Sorry for the delay in blogs. I lost some brain power during my time without sleep for the roadtrip to Oklahoma and forgot to blog.
Day five, Zak and I took a morning train from Amsterdam to Duesseldorf, Germany. Why did we do this? Because this was the only city in Germany that had an automatic car available for renting that would let us return it in Switzerland. Or so we thought. We arrive at the rental car place, give him our papers, sign some stuff and get in the car only to notice that it’s not a car but a mini van and that it’s not an automatic but a standard. When we explained to the guy that we reserved an automatic he said “but I don’t have any automatics”. Yes, but we reserved one and it said it was available here and you had a month to get the car you said you had for us. “This is not my problem” was the response. (Remember this phrase as it comes up later in our trip) So, we got in the car and it took Zak 4 tries to pull out of the street without stalling.
I have never driven a standard and Zak learned about 10 years ago but hasn’t driven one since. Take a moment to imagine how crappy a situation this put us in and you will have accurately imagined our morning with this car. So, we took Villem (that ’s what we named our mini van) to a parking lot and Zak practiced driving while I tried to crack the code on the built-in navigation system which we named Gert.
After that less than thrilling adventure, Gert led us successfully on our way. After we got on the highway, our stress level declined greatly and we were able to enjoy just how lovely the German countryside is. Plus, we were on the Autobahn and were going 140km per hour which is over 80 mph and it was awesome!
That afternoon, we made one fatal mistake. We got off the higway. People who don’t know how to drive standards should aviod the lower gears at all costs. If that means you don’t eat between 7am and 7pm, so be it. My tip to you. However, we didn’t know about this piece of wisdom, so we stopped at a gas station/Burger King and stalled 3 times on the way to the parking lot. It was at this gas station/Burger King (man alive do the Germans love the BK. We saw no McDonalds and there was a BK every 15 feet of highway. For serious) that we learned that Zak’s Bank of America card had been shut off.
Because we couldn’t call the 800 number on the back of the card because of our Europe phone issue, we had to track down a collect Europe BOA number and call that. What we learned was that Zak’s account information had been “compromised” and they had shut down the account without notifying him in any way. When Zak explained that we were in Europe and needed money, they said they would stay on the phone with him while he found an ATM, turn on the card for the two minutes they could verify it was him using it and then turn it back off and he couldn’t use it again. What?! Zak was so mad. He kept saying to the guy on the phone “this is absurd, I’m in Europe and need money”. It was quite the party at this rest stop.
So, after we spent some time dealing with this, we tried to leave. Tried being the operative word. Zak pulled out of the parking spot and then we needed to reverse. Easy enough, right? Sadly, no. Each time Zak tried to reverse, we got closer and closer to the curb in front of us until we were on the curb in front of us. Okay, not such a huge issue, right? Except that the curb in this sad little tale was on the top of a hill and if we went forward another 18 inches, our car would have plummeted down this hill and landed us on the highway. Not good.
So, I’m a little nervous and Zak is mad and we can’t move backwards in our car. At this point, a man in a white car pulls up thinking we are broken down. He gets out of the car and comes over and has to show Zak how to put the car into reverse. Aparently he wasn’t in reverse the whole time and that’s why we weren’t moving backwards. Makes sense to me. Problem solved, right? Nope. Even with the car in reverse, Zak couldn’t get it to get off the curb. So, we both had to get out of the car and push our giant minivan off the curb and back into the parking lot so we could leave. Alas, how I wish we had taken pictures of this spectacular moment of our trip. Even then we had the sense of humor to know how funny it was.
And back on the highway! So, we kept driving that day and ended up in Munich in the afternoon. We loved Munich. It was so much prettier than we expected. The hostel was great. It had a bar downstairs with $2 beers during happy hour and an elevator.
The guy at the desk recommended a restaurant for us for dinner. It was this local brewery and it was fantastic. We had some great German food and really great German beer and it was so cheap. Good rec, front desk guy. We had the best potato pancakes there.
The odd thing about our visit to Munich is that on the way to our hostel, we passed these to huge monuments. One was like in mini Arc de Triomphe and the other was this giant dome thing with a horse. So, we asked the girl at the desk what the monuments were for and how to walk to them and she said, ” I do not know these monuments”. So, we decided she was dumb and asked the guy after dinner and he didn’t know what we were talking about. Nor did we see them on our walk around that night or on the way out of town. We called this our bermuda triangle moment from Munich. We both saw them, were pretty sure they existed but couldn’t find them again and no one knew what we were talking about when we described them…odd.
