Reflections of My Travel

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This morning we slept in a little before circling back around Amsterdam toward the North Sea. We took a nice stroll along the beach at Egmond aan Zee. It wasn’t as nice a beach as most of our Florida beaches. The sand was a dark brown sand. It was fairly fine though, not shelly or rocky. The water was very dark, brackish. The waves, while we were there at least, were small. They seemed to be working on some beach reclamation project. We enjoyed our windy walk on the beach. The beach does, after all, hold many significant memories for us. When we left, we headed north to drive along the long land barrier bridge that they created to keep Holland from flooding again. It was an impressive land barrier, indeed. Somewhere along the way, we experienced another kind of unusual overpass. We were driving along and noticed sailboats crossing over the autobahn up ahead. I really wish we had been going a little slower that I could have gotten a picture. The overpass was a canal, but of course, all you could see from our vantage point was that there were sailboats passing overhead. Quite a strange sight to partake of. Along the way, we thoroughly enjoyed the incredible displays of tulip fields all along the roads. Simply awesome. Huge fields planted solid with rows and rows of perfectly pristine tulips. Red, orange, yellow, pink, white, purple, blue, maroon, multi-colors… absolutely incredible! I’ve never really had a favorite flower, but I am now completely enamored with tulips. There were also plenty of the old windmills that are so symbolic of Holland. We stopped to take a tour of one of these impressive structures. It amazed me that 400 years ago they were building such complex wooden systems to pump water. The windmill itself I found creepy. It was about 4 stories and the steps were very short, steep steps. Because everything in the structure was made of wood, including all the gears and such, it was very creaky. By the time I had climbed all of the very, very steep steps to the top, it was very loud and gave me the creeps. I figured it would be a good setting for a B horror flick. It was very interesting though. And, as I said, very impressive. We left the windmill and continued along our way, stopping for our best meal in 3 days – yep, McDonalds! I can’t begin to tell you how wonderful it was to drink some Fanta®. It was the next best thing to having water that tastes like nothing. I’ll never understand how Europeans can drink that horrid tasting water. After our very satiating lunch, we made our way back into Germany, yet another unceremonious crossing, but it was very good to be back where I could read the signs again. Today was a long drive day. We ended up driving back across the country. But this was the first day that we really experienced the fast side of the autobahn. So far, I’d say that speeds have averaged about 85-90mph. Today was the first time that it got to what I considered blatant speeding. Randal fell into a fast crowd that was going 215kph, which is roughly 133mph. Cars there are just built for speed. Our little Ford station wagon was a 6 speed, straight shift, diesel and it didn’t go into sixth gear until about 90 mph. Anyhow, it was a good day to have good traffic and high speeds since we were just driving across the country and our drive time to do so was significantly reduced. We are camping just outside of Dresden.

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First thing this morning, we crossed the border into Poland. Now this was a border crossing. They had a toll-like station where they stopped each car, looked at our passports, and STAMPED them! I got a stamp for leaving Germany and a stamp for entering Poland. Yes, I do get excited over the simplest things. One of the first things that we did was to stop and top off with gas. This was our first non-Euro currency exchange. Turns out that polish money is kind of like the Chinese yen, it takes a lot of them to make a little. We topped off with gas for right around 65 zloty, which was roughly 16 Euro, which was roughly 20 dollars. We began our quest for a postcard at a very nice supercenter-type store. It was actually a surprise to find such a nice shopping center where we were as the surrounding neighborhoods were very poor looking. We were unable to find any postcards, even after grabbing a polish-English dictionary in order to make an attempt at questioning an employee on the matter. We did grab a small bottle of milk to have with our breakfast. Of course, since we couldn’t read any of the bottles, we basically crossed our fingers and grabbed one – a strategy that proved unsuccessful when we opened it a short while later and discovered it was buttermilk (at least I hope it was buttermilk and not just horribly rancid milk for sale!). We stopped in a couple of other places looking for a simple Poland postcard. Finally, I settled on a postcard that for all practical purposes had nothing to do with Poland – a close-up pic of a dog – but it did at least have some polish writing on it, “cze??, daj pyska!” (which I’ve translated to either “worship, it give muzzle” or “hello, give mouth”). After finally finding some sort of postcard, we crossed into Czech Republic, another true border crossing. I received another stamp from Poland, marking my departure, but I was perturbed to find that Czech had not bothered to stamp me in. Big meanies. Both Poland and the Czech Republic had pretty countryside but poor housing until we got to Prague. At the border between the two countries, we had children rush our car with windshield cleaning supplies and though we repeatedly said no and shook our heads, they insisted on cleaning our windshields. Looking around at the poor surroundings, and because they did do a good job, we gave them what polish change we had. I had heard raving reviews about Prague, and for all I know they might be true, but we didn’t care to stick around to find out. It was huge. It was a city. It was a huge city. And we just don’t much like cities. Randal certainly did not like trying to drive around in it. The architecture was very pretty, but not any prettier than we had seen everywhere else. It did not seem worth sticking around so we hightailed it out of there. If it hadn’t been so big and crowded, it probably would have been a good place to stop and find a postcard. But it was very big and crowded so we just went on, figuring that we’d stop at the next town. We stopped in Plezne at a large and modern mall. We walked around the whole mall and never found the first postcard. And before we knew it, we were back in Germany. So much for my simple postcard collection. Such is life. We got to the town of Regensburg, on the Danube river, and decided it looked like a good place to spend the night. I’m very pleased that we made that decision. We took a nap in the hotel room and when it was dark we woke up and went for a walk around the town. It was a terrific little European town! It was everything that comes to mind when you think of Europe. Small paved street-alleyways, lots of shops, cafes with people sitting outside socializing, massive and ancient cathedrals… it had it all. I thoroughly enjoyed our lengthy walk around town and across the river and such. It was a nice, relaxing, and yes, romantic evening. When we got back to the hotel, we attempted to watch a bit of TV. Only CNN in English. But the commercials on television at that hour of the night were far more lascivious than ours. We ended up watching a snooker tournament. After all, who needs to understand the words when there’s so much strange billiard action going on? It’s been a good night, indeed.

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When we woke up this morning, we decided to walk the town of Regensburg one last time so that we could get some pictures since we failed to bring our cameras on last night’s stroll. It was still lovely in the daylight. It was interesting to see how different it was though. Cars driving down the fun little alley ways that accommodated only foot traffic last night, people sitting inside the shops to eat by themselves instead of out on the sidewalks with large social groups, et cetera. We were unable to find any “Gute Mutters Tag” cards so we bought a few postcards and went back to the hotel to write mother’s day messages and mail them from the desk after getting cleaned up and checking out. From Regensburg, we headed south toward Dachau. I must say, this was probably the single most sobering place I’ve ever visited. As I walked up the gravel path leading to the camp, I began getting goosebumps. By the time we got to the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate at the entrance to the Jourhaus and camp, I had a sinking pit in my stomach. That feeling remained the entire time we were in the camp, until we got back to the parking lot. There were several WWII vets walking around with their families and it was so sad overhearing them tell about the liberation and such. I assume that they were actually here because the 60th anniversary of the liberation was two days ago. Another thing that struck me about the experience was that this seemed to be the one place that we (America) were referred to in a heroic tone. Not that there has been any kind of a blatantly derogatory tone toward us, but it seemed like most of the places we’ve visited have said things about “this building was destroyed by the American bombing” or “this is the only town that didn’t suffer from the American bombing” or something to the effect. It just seemed like this was the first place we’ve been where the sacrifices of our boys was truly appreciated. Perhaps I’m out of line there though. When we had walked around all of the visitable areas of the concentration camp and crematorium, we walked back out to the parking lot and felt like a weight was lifted. It was really just such a sorrowful experience. From there, we headed down toward Füßen to spend the night so that we could get a bright and early start at the Königschloßer.