Monday, April 19 “Touring Europe Outside the Bubble” We’re taking charge and escaping Frankfurt, hopefully no longer under the effects of a continually erupting volcano.
So here’s how NOT to tour Europe –we grab an Egg McMuffin at the McDonald’s in the Frankfurt airport before picking up our rental car. Walk approximately a mile to find our car, yet unable to find the cable connection on the GPS the Eurocar employee issued us. Walk a mile back to the Eurocar counter to learn that the cable connection is in a nifty place we hadn’t seen before. Walk back to the car and drive to our hotel to check out and load up. Talk to a family from Canada who are told it will be SATURDAY before they can leave. Give them our calling card we had purchased since it is only good in Germany. Sit in gas station near the hotel eating our McDonald’s breakfast trying to figure out how to get our GPS to work. Our GPS voice, we’ve named “Pam-Pam” has a British accent and she sends us 15km in the WRONG direction and then quits giving directions at all. Feeling very stressed in a foreign place this morning. Multiple turnabouts and street signs in a foreign language are not comforting when you are lost. The word for the day is “AUSFAHRT” which I could find nowhere on our map. After seeing this word repeatedly we realize that it is not a location at all, but probably means EXIT. What in the word are two people from Greenwood , SC doing trying to drive themselves to Madrid? Maybe we should have taken European driver’s ed before getting behind the wheel.
We rarely saw speed limit signs while in Germany and felt like a snail being passed by cars and motorcycles whizzing by us on the left. Wishing now we had a car with more pick up and go than this cute little SKODA that rattles when it gets over 120 kilometers/hour. By the end of our day at 10pm, we have traveled 1000 kilometers, passed through Germany and most of France, eaten at a Shell station for lunch and a truck stop for dinner, stopped and paid toll fees at countless toll roads and taken in some beautiful views (albeit fast) along the way. Whatever pictures we made were from the car in transit. The Ibis Hotel in Montpiellier, France was a welcomed respite at the end of a long day of travel.
This isn’t exactly how I’d imagined experiencing Europe but at this point we really just want to be HOME.
So here’s how NOT to tour Europe –we grab an Egg McMuffin at the McDonald’s in the Frankfurt airport before picking up our rental car. Walk approximately a mile to find our car, yet unable to find the cable connection on the GPS the Eurocar employee issued us. Walk a mile back to the Eurocar counter to learn that the cable connection is in a nifty place we hadn’t seen before. Walk back to the car and drive to our hotel to check out and load up. Talk to a family from Canada who are told it will be SATURDAY before they can leave. Give them our calling card we had purchased since it is only good in Germany. Sit in gas station near the hotel eating our McDonald’s breakfast trying to figure out how to get our GPS to work. Our GPS voice, we’ve named “Pam-Pam” has a British accent and she sends us 15km in the WRONG direction and then quits giving directions at all. Feeling very stressed in a foreign place this morning. Multiple turnabouts and street signs in a foreign language are not comforting when you are lost. The word for the day is “AUSFAHRT” which I could find nowhere on our map. After seeing this word repeatedly we realize that it is not a location at all, but probably means EXIT. What in the word are two people from Greenwood , SC doing trying to drive themselves to Madrid? Maybe we should have taken European driver’s ed before getting behind the wheel.
We rarely saw speed limit signs while in Germany and felt like a snail being passed by cars and motorcycles whizzing by us on the left. Wishing now we had a car with more pick up and go than this cute little SKODA that rattles when it gets over 120 kilometers/hour. By the end of our day at 10pm, we have traveled 1000 kilometers, passed through Germany and most of France, eaten at a Shell station for lunch and a truck stop for dinner, stopped and paid toll fees at countless toll roads and taken in some beautiful views (albeit fast) along the way. Whatever pictures we made were from the car in transit. The Ibis Hotel in Montpiellier, France was a welcomed respite at the end of a long day of travel.
This isn’t exactly how I’d imagined experiencing Europe but at this point we really just want to be HOME.
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