead us to the clock. They actually led us on meandering tour through the old part of town. It is a very nice looking town, with many tall half-timbered houses. One that we passed had writing on it (in Spanish, so Scott could read it) that said that it was built the same year that Columbus went to America and the Spanish conquered the Canary Islands. It was not the oldest building in town, to be sure. Anyway, when the path of mice finally circled us back to the place where the glockenspiel is, we found out that we missed the last show. It only runs three times a day, and the last one was at 5:35. We only arrived in Hameln at about 6:00.

And so ended our journey up the Fairy Tale Road. The last official stop is Bremen, where there is a statue of the four animals that wanted to become the Bremen-Town Musicians. However, that’s further west then we want to be tomorrow, and after all, if you read the story, the Bremen-Town Musicians never actually get to Bremen. So we leave them behind as we head to other adventures elsewhere. The Fairy Tale Road has not been much different then we expected. Many of the stops were skipped simply because they had little to do with any fairy tales. We give “thumbs-down” to the signs for the road and the signs to most of its attractions. Over all, it was a lot of time in the car with the interesting sights being far between and sometimes hard to find. Since that’s what we expected, it wasn’t much of a disappointment for the adults. We made it into a scavanger hunt. The kids had other images in their minds to start with, so ironically, they may have been less satisfied with their trip with the Grimms than the adults were.

We also did some shopping in Hameln. Julie needed some clothes, because as SpongeBob says, “I ripped my pants!” She bought new pants and SpongeBob shirt (though that may ultimately become Anna’s). Anna bought a blue top and some scarves. Emma couldn’t be left out, so she got a shirt and some shorts too.

We found a little hotel over a pizza restaurant outside of Hannover, and have stopped there for the night. You can tell we’re getting into Northern Germany now, because when Julie signed in, the clerk asked if she was Danish. We suppose he thought that Cheektøväga is a place in Denmark.

July 14- Fairy Tale Road

European windows took some experimentation to figure out, but we think we’ve finally got them. In many windows, the handle needs to point straight down, in the “6 o’clock” position to be closed. If you turn it 90 degrees (to 3 or 9 o’clock, depending on which way the window opens), the window will swing open like a door. However, if you close the window, turn the handle back to 6:00 and then to 12:00, the window pops off of its top hinge and leans into the room, creating a gap at the top of the window. This way, the widow can be left open a bit to allow cool air in. Since air conditioning is rare, even in expensive hotel rooms (like last night’s) the windows are often left propped open from the top. This mechanism is used on many sized windows, from the usual size all the way up to patio doors.

There is really no reason why you still couldn’t have screens in the windows like these, but none of them do. That means that certain things do get in. There seemed to be many mosquitoes in our hotel room in Garda, Italy, for example, and the three girls especially seemed to be attracting bites. This morning was more interesting though. Both the window and the skylight were open because it was quite humid last night. Scott awoke with a start and a shout when he felt something flapping at his toes. A small grey and brown bird had found its way into the room, but was now having problems finding its way out. Luckily, we had already mastered the ways of the window, and it was easy to open the window wide again like a door so he could find his way out.

Today’s tour was a trip up the Fairy Tale Road. A while ago, towns in Southern Germany joined together to market themselves as the “Romantic Road” and were apparently quite successful at attracting tourists. The Fairy Tale Road is a similar marketing device for towns in Northern Germany. Many of the towns have ties to the Brothers Grimm and the origins of their stories. Some towns have a more obvious link to the stories than others, and for some, they’re making a bit of a stretch in order to be included. Julie and Scott kept calling it the Fairy Tale Trail, just because of the rhyme and rhythm of the name, but we could tell by the way that Anna talked about it that she expected a trail we would walk on through a woods. We’ve tried to change to calling it the Fairy Tale Road because of that.

Our first stop was the town of Lohr am Main, which is not officially on the Fairy Tale Road at all. There’s no telling what the politics were that kept it from being included, but it’s got one of the better claims to Fairy Tale history. It claims to be the hometown of Snow White. We got the scoop at the visitor’s center, but it was in German. Using our translator and previous knowledge gained from the Internet, we can piece together parts of the story. Once upon a time (in 1729, to be precise), a girl by the name of Maria Sophia Margaretha Christina von Erthal lived in the castle at Lohr and had a step mother that she did not along with. A route that she took to escape from her can allegedly be followed through the nearby countryside. The local glassmaking industry is famous for its mirrors, many of which are on display in the museum (which we didn’t see), and these may have been the inspiration for the magic mirror. Nearby miners are said to have given her assistance, and these men may have become the seven dwarfs as the story was retold. The town is pretty, but there’s nothing to see or photograph that is associated with Snow White. We were hoping for a commemorative plaque or sign, but the lady in the visitor’s center said there wasn’t any.

The trip to Lohr took us quite a ways to the east of the start of the road, so we had to swing back to near where we started. We made it to Hanau, the first official stop, when it was close to lunch time. This town is the birthplace of the Brothers Grimm. We followed signs to parking and to the Rathaus (town hall). It is a big, pretty, brick building with a statue of the two brothers in front of it in a big square. We ate lunch at a McDonald’s, in view of the statue, took our chance for the photo-op with Jacob and Wilhelm, and continued on.

Our next stop was also the second stop on the official trail- the town of Steinau an der Strasse. This town is the one where the Grimm family moved and the brothers spent a large part of their life. The businesses in town seem to be mostly closed on Tuesdays, but we found the Brüder Grimm Haus museum, in the house where they lived and it was open. It’s a small museum, and there is no English translation for the German exhibits, but even so, it was an interesting stop. Part of the museum is currently an exhibit of modern cartoons that make jokes about the Grimm stories. Again, it was all in German, but we could make out the point of many of the cartoons using the pictures and what vocabulary we knew, and laughed at many of them. Part of the house is set up as a kitchen from the time when the Grimm family would have been there. There are many examples of first editions of the Grimm fairy tales and examples of art that has illustrated various editions of the books. The art continued all the way up to Shrek, but conspicuously contained no Disney versions. Perhaps the most interesting person in the exhibits was neither Jacob nor Wilhelm Grimm, but a third brother- Ludwig Emil Grimm. He was an artist, and many of his pictures are on exhibit there, including portraits of the family. Anastasia discovered a reproduction of a machine that he made. It had a long roll of paper that he had illustrated with the scenes from a story. If you turned a crank, the paper would advance and you’d get to see the next part of the story, like a comic strip on a roll. Unfortunately, again, we could only admire the art because we could not read the German script.

Before leaving the museum, we bought an English version of some of the more popular Grimm Fairy Tales, so that we could read them in the car. Emma loved looking at the pictures as we drove. Before we left Stainau, We stopped at a bakery that was one of the few stores open in town, and Julie finally got her Black Forest cherry cake. The girls also played for a moment with someone’s pet cat, until it responded to it’s master’s whistle and jumped up to follow her inside. The Germans certainly have well trained pets.

We began following the “Deutsche Märchen Straße” (Fairy Tale Road) signs, but we found them to be to few and far between to be practical guides. Luckily, we had the good German map we bought before, and were able to find our way to the next towns. Sometimes we followed the official road, but just as often, we straightened it out to make up some time when the towns didn’t seem to offer anything that was all that interesting.

Our next stop was Alsfeld, which claims to be the home of Little Red Riding Hood. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is the biggest town in the region that claims her, because there are a few towns in “Rotkäppchenland” (Little Red Riding Hood Country). A better translation of her nickname is “Little Red Cap,” and the people of this region say that it is their traditional clothes that gave her that name. Some internet research hinted to Scott that there was a statue of her somewhere in Alsfeld near their Rathaus, but he was never able to find a picture of it. As a result, we were not really surprised when the woman in their information center said that there is no such statue in town. Still, there were many pictures of apple-cheeked little girls in the “Little Red Cap” and traditional clothes of the region all over the brochures and postcards. We took a handful of those for the scrapbook. The town of Alsfeld itself is extremely picturesque. It, and many of the towns we are visiting, are also part of a collection of towns that feature their half-timbered architecture as part of a separate “Road” to follow. Alsfeld seemed particularly interesting looking. The Rathaus is very distinctive, and half-timbered buildings of several stories extended from the town center for several blocks in every direction.

At the visitor’s center in Alsfeld, Julie noticed a brochure for a bobsled run, similar to the one that we had to skip in the Black Forest. Since we had promised the girls that we would keep our eyes open for another one and since they had really spent a lot of time in the backseat of the car today, we surprised them by pulling in there next. Once again, Anna rode by herself, and Emma and Mom rode together, while Dad took pictures and babysat Emma’s fox. The girls rode the sleds twice and liked this one better than the one near Neuschwanstein. For one thing, this one is more like a roller coaster than a sled, and runs on two tracks while the riders are strapped in. It was much safer as a result. For another thing, it took you through some woods and scenery too. We ate dinner at the sled run. Everyone got jägerschnitzel (which for future reference is a pork cutlet, but this one came with a mushroom sauce) and pommes fritz (i.e., French fries). Four plates were way to much for all of us to eat, especially when the girls were anxious for a third sled ride.

After their third ride we started looking for a place to stay for tonight. We are in the town of Homberg (Efze). It took us a few tries, but we were able to find a hotel here for a reasonable price this time. The most noteworthy feature of the room is that its bathroom may actually be small than the on in Rothenberg, yet inexplicably, there are two showers.

One last note for today: Anastasia’s loose tooth has finally come out. We’re all glad to hear that because she has fretting over it and it had become a bit of an obsession for her. She hopes to get a Euro for it from the tooth fairy tonight. The Fairy Tale Road seems like an appropriate place for the Tooth Fairy to show up. We just hope that the girls don’t try to catch her and press her in a book like the have been hoping to do with any other fairies we might find.

July 13- The Rhine

There were at least nine beds in the room we had in the castle, with three sets of twin bunks and three more twin beds along the wall. Somehow, Anna and Emma ended up in the same bed (and they giggled late into the night, long after Mommy had fallen asleep.) Dad had to keep tipping his head to one side or stooping over because the sloping walls follow the roofline of the old castle.

We ate breakfast, posted to the blog, and then saddled up for the long trek. We had to hike back down the hillside to where our car was, down by the Rhine River, in order to catch the boat. Of course, the walk down was less hard than last night’s walk up. Last night, we followed the outer walls of the town’s defenses up the hill. Today, we took an interior route, down many “stairs”, past hillside vineyards, down to the level of the church steeple and the town rooftops. At that level there is the ruins of an old church where there are literally just two walls standing, tracing the outlines of where the windows were. They apparently have services here again, because chairs were set up ready to go. Victor Hugo called said ruin was where, “a magnificent skeleton puts its silhouette against the sky,” and he helped to popularize this area of the Rhine as a place for the Romantics to escape to.

We got our tickets for a boat that left shortly after ten o’clock. The boat itself was a bit disappointing in that it was hard to find a good place to watch the scenery go by. It’s not that the boat was actually crowded, but there were limited spots that actually offered a good view, and since we weren’t at the first stop on its route, those spots were already taken. Julie and the girls took a spot on the first level, in the restaurant area, and sat on the starboard side where we knew many of the sites would be. Scott was too frustrated there because the windows and their reflections would certainly interfere with his photography. He found a place on the second level that was relatively unobstructed, but he was standing by a chest-high wall that certainly would have blocked the view if the kids had tried to stand there. He was able to get the video rolling, the camera flashing, and felt the wind blow as the cruise down the Rhine began. It was frustrating to see boats from other tour companies with more room, fewer people, and more viewing areas on them as they passed by us, though.

Then came the Rhine Castles. If we were counting, we probably would have doubled the number of castles that we’ve seen in all of Germany during this short trip along the Rhine today. There were original medieval castles that have survived intact. There are Romantic Era rebuilds on original castle ruins. There are castles that are just ruined shells. There are big castles and small castles. There were castles of all different sizes and colors and flavors. There was a castle in the middle of the river shaped like a boat. The reason for all of these castles is that these are the castles from which the “robber barons” operated. Petty princes and nobles set up their “toll booths” along the Rhine to collect money from the passing ships.

Julie eventually enjoyed some sips of a Rhine wine, which she ordered “suisse,” or sweet. Scott was most interested in passing the Loreley rock and statue. We’ll write more on her in a bit. Anna and Emma both shared some ice cream. Towards the end of trip, as the houses of Koblenz were coming into view, Emma said that it reminded her of Venice. It’s pretty amazing that a five-year old can say that and mean it and have a point of reference like that. It’s also pretty amazing that she’s still able to make some sense of the dizzying array of places we’ve been.

We arrived in Koblenz, the end of our boat ride, and we walked to the “Deutche Eck”- the German Corner. This point is the spot where the Mosel River joins the Rhine River, and it is most notable as the place where there is a gigantic equestrian statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I, who unified the German Empire in the 1800s. This spot is said to be an extremely patriotic spot for Germans. Could we compare it to Mount Rushmore for Americans perhaps? We are convinced that it is indeed an important symbolic spot, because the German Corner also includes the most important emblem of modern Germany- the ubiquitous construction crane. Either way, we climbed up into the base of the statue and enjoyed the view of the Rhine and Mosel rivers.

We enjoyed a leisurely stroll to the train station. We strolled through the park along the Rhine side of Koblenz. In spite of the construction happening there and the need to dodge bicyclists as they whizzed past tinkling their bells, it was actually a very pleasant stroll. The weather was great- bright and breezy. We stopped for pizza for lunch. As we turned away from the park, Scott actually got to visit a German comic book store. He didn’t buy anything there, though, believe it or not.

The train station was easy to find. We just had to walk past several construction cranes and look beneath the right castle. (Really.) When we got to the train station, Julie spent time in line waiting for information on how to by the tickets back to Bacharach. Anna and Emma seem to notice every dog that goes by. They laughed at a little wire-haired dachshund puppy that first was romping in one direction through the station, and then got pulled in the opposite by his master. He tried to “put on the breaks” but the floor was too slick and he slid along behind her. Then we got into the train and were whisked relatively quickly back to where are car was.

Scott wanted to make one more stop before we left the Rhine area. We had seen the Loreley rock and statue from the boat and the train, but Scott wanted a closer look. The legends say that a beautiful Rhine maiden (related to the mermaids perhaps?) used to sit on the rocks near a high cliff at a dangerous bend in the river. She would sing a siren song that would lure sailors to their deaths on the rocks. The story itself was later turned into a poem, and the poem became one of the most important German folksongs. Mark Twain said although he didn’t like the song at first, it soon became one of his favorites. It is one of Scott’s favorites too. For the boat ride, he had long ago heard about how cruises along the Rhine will always play that song, and the passengers will sing along with it, and he was greatly anticipating that moment. He was pleased when it happened, but he will admit that he started taking video and pictures of the wrong cliff when the music was played slightly earlier then it probably should have been. There was no mistaking the real site when it came into view. He wanted a closer look.


Julie agree to take the car ferry from St. Goar across the Rhine to the opposite shore. She was fretting so as the boat pulled away from the docks that you’d think she was remembering the stories of the shipwrecks. In fact, she was just hoping that our parking brake held.

We drove to the Loreley cliffs and parked the car. We then took a long walk down a breakwater wall that has been erected, and went to see the Loreley herself. The larger then life statue of the maid sits by the waters of the Rhine, looking very sad. As Rick Steves says, her “long blonde hair almost covered her body.” Scott needed pictures by her and with the cliffs. He listened to the song on his MP3 player while he was there.

Meanwhile, everyone else was hungry and tired. We left there and made our way eastwards, towards Frankfort. We saw the Manhattan-like skyline of Frankfort in the distance and watched the planes lining up in the sky to land at the airport. At one point during this drive, Julie used one of the German words for “castle” to ask, “Is that a schloss over there?” Scott said, “I done with schloss-es for now. I’m geschlossen!” making a pun on the German word for “closed.” Well, we thought it was funny at the time, but we were getting tired.

We ate at a McDonald’s and found a hotel in the town of Heusenstamm. As is our pattern when we don’t have a reservation , we paid too much for the room, but decided to stay anyway because the smaller places will be harder to find this late at night. We ended up getting a huge suite. The girls have one room and we have one room, and either one is larger than the room had together in Rothenberg. One room is a regular bedroom, while the other is an office/living room with a two person desk (shaped kind of like home plate in baseball), a double bed that folds down from a closet, and a skylight. The bathroom is also huge, with two sinks (three, if you count the bidet), a toilet, a urinal, and a whirlpool bathtub. We’ll have lots of room to stretch out before we sleep.