About three years ago this time, Linda and I were spending a lot of time planning a 4-month trip around Europe and the Middle East. Linda left work in February of 2020, the following year. On March 8th of that year, I talked to my management about taking a year off. There were several meetings. In addition, March 10th was the “work from home” test day at the Boulder office, where I was. On Thursday, I told my management that I was putting my plans for a leave on hold for a few weeks to see what happened.
By the middle of April, Linda and I were unrolling our plans.
Fast forward to early Autumn this year. We rescheduled a portion of it and landed in Amsterdam on the morning of September 24th. A quick cab ride later, we got delivered to Bloemgracht where our lodging was for the next week, a houseboat moored in the canal.
We got in before check-in time, so we spent the day walking around central Amsterdam. On Saturday, there’s a farmer’s market at Noordermarkt where we found some fruits and veggies, as well as some cheese and rolls for breakfasts. We also walked to the train station where we were supposed to be picking up a car later in the week. A near-exhaustive walk of the train station yielded no Avis office. At the Sixt counter, the lone car rental place in the station, we were told the nearby Avis office had closed over the summer.
Our continued wandering took us by Chabrol Wines where we tasted and picked up a few wines for our stay. A short discussion with the salesman pointed us to the Pesca restaurant for dinner.
On our way back to the boat, we stopped in Pesca and made reservations for later that day.
That afternoon we hung out on the porch of the houseboat watching the canal traffic go by.
You can see on the far side of the canal that parallel parking on this street is a delicate job.
A nice benefit of our location was the Westerkerk was a little over a block away. Every quarter hour the glockenspiel played a little piece. Most times it was 15 or 20 seconds, but at certain hours it was up to 5 minutes.
I had found Pesca while browsing maps near our houseboat before we arrived. I hadn’t given it a lot of serious consideration because they had no published menu. When we arrived, we found out why. The front of the restaurant was an operating fish store. The hostess poured us each a glass of champagne and took us to our table. A few minutes later, our waiter took us up to the fish store and we got to choose our dinner from the iced seafood in the fish market. We chose a North Sea seabass (something local) and a side of grilled octopus. Next he took us to the “wine shop” between the fish counter and the tables, where we chose our wine for the meal.
Anybody headed for Amsterdam should plan on stopping by Pesca on Rozengracht.
On Sunday we got up late and spent the day exploring on foot. We had our first experience food shopping, this time in Albert Heijn, a grocery chain in The Netherlands. There was one tucked away in a string of shops about a 5-minute walk from the boat. We walked right by it and went to one a kilometer and half away, right behind the royal palace.
We also went to Kathmandu, an outdoor and camping store. We picked up a few camping mugs, since drinking and coffee cups are quite small in many restaurants and airBnBs. We also picked up a nice cooler and thermos, both of which did their jobs better than we would have expected for their prices. You can see the thermos in the Stoomtram photos in a few days.
Sunday night, we had purchased tickets for “Sunday Night Live” at Boom! Chicago, featuring an English-language improv show. The site recommends showing up an hour early and says they have “snacks.” We ate their “snacks” of olives and popcorn with Goose Island IPA and white wine in a largely empty lobby for a half hour.
The show was very good. The group of 5 comedians were given a few words over the course of 75 minutes and built elaborate, reasonably funny stories out of them. The first word was “Geronimo” which degraded into a Smurf, hired by the president, apologizing to the (American) Indians for their treatment. There were three other words (provided by the audience) that worked into similar sketches. There were a couple Dutch words thrown in, but the performers are mostly American. We only went once, but as a second day activity it provided a good perspective of how America is viewed in Holland.
Monday we had a scheduled visit to the Van Gogh museum in the afternoon. In the morning we walked over to the main square, The Dam, in front of the royal palace and the Nieuwe Kerk.
As you can see, it was fairly deserted. From there we walked up the main drag toward the marina and the main train station. A slight detour off of this route took us by the Oude Kerk. It’s a beautiful building that doesn’t lend itself to pictures, due to it being in a very built up part of town. (There are a couple shots of it, as well as the Condomeria we passed on the way in the gallery.)
The Van Gogh museum was very nice, if a little crowded. Learning his history and seeing how prolific he was in an incredibly short life was impressive. This is the only picture I took, and this only because my mother was doing a jigsaw puzzle of the same painting at the time.
We had taken a tram to the museum, but took the 45-minute walk back to the boat. Since discovering that Avis was no longer at the train station, we found their new office and walked by it on the way. I made sure they had our reservation for a few days later and let them know we would be picking the car up later in the day than we had originally scheduled back in April.
That evening we ate at Long Pura, a nice Indonesian restaurant a short jaunt from the boat. We had their tasting menu which had a load of courses. I was told that Indonesian restaurants are prolific and good in lots of Holland, in part because of the Dutch colonization of the area in past centuries.
Tuesday dawned rainy. We hung out on the boat most of the morning, then had lunch at Cafe de Oude Wester. I had a traditional Dutch dish named Hachee, which was a beef stew served with a side of red cabbage and potatoes. (FWIW, everything on our entire trip seemed to come with a side of potatoes.) From there we went to the Anne Frank house for a short presentation and then a walk through the house. We learned a lot about the Dutch occupation during WW2 that neither of us had known. The talk and the walk through the house were somber, but informative.
Another thing we had found while walking the streets of the center city were brass plaques replacing cobblestones outside a few houses, memorials for previous residents of that address who were killed during the war.
Here, standing outside the Anne Frank house, you can see the bow of our houseboat under the canal bridge.
After the tour, we headed back to Chabrol to pick up a little more wine and some Dutch Gin. They had some open and provided us tastings. This is a nice one we picked up to bring home,
Wednesday morning, we took an early train to Hoorn, commencement point of the Stoomtram Museum. While there are a couple buildings with lots of railroad bits there, the “museum” itself is the 20km trip out to the North Sea.
We got to Hoorn about an hour ahead of time, which meant we got a private tour of the restoration shop from a docent.
There are more pictures in the gallery of more of the shop and the mail sorting car he showed us.
We got on the steam-drawn train for a leisurely trip through rural countryside to Medemblik on the coast. On board, we had a table to ourselves and were served some small Dutch pancakes made in the galley on the train.
There were two stops along the way with vintage farms and farm equipment to be checked out. At one of the stops, we got to watch them “blow down” the boiler, which basically used the steam pressure in the boiler to blow out any minerals and whatnot that accumulate in the steam system.
At each of the few road crossings, the train slowed to a crawl so the conductor could jump off and turn on the crossing guard. Once across, he would turn it off and jump on the back of the train. The only place with an automatic crossing gate was where this tiny tourist train crossed a 6-lane highway.
In Medemblik, we grabbed our bag lunches and set out to find a place to eat. Although brightly sunny, it was a little cool and windy. So we took a quick walk around the entire perimeter of the small peninsular town, then retreated to the train station to eat with a crowd of our fellow tourists.
Shortly after noon we boarded the Friesland, a 1920’s-vintage steam ship for a cruise to Enkhuizen.
During the excursion we got to see the string of windmills in the strait that leads down to Amsterdam. There were a handful of tall sailing ships we saw, including one that we overtook heading the same direction. Before the terminus in Enkhuizen, the boat stopped at the Zuiderzee Museum, an open-air museum of an old fishing village. It was mostly a collection of restored shanties with plaques describing who lived there and what their role was. AImed mostly at children, it was not terribly interesting and we didn’t stay long.
We hoofed it to the Enkhuizen train station where we caught the commuter train back to Amsterdam, allaying concerns from Google nav that trains weren’t actually running that day.
That evening we had dinner at Moeders, a traditional Dutch restaurant. It had a reasonably small interior with maybe 25 tables. Every piece of wall space was covered with pictures of “mothers,” easily numbering in the thousands of photos. They also have a nice outdoor deck, but the rain had returned by that evening. I had the Stamppot from the menu, a plate of carrots, potatoes, sausage, beef and bacon.
Thursday we went to the Rijksmuseum, the Dutch national museum. There’s a lot to see and a lot of old masters there. We first did the “highlights tour,” complete with audio guide to what we were seeing. Plenty of Rembrandts, Vermeers, some Van Gogh and many other Dutch artists. The architecture of the building was great, also. There’s a hall of stained glass windows showing some of the history of Holland. There’s also an operating library for people studying Dutch art and history.
It’s one of the first constructions using iron posts.
We walked back by way of Avis rental and picked up our Citroën C3. (We had reserved an “Opel Corsa or similar.”) I added Linda as a driver, as well. The counter agent wanted to make sure we could drive a manual transmission, shooting a particularly inquisitive look at Linda.
We had reserved a parking place at a Q-park near the train station. When we drove there, we found construction blocking a lot of the streets and no entrance where it said it would be. A little more fumbling around and we found a different Q-park, but had to pay the drive-in price, not the prepaid price, which we had to pay, anyway.
We had dinner our final night in Amsterdam at Rangoli, South Indian restaurant. We had a tasty chicken vindaloo which we paired with some appetizers.
I reclaimed our car Friday morning from the Q-park. There was a reserved handicapped parking spot next to the boat (reserved for a particular license plate). Luckily it was empty when I got back, so we had easy access to dump our bags in the car. We had a few more things, with the cooler, kitchen stuff, and a bag of foodstuffs we had accumulated over a week in Amsterdam.
We drove about an hour to the little town of Doorn to visit Huis Doorn, the estate of Kaiser Wilhelm II when he was in exile from the end of the First World War until his death in 1941. The property is huge and well maintained. There’s a building that serves as an entrance portal to the grounds with model railroad of the area, including models of buildings there.
From the entrance, it’s about a 10 minute walk to the house, proper.
You can only tour the house in tour groups which are normally done every hour. The tours are in Dutch, but they had English audio guides you could carry around. When we asked about a tour, we were told some of their tour guides hadn’t shown up yet, so we would need to wait an hour or so for the tour.
We had heard about the house from a movie a few years ago, and part of the appeal was that it was completely decorated as it had been in 1941, when Willhelm II died. While waiting, we read the wall hangings about the Hohenzoller family tree. This includes several fifth or so generation descendants who are still alive today.
We stopped and grabbed a bite in the small cafe in “The Orangery,” an outbuilding that was designed as a guest house and location for large gatherings and meals.
When we returned to the house, we were told they had found a tour guide. Since we were the only people waiting for the tour we got it in English, which was very nice. We went from room to room, all filled with artwork and elaborate furnishings.
When Willhelm was sent into exile, he was only allowed to take things that belonged to his family. Nothing that was considered German state property. In spite of this, our guide told us that there were 64 rail carriages of things brought from Germany to the estate. The paintings, busts and Delftware (a type of fine Dutch pottery) plates are all of the family and events in their lives.
The guide said the house is the first known residence to have an elevator in it. While we were assured the elevator works, apparently safety regulations don’t allow it to be operated. The elevator was installed because Willhelm’s wife was wheelchair bound for much of the time they were there.
The dining room is set as if for a formal dinner.
In one corner of the dining room is a “trophy” commemorating 25 years of rule for the Kaiser. It’s loaded with silver, gold and jeweling. Because it took years to complete, Willhelm didn’t receive it until after he was deposed.
He had a two-room library which is apparently where he spent many of his afternoons, reading. In the smoking room, there is a trompe l'oeil (a painting of a photograph, where everyone looks more composed, and often thinner and taller, than the original photo) of the wedding of his nephew in Berlin sometime during the 1910’s. Seated together at the table were Willhelm, Queen Victoria, King George, Czar Nicholas, and other European royalty that I couldn’t identify.
Willhelm’s remains are in a mausoleum in back of the house.
After the tour of the house, we walked to the rose garden which was still flowering to some extent on the last days of September. The rose garden was dedicated by Queen Victoria, who died at Huis Doorn shortly after Willhelm purchased it. Our guide mentioned that Queen Victoria was the end of the line for the House of Rose (hence the rose garden), a fact of royal genealogy that would be hard to prove by me.
The “pavilion” at the estate used to be the old carriage house. It now has a permanent exhibit on the history of WW2 in the Netherlands, as well as a rotating exhibit. In our case, it was a history of bicycles (and a few motorcycles) in Holland. This included bicycle-mounted cavalry, capable of carrying swords and rifles and other military kit, from early last century.
When the second world war ended, the Dutch government seized all assets belonging to Germans in the country and made a case-by-case assessment of whether it was rightfully obtained. The Hohenzoller family lost out, and Huis Doorn became property of the Netherlands. They immediately recognized its historic value and converted it to a museum at that time. While some pieces (like, unfortunately, the car collection) were sold off, most of the house was maintained exactly as it was left. For that reason, alone, it’s a worthwhile stop.
We drove from Doorn to Breda that afternoon. Our hotel was a reasonably modern building attached to an old church in the town center. Like many town centers, this is a jumble of tiny streets that we needed to weave through the crush of bicycles. The hotel prided itself on its “Naughty Nun” theme, to the point where this was mounted on the wall of our room.
Otherwise the room was great. We had a small outdoor deck and spacious room. The breakfast was served in the old balcony of the sanctuary, with a glass wall separating it from the remaining portion that was still in use. We had dinner that night at Rhodos, a very nice Mediterranean/Greek restaurant, getting lamb, greek salad, roasted veggies. And, since it was Holland, fries.
On Saturday, we headed to the Kinderdijk windmill site, halfway between Breda and Rotterdam. This is an expansive site with 19 windmills originally built in the mid 1700s. The area is a bog that was converted to farmland by cutting trenches to drain the land. As the amount of trenched land increased, the land itself began to dry out and contract. This resulted in the land being lower than the river level and becoming flooded again.
The windmills were constructed to pump the water up to river level and keep the land dry. There are two sets of mills that work in series. The first, built of stone, lift the water about 5 feet to a canal that empties into a reservoir. The second set, made of wood, lift the water another 5 to approximately river level.
You need to park about 15 km away and take a shuttle. The parking is clearly marked, and if you continue past it, the road becomes narrow and uninviting.
At the entrance, there’s a welcome center with info and a little diorama of the area. Next door is a basic cafe with seating allowing you to see a few of the windmills. The main walk (or ride, if you have a bike) is along the mezzanine canal. You get a good view of many of the windmills, most of which can and do still operate. There are a couple windmills you can go inside of and see the living quarters and the inner workings. They are entirely wooden mechanisms.
The head of the windmill is turned into the wind manually using an arm that protrudes opposite the rotor. The arm is chained to posts in the ground. A winch is used to pull the arm one way or the other to face into the wind before being securely chained in place until the next change in wind direction.
The cloth sails are attached to the blades by hand, as well. On windy days, they may only cover half or a portion of the blade. A “miller” is the person responsible for operating the windmill. In many cases, the miller’s wife is the seamstress sewing the sails and whatnot.
In the early 1900s, the windmills’ pumping was replaced by an electric pumping station. The pumping station was in use until the beginning of World War 2, when power became an issue. The windmills were rushed back into service to keep the farmland unflooded. Since then, the windmills have been maintained in working order. There is a powered pumping station in use now, but the windmills are capable of draining the land if the power goes out.
The trail walks you by several of the working farms strewn among the windmills. The land is used entirely for grazing, not for crops. While the farms each have sustenance gardens, the main produce seems to be dairy, beef and lamb.
There are things to see inside the pumping station, but we were immediately accosted by an overly helpful guide, so I didn’t get any pictures of the inside.
They are in the process of refurbishing the massive electric motors to make this pumping station functional again, as well. Next door is the modern, current pump station that was sucking in large amounts of water but provided no option of touring.
When we checked in at Breda, they mentioned there was going to be a running event in the city center on Sunday. If we wanted to leave before 6pm, we would need to park outside the “moat” that marked the middle of town. After leaving the windmills, we went back to our room and packed all but a backpack’s worth, each, and loaded it in the trunk of the car.
Here is the “moat” in front of the Granaattoren, a wall and entrance into the castle area.
We found a city lot about a 15 minute walk from the hotel and headed toward it. It was a lot in the center of a block, surrounded by apartment buildings. I drove past the entrance the first time because the entrance was an alley next to a church. Once parked, I looked around to see if other cars had permits in them. I didn’t see anything, but I did spot a sign showing coins being fed into a machine with an arrow that convinced me we needed to pay.
We split up, walking the perimeter of the parking lot looking for a kiosk. Nothin’. I tried to ask a couple other people. One answered in Dutch, which I knew wasn’t a good sign. The other simply pointed at one of the buildings and said “I live here” and shrugged. Finally a couple pulled in. The woman explained that yes you needed to pay, but she didn’t know where. She also looked up on her phone and found out there was no fee after 6pm on Saturday or at all on Sunday. While her partner was on his phone trying to get the answer, she just said she would add our car as a guest of theirs for that evening. I still have no idea how you pay for parking in that lot.
When we got back to the hotel, we went to Sabores, a “Mediterranean fusion” restaurant, sort of combining Greek and Japanese. It worked well; we had a tataki and grilled octopus as a couple appetizers. They’re located on the Grand Market, a large plaza in the center city.
After a quick breakfast in the morning, we grabbed our backpacks and trekked to our parking lot, now needing to look for breaks in groups of runners on cordoned-off streets to get there.
That Sunday, the first of October, we crossed over into Deutschland and navigated the ring roads of Düsseldorf to get headed to Köln, our destination for the next three nights. The drive was our first introduction to the German-speaking Autohof, the equivalent of a U.S. toll-way service center. We gassed up and also had our first experience with the far-too-common German pay toilet. (If you’re out and about in Germany (and lots of Switzerland) make sure you have coins if you plan to use a toilet.) We also bought lunch, an adequate kebab chicken sandwich with tomato soup.
In Köln, we found our room, then trundled to the Domforum, essentially the information center for the Köln Dom, or cathedral.
We wanted to book our English-language tour that happens every day at 3pm. You have to reserve in person and less than a week before for the 20 available slots. We nailed that down for Sunday.
An unfortunate consequence of having the cathedral be the main attraction for going on a millennium is the original train station is located right next to it. Over the past century or so, the train station has turned into the sprawling “Hauptbahnhof,” like you find all over Germany, occupying what probably would have been a cathedral square.
This consequence did make it easy to stop in the Rewe grocery store in the train station to buy a few supplies on our way back to the room. We ate in the hotel restaurant that night, where I had Lebenkäse (a sort of pork-based meatloaf) with a mushroom sauce. Very tasty.
On Sunday we took a walking tour of the central area, walking by the cathedral again before dropping down to the bank of the Rhein to walk by the Fish Market, a shopping plaza on the site of the genuine fish market of centuries past. We headed back into town, by some of the other plazas before getting to the “Older Market,” an open plaza surrounded by restaurants and shops. We had lunch sitting outdoors at one of the little places.
This brought us to our afternoon tour of the Kölner Dom, the Cologne Cathedral. I really hadn’t known much about the cathedral before my visit, other than it was built in the northern-most city established by the Roman Empire and a spectacular architectural undertaking.
Once in Köln, we learned that it is, in fact, the largest cathedral in Europe. The current cathedral is on the site of the “Old Cathedral” that was built in the 800’s. In the 11th century, the archbishop of Köln made a bargain to acquire the remains of the Three Magi from the archdiocese of Milan. The archbishop of Milan was apparently miffed that his followers weren’t giving as generously to the church as he thought was appropriate.
The “old cathedral” was deemed inadequately grandiose for such a treasure and a newer, more worthy cathedral was drawn up during the 1100’s. Work began on the current cathedral in the mid 1200’s, the same year the “old cathedral” conveniently burned down. The cathedral then became a work in progress of the next 600 and some odd years. Here’s the interior, looking from the newest section toward the oldest section.
The oldest section is known as “the choir.” It consists entirely of the altar, the choir seating and the seven chapels (more on these shortly). The second portion made some headway in the 1400’s to the point where the vaguely purple columns are seen just left of center. In this portion, one of the belfrys was completed, without its spire. Finally, in the early 1800s, they finished it up, completing both towers and sanctuary seating you see here.
There are three organs in the cathedral. There’s a small one in “the choir” that I didn’t take a picture of. In the above photo, you can see pipes of the old organ in the balcony to the left between a couple of the columns. While it has been repaired, it was never placed properly to provide decent sound to the entire cathedral. Up above, you can see the sparrow’s nest organ that is currently the primary organ for the cathedral.
Each of the stained glass windows is supposed to tell a story of some sort, although you probably need a storyteller to figure it out.
Each of the windows was “sponsored” by a donor or a church. Our guide pointed out the many Bavarian Coats of Arms included in the windows, as rich Bavarians were major donors to the cathedral. During the second world war, the windows were removed, intact, and moved to a secure location. Fortunately there was little damage to the cathedral during the war.
The cathedral’s ornateness is stunning. There are the apostles and other figures of religious repute sculpted into each one of the stone columns in the pew area. There are decorated little antechambers to the sides for particular reasons. The “balcony organ” I mentioned easily occupies 2500 square feet of space. As was pointed out in the tour, the type of rock used changed over the centuries, so the lower, older rock is darker and the newer rock is lighter.
In the gallery, you can see several more pictures where repairs have been made using the newer stone, set starkly against its darker background.
In addition to the useful guiding, explaining things that would have otherwise been unexplained, the tour also provided access to the fenced-off altar and choir area that can only be viewed through steel mesh for those entering on their own.
The altar is a massive slab of marble held up by finely carved cabinetry, again depicting the apostles. It stands in front of the gold, jewel-encrusted reliquary of, supposedly, the three magi who showed up shortly after Christ’s birth. The Shrine of the Three Kings was built around 1200. Examination of its contents in 1864 showed it contained the skeletal remains of three people and vintage-correct memorabilia for its purported contents.
It is now inside a glass enclosure, denying pilgrims their centuries-held tradition of being able to touch the relics. Instead, there’s a small rectangular hole in the fence allowing people to touch the leg of the pedestal.
Behind the altar are exquisitely trimmed choir seating flanked by frescoes. The carving on each seat is elaborate. Since this is the oldest part of the cathedral, these are probably older than the 1878 completion date, though our guide didn't know exactly when they went in. From this area, you can see the back wall of the cathedral.
Ahead of the altar and shrine, seven individual chapels are sectioned out along the semi-circular front of the cathedral. Most of these are fenced off, as well. Some have small seating areas. All of them have one or more sarcophaguses of a former archbishops of Köln. Many of them have larger-than-life likenesses of the man interred within.
That evening we ate at a decent but unremarkable little Vietnamese place, Ngon-Ngon, not far from our hotel or the cathedral. Walking to it we passed the Eigelstein-Torburg, a Roman-era stone gate. It’s worth a walk-by if you’re in the neighborhood, and appears to be a regular event venue.
Germany celebrates Reunification day on October 3rd each year. This is the day that East Germany and West Germany stopped existing and simply, once again, became Germany. It marks the day Bonn ceased being the erstwhile capital of West Germany and Berlin once again became the seat of government.
Workers of Germany on Monday, the 3rd, take the day off. This was fortunate for us, because most museums in Köln are closed on Mondays, except for holidays. We used the opportunity to visit Museum Ludwig, a contemporary art museum in the museum district near the cathedral.
The collection focused largely on abstract/pop from Warhol, Lichenstein and Robert Rauschenberg as well as many German artists I’m not familiar with. There were a couple rooms of Picassos, including some pottery plates he decorated. This one is painted up as a bull ring.
Not only was there art produced by Picasso, but there were also a couple rooms of his photographs and photos taken by a journalist living with him for some period of time.
There was some sculpture, including video sculpture. There were also a handful of alcoves featuring various video clips as art. There were also some mock-up samples for items later to be featured in an Adam&Eve catalog.
That afternoon, we toyed with the idea of climbing the 500 and some odd steps up the south tower of the cathedral. The views of the city are supposed to be stunning. But neither of us felt quite that ambitious so we instead walked across the Hohenzollern Bridge, in the shadow of that same tower.
The Hohenzollern Bridge is named in honor of our previous player, Kaiser Willhelm II, and family. He commissioned the bridge as the first railroad bridge across the Rhein in this location. While the original bridge was bombed out of existence in WW2, the replacement bridge still bears his family’s name.
The bridge carries almost continuous rail traffic of all flavors from the ICE and RB trains of DeutscheBahn down to municipal trolleys. As you can see from the photo, the bridge has a saturation coating of “bridge locks.” Guarding each end of the bridge are two pairs of statues of the Hohenzoller ancestors.
It was also nice to see people displaying the Ukrainian flag. We saw many throughout our trip.
We had originally planned on getting an early start out of Köln the next morning to get to Bacharach in time to take a round-trip river cruise to Rüdesheim. When we got back to the hotel and I called K-D boat lines to get tickets, I was told one of their boats wasn’t running the following day and our schedule options weren’t going to work. The following day, Wednesday, all boats were expected to be running, so we rescheduled to that day, and reversed the direction. We looked at other options, including possibly taking the cruise one way and then walking between the two end points but found out Rüdesheim and Bacharach are on opposite sides of the river, making a walk quite difficult.
On a trip to the hotel bar in Köln, I noticed their restaurant had an Oktoberfest menu. We decided to eat at the hotel to try a few things from the menu. I do remember I had a half-liter stein of lager with dinner.
On Tuesday, not needing to head out early as originally planned, we left late morning and tried to choose a route that hugged the river’s edge as much as possible. This worked some places, not so well in others. By early afternoon, we were looking for lunch and found a nice little place on the edge of the Rhein in the small town of Boppard.
Historischer Karmeliterhof outdoor seating offered a perfect location to watch trains and barges run along and on the river. The menu was entirely handwritten in cursive and in German, only. We were able to figure out enough of it, and shared a potato soup and a summer salad with tuna.
Not too much further upriver, we got to Bacharach, our stay for the evening. We stayed in an old-timey hotel named Hof Altkölnischer. We did an approximation of Rick Steves’ walking tour of town. The town is only a few streets deep between the river and mountains that shoot straight up right next to the river, so the walking tour was largely walking from one end of town to the other.
We were surprised at the number of “Weingut”s, or wine merchants, there were in town. Over the next week we would be equally surprised at the quality wines that are produced in the Rhein Valley. Unlike the limited selection of sweet Rieslings you normally see from Germany in the US, they make a variety of tasty, dry reds and whites.
We stopped in Weingut Friedrich Bastien a few doors down from our hotel and bought a couple bottles. We then spent the rest of the afternoon lounging on our balcony.
It overlooked one of the two biggish intersections in town.
We ate in the restaurant at the hotel that night where I had a nice smoked sausage dish.
The following day, we did get up early to get to Rüdesheim for our river cruise. Although only 19 km away, time required to get there was 45 minutes. This included wait time and transit time for the ferry to get to the other side of the Rhein.
We got to Rüdesheim in plenty of time, but the parking lot we found was going to require 9 euros in coins for the amount of time we were going to be away. Linda stayed with the car while I hustled the 10 minutes to the boat terminal, thinking I could get change there. The terminal wasn’t even open yet, so I got it from a hotel nearby.
Once parking was taken care of, we went back to the now-open boat terminal and got on for the hour-plus cruise back down the river to where we had stayed.
Immediately upon leaving Rüdesheim, we started seeing vineyards and castle remains.
Some well maintained, some in complete ruin, the castles sprung up around every turn. The castles were built by robber-barons who, literally, extracted a toll from every boat attempting passage along their chunk of the Rhein. It obviously was very lucrative.
We almost missed our stop at Bacharach, not realizing it was a very brief stop where they just shove the ramp out to the pier for those boarding and disembarking. We had left a bag at our hotel (intentionally, not wanting to leave it visible in our car) that we picked up and dropped at the tourist office. There the guide told us about a trail up to the castle overlooking the city. We spent our additional couple hours there hiking up to the castle, which has since been converted into a youth hostel.
The trail leads up along the old wall for the castle grounds to a couple hundred feet above the town.
From the top, you can see many of the surrounding vineyards. The workers were out, in what looked like difficult terrain. The vineyards surrounded a tall tower that had been reconstructed at the location of one of the wall towers.
On the way down, we passed by the remnants of the Werner Chapel, a tall, octagonal brick chapel behind the protestant church.
We grabbed our bag from the tourist office and got to the boat dock early enough to enjoy a few minutes in the sun watching the river traffic go by. The same boat we had gotten off of picked us up, heading the other direction. The return trip, upstream, took a little longer. During the almost-two-hour trip, we ordered a lunch of a hearty potato and sausage soup.
Back in Rüdesheim, we took off for the several hour drive to Baden-Baden. When we pulled up to the hotel loading/registration area, our lowly Citroën was clearly outclassed by the other cars.
Our lodging, however, was a very nice junior suite with a bathtub at the foot of the bed, situated in the front window of the room. We ate at the hotel restaurant, an upscale Japanese place named moriki. Dinner was as picturesque as it was tasty. It, surprisingly, was not served with potatoes.
The next morning we took a walk around Baden-Baden, including walking around (and through) the Trinkhalle, where it used to be all the rage to drink the mineral water. Next door is the casino, if you’re into that type of thing. Then we climbed up the hill to the Friedrichbad, the old, main bathhouse in town. There was one place outside of it where the warm spring water ran out of a rock. We walked by a courtyard where I spotted this deer statue, welded out of washers.
That afternoon we took off toward our next stop, Sankt Peter. Our intention had been to take the Schwarzwald Hochstrasse, or Black Forest High Road, along a crest in the area, high above the Rhein. Unfortunately, the road was closed about 12 km from Baden-Baden, and we spent a bunch of time snaking around to try to get past the closure. We did find our way back to the spine for a distance.
We detoured slightly to the Black Forest Open Air museum, Vogtbauernhof. The museum is actually an old farm village with all the buildings restored and arranged as they would have been as a working 19th century farm. There’s the main farmhouse and barn, a massive building that was living quarters for the farm owner and milking barn for the cattle. There were numerous bedrooms, and the upper floors were storage for a variety of things you’d need on a farm. There were shops, and other storage buildings, as well as other smaller houses.
We didn’t see anywhere near all of it. It would be easy to spend an entire day there.
Sonne St. Peter is the hotel/resort we were staying at in St. Peter. It’s a small farm town built around a convent. The hotel has an excellent fresh-take-on-traditional restaurant serving breakfast and dinner. Linda had some interesting venison ravioli and I had a lamb dish the first night there. They had homemade ice cream for dessert, and I had a plum-based dessert trio, featuring their plum ice cream.
The next day was between misty and rainy, and we headed to the Uhrmuseum, or Clock Museum, in Furtwangen im Schwarzwald. It was a fairly exhaustive collection of clocks from the dawn of time to present. There was a Stonehenge model that showed the way the light shined on it on the summer solstice. They had all sorts of the mechanical approaches, explaining the move from foliots to pendulums and enumerating the various different catchments and escapements used over their evolution.
Fooled you. This is not the clock museum, but the hotel in Baden-Baden. For all we saw, the only picture I took was this, showing the result of the previous.
We had lunch in a tiny cafe in Furtwangen. Around 1-1:30 when we were there, we were the only people eating anything other than massive layer cakes or cream pies. We did our best to order by pointing at the menu and exchanging single words of German when necessary.
There is no laundromat in the tiny berg of St. Peter, so we spent the afternoon driving to nearby Freiburg to do our weekly laundry. While waiting for clothes cleaning, we walked around the university area of Freiburg with little to see but shops and school buildings. The university was fairly deserted on a Saturday afternoon. We ended up spending 20-plus euros in coins between the laundry, parking and, yes, a toilet.
Dinner was back at the Sonne, although I don’t remember what we had.
Sunday dawned damp but sunny. After breakfast, we packed up our room. As we were packing, there were loud engine noises outside. I watched as a short string of vintage tractors rolled up the street next to the hotel.
We dumped our bags in the car, in preparation for leaving later in the day.
One of our original plans had been to hike between St. Peter and St. Margen, then take the bus back. To our dismay, the bus schedule changed in July to only running between the two towns on weekdays. I fired up AllTrails and found a 8km loop that took us to the neighboring dorf of Lindenberg, then past Hochgericht, or High Point, and back to St. Peter. The trail led up one-lane country roads, past cattle fields with bell-clad cows. Another couple oldish tractors passed us on the way.
When we got away from town, we could see fog laying in the lower valleys above brightly lit hills.
As we started the gentle descent, a couple of young women riding horses came out of one of the farm driveways. They rode slowly in front of us down into town. As we turned to follow our trail, they continued toward Lindenberg. One said to us “Ah. Schönste weg.” (“Ah. Most beautiful way.”) The local church bell started ringing shortly after, presumably their destination.
Part of the trail was overgrown, easy enough to follow. At one point, we were walking along the high side of a pasture and then climbed into the woods toward the hilltop. When we got to the hilltop, there were a few benches and a monument. The placard read (in German) Hochgericht, the “high place” or “high court” was the high point between Lindenberg and St. Peter and the old location of the gallows. They were placed there as a reminder to those in the neighboring convents and monasteries to behave.
As we descended, the trail up to the location had sign posts chronicling the events leading to the biblical crucifixion. The view down on St. Peter was much cheerier.
We got back to St. Peter and bought a couple local gins from the concession at the Sonne. I ended up buying a bottle of the blue-gray and the small bottle of the black. I had tasted the former the night before, and it had nice florals. The black bottle was not open for sampling. Its contents were not black, but were of strong juniper. I also tasted the green-labeled bottle, which reminded me of drinking a spruce tree.
We then started the very short trip to Staufen im Breisgau. About 15 minutes into the 45-minute trip, traffic slowed to becoming halting. People were parking on the grass next to the very narrow two-lane road. As we crawled our way forward, a vintage tractor and Unimog show appeared next to the road. Not being one to miss this type of event, I turned around, found myself my own chunk of grass and parked.
For being in the middle of tiny communities for miles around, the number of old, well maintained tractors was impressive.
In the gallery, you can also see a very old single-cylinder diesel tractor with a massive flywheel/pulley at the driver’s right knee. Listening to that pop-pop-pop down the road was worthy of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
The similarity of the Unimog and Mercedes tractor lines is evident here.
The whole event appeared to be a benefit for the local fire department. We walked around the tractors and ‘Mogs then pointed the car back at Staufen.
Staufen is another small town with a tight center of town. We were staying at the Gasthaus Hotel zum Hirschen. We needed to get diners to move out of the alley to get to our parking spot, likely out after church on a Sunday afternoon.
We checked in and looked over the menu. One of the waiters had worked in Lake Tahoe and described the menu. Settled up in our room, we hung on the rooftop deck at the end of the hallway for a little while. For dinner I had the venison special. There was a very nice local cuvee we had with our meal.
In the morning we had breakfast in the same dining room. Before taking off for the day, we took the climb up to the ruins of the castle in the town.
The hill is covered in vineyards, some with archaic concrete steps for the walkways down to the vines. The castle is long deserted. There are stairs up to the tower allowing you to look down on the castle interior and town.
Back at our hotel, we checked out and took the short drive to Weil am Rhein and the Vitra Design museum. The main museum was focused entirely on robotics, sort of giving a history in the first little section, and then splitting off into specific types.
This full-wall mural says that when robots automate everything, you’ll still manage to leave the butt plug out when company is around.
They covered prosthetics, household chore helpers and industrial robots. There were a bunch of interactive exhibits, allowing you to do things with the robots. They had some of the bizarre exhibits like this one demonstrating how to create google map traffic jams. This is a reproduction of a wagon full of smartphones that its owner dragged around various city streets in Berlin, causing the traffic patterns to show lots of slow-moving travelers.
We walked across the campus, past the various domes and slides and other interesting architectural pieces to the Schaudepot. We had lunch at the cafe, then walked through their hall of chairs. Hundreds of them of different designs, largely organized by color.
In the basement is the complete rebuilding of Charles and Ray Eames’ office. Picked up from LA and plopped into the museum basement.
Ten minutes after we left, we hit the Swiss border. Switzerland has a nationwide road toll, indicated by a “Vignette” stuck to your windshield, paid annually. You get a sticker to put on the windshield with some funky RFID in it that can be read remotely. We needed to get one, so I pulled into the lane to purchase it. I handed a credit card to the guy with the little handheld unit. He tried twice to run it and it failed, so he pointed us to the immigration office by the side. (I’m convinced he tried to approve the card with a blank signature, causing it to be declined.)
Inside the little shack, we waited behind the one other person trying to get into the country with difficulty. The transaction went better inside and we got our Vignette and put it on the car
An hour and half later we dropped into the basin of the two lakes of Interlaken. Our hotel was on the south shore of Brienzersee, the eastern lake of the pair. It was a small hotel and restaurant, Hotel Châlet du Lac in Iseltwald, looking out across the marina at the “old hotel” in town.
We learned when we got there that the restaurant was closed Mondays and Tuesdays. We asked for a recommendation and were told about a place that specializes in game meat. We wandered by to find they were also closed on Mondays. We ended up at Restaurant Dorfpintli, a little Italian place underneath a larger restaurant and hotel. The entire operation was run by a husband and wife team. She was the waitress, he was in the back cooking. There was a huge sign reading “Kitchen closes at 8pm.” and then the same message in German underneath in much smaller lettering. We got there a few minutes before 7. When I asked for a table for 2, the waitress/hostess thundered “Haben Sie Reservierung?” I said no. She gave us an exasperated look and pointed us at one of the three empty tables, right near the entrance to the kitchen. One of the other empty tables was a four-top in the corner by the windows with a “Reserved” sign on it.
For being a tiny place, the menu was quite extensive. I ordered a pork steak, Linda ordered a “sausage salad” and after a little back and forth, I made it understood we wanted a bottle of red wine. This apparently pleased the cook, who came out and carried on a one-sided conversation in Italian, and gestured that he was going to cook me a nice, thick steak. We immediately gained status and got moved to the table in the corner, the reservation sign being moved to our previous table.
The steak was delicious, coated with chive butter.
Linda’s salad was purely diced up sausage, marinated in a vinegarette dressing with potatoes and the like. I had plenty of green salad so we shared that.
As we were eating, a couple other parties came in, looking for tables. They were met with the same brusque question and when they said no, were told the restaurant was full, and punctuated with “Bye bye.”
When we finished, the cook came back out and asked if we liked it in simple Italianesque. “Bueno, ja?” I think Linda answered him in Spanish at one point. As he took our empty plates, I asked the one word question “Grappa?” which was immediately, enthusiastically understood. He rummaged around on top of the refrigerator for a few minutes and brought the grappa.
On the walk back to the hotel, the lights from the far side of the lake reflected in shimmers on the lake surface.
The next morning, Tuesday the 11th, clouds hung over the lake as we prepared for one of our more complicated travel days.
I had arranged ahead of time to be able to park our car at our hotel in Luzern, or Lucerne, where we would be spending the night on Wednesday. The drive from Iseltwald to Lucerne started out as an hour and 10 minutes. Almost two hours later, we made it to the hotel in Luzern. The valet took the car keys and we grabbed our overnight backpacks and walked to the train station. The vending machines for tickets took some deciphering, so by the time we had tickets to Alpnachstad, we had just missed a train and had to wait half an hour for the next one.
After getting out of Luzern, the train hugged the edge of Lake Lucerne, passing through a handful of tunnels, before getting to Alpnachstad, the base station of the Pilatus cog railroad.
The cog railway runs four and a half kilometers and is the steepest cog railroad in the world, with maximum gradients of 48%. Over that distance it rises 1600 and some meters to its station at Pilatus Kulm, or the top of the mountain Pilatus. It uses a special double-sided cogway to ensure there’s no way the cogs can disengage from their rack.
It’s running on the same rails that were installed in 1889, when a steam-powered train made the ascent in a little under an hour. In 1937, the train was electrified and travel time shortened to about 25 minutes, including a stop at Amisgen, a resort partway up the mountain.
It’s worthwhile to get a view facing forward, as you can see the rails rise above you.
It also provides a nice view of Lake Lucerne on the way.
We got to the top early afternoon and checked in for our room. The room wouldn’t be ready for a few hours, so we kicked around the sunny deck watching a few trains arrive.
The several-kilometer Dragon trail starts from the hotel through a tunnel cut into the rock with windows looking out over the valleys. A long staircase leads you back into the daylight where you loop around a large knob and head back toward the hotel.
The legend of Pilatus is the mountain is occupied by a dragon. While it’s a fun legend, Pilatus has gone over the top (pun noted). There was a dragon’s lair in the ground floor of the hotel that had interactive dragon-hunting games projected on the wall. Their web site has a dragon next to the “Pilatus Kulm'' banner. We were even staying in the Drachenstein Suite.
We had a tasting menu in the Queen Victoria Saal for dinner that evening.
The next morning, we climbed to the high point of the mountain, the Esel. From a distance, it’s the prominent point you can see sticking up from the top. Far beneath the hotel was a uniform layer of clouds blocking views of the towns and lakes down below. From this perspective, you can see the Dragon trail running the other direction from the hotel.
After the short climb and descent, we took the gondola then cable cars down to the Kriens. The gondola holds about 20 people. Sitting right in the front was a guy with his noticeably distressed dog whimpering the entire trip down to the cable car station. (“Cable car” is the name they used for small, suspended cabins cars, with just a pair of benches facing each other. Not like the cable cars in San Francisco.)
As we traveled down toward Kriens, a suburb of Luzern, we entered the cloud bank you can see above.
From Kriens, we caught a bus into Luzern and went back to our hotel where we had dumped our car the previous day and dropped our backpacks before setting out to peruse Luzern.
Luzern is a beautiful small city situated against Lake Lucerne (Luzernsee). It has a very Swiss-looking downtown with very high-end shops selling jewelry, watches and other luxury items. Tucked behind the downtown area is a small pond in front of a colossal, dying lion carved out of the rock.
The lion is a memorial for the Swiss guards killed during the French Revolution in 1792. It was carved in the early 1800s and has the names of all of the guards killed beneath the lion, with the names sized according to rank. The location is somewhat remote, away from the bustle of downtown and is, at the same time, glorious and somber.
We grabbed lunch as a Vietnamese fast food joint near the Lion, serving cooked-to-order Pho.
There are a pair of old, meandering wooden bridges across the Reuss River that flows through Luzern. The Kapellbrücke, or Chapel Bridge, is a long 14th-century zig-zaggy covered bridge with finely painted gables supporting the roof every little ways. The bridge takes a less-than-direct route across the river as it was built to go directly between the homes of two noblemen. Partway across is the tall octagonal tower the bridge bends around.
About a kilometer downstream, away from the lake, is the Speuerbrücke, another older, wooden covered bridge. This one is 400 years newer than the Chapel Bridge, but also features finely painted roof supports and a change in direction, midstream.
Just upstream from the Speuerbrücke is the Needle Weir, used to control both the level of the lake and the flow of the river. The idea of a needle weir is it’s a dam made of thin vertical slats, or needles, and flow is controlled by adding or or removing needles. The weir is on the right side of this picture a bit in the distance. On the left, in the foreground is a small hydroelectric plant taking advantage of the difference of level between the lake and the river.
We ate at the HATO restaurant, serving fair, pricey Asian-fusion food. The restaurant, itself, is subterranean with windows in wells just below street level. By design or not, this gave an appropriate angle for looking up pedestrians' clothing on the sidewalk.
The next morning I was dragging a little with an upset stomach. We had a short travel day to Zürich, so after a light breakfast we headed to Sammlung Rosengart. The Rosengarts were art dealers in München, then Luzern. The Rosengart museum is a modern art collection spread across a couple floors in an old bank building. Kandinskys, lots of Picassos, sprinkled with some Monets and Matisses. The whole basement is dedicated entirely to Paul Klee. While one room would have been adequate, the entire basement was more Klee than glee.
It’s about an hour drive from Luzern to our hotel, the Renaissance Tower in Zürich. We got there early afternoon and I slept most of the rest of the day. I really didn’t feel much like eating, so we just got a sandwich in the hotel restaurant that evening.
One of the fascinating sights from the Renaissance Tower is that you are right where all the tracks fan out from the Hauptbahnhof, looking to the west. Watching all the different classes of trains enter and exit the station at night was evening fun.
I had stayed there on a couple previous trips to Zürich and knew the view we could get. It was great to get it again. On a previous trip, I had been in search of a grocery store and walked down to the Migros building (with the large M on it) only to find it was a distribution facility, not a grocery store. A block or two away from the hotel there is a Coop, the other major Swiss grocery chain, to serve our purposes.
I was doing a lot better on Thursday, the 13th. After breakfast we walked the several km from the hotel to the downtown area on a path along the Limmat River. It’s a scenic walk taking us by the river-fed public swimming pool and a small container village.
Once we got to downtown, we continued along the river to its source at the Zürichsee, or Lake Zürich. The second to last bridge across the river is actually a large city square with some sort of commerce building and a small area with carnival rides.
We walked back along the other side of the river to the train station. Next to the train is the Switzerland National Museum. Opposite the museum is the city-run water taxi/tour boat. We took a water ride out into the edge of Lake Zürich then back. We hitched a streetcar back to the hotel, then had lunch at a cafe nearby, Steiner Flughafebeck.
On one of the nearby hilltops is a restaurant called Die Waid. It’s actually a pair of restaurants, one called the Seasons restaurant and the other called Wok. I had eaten at Wok before, which served a variety of small skillet dishes, not terribly spectacular. The Seasons was more upscale and had a very good reputation. This evening we ate at the Seasons.
It took a couple streetcars to get us up to the base of the driveway. It was a showery evening but not terribly cold. Still, we arrived slightly wet. Dinner was delectable. Linda had the sliced veal, Zürich style. I had the calf’s cheeks Bourguignonne. The view was fantastic, overlooking the city.
After dinner, I looked up a route back to the hotel, approximately in the center of this photo. It looked like streetcar line 13 ran on the street below the street Die Waid is on. We took a switchback route down a few narrow lanes to the street with the streetcar track running down the center of it. We walked up the street a little ways looking for a stop. What we found was a large orange sign about line 13 with a December 2022 date on it.
We took that as a bad sign. At this point we had been out for about 10 minutes. We figured walking another 40 minutes wouldn’t soak us that much more.
The trip down to the river was mostly on discontinuous stairways that ran street to street on the roads that skirted the hill. Then, every street or two, we’d need to jog left or right a short distance to get to the next stairway. It was a very nice residential area with a lot of picturesque houses that I took no pictures of.
Once we got down to the river, we went the short distance to the footbridge that dumped us into the technology park where our hotel was.
The next morning we tried taking a streetcar to the Schweizerische Nationalmuseum, or Swiss national museum. The same streetcar line we had used to get back to the hotel the day before was now taking a different route. We ended up getting off and walking a few blocks to a bus stop that got us to where we were going.
The museum has a bunch of different displays, some permanent, some rotating. The rotating exhibit we visited first was of Swiss sleighs.
This is in a large gallery with a fireplace and the flags of the various clans and regions that make up Switzerland.
We then spent most of our time walking through the permanent display chronicling the history of Switzerland, from first settlements in the 10-hundreds up to 2017. It was fascinating, describing clans that formed and how the mountain passes in the country became critical during the expansion of the Roman Empire.
It went on to explain how they became the bankers of Europe and finally how they settled on neutrality following the French Revolution in the early 1800s. It covered how they welcomed and helped refugees during both world wars. It was a very extensive exhibit that had quite a bit to absorb.
We had lunch at the museum cafe then visited a more whimsical exhibit on the city of Zürich, Simply Zürich, which had several walls covered with nicknacks covering a smorgasbord of topics. They had displays on such things as one of the first drones to one of the largest, unsolved armored car robberies.
From there, we took an S-bahn from the train station, right across from the museum, to the Uetliberg lookout tower right next to the massive TV tower. There’s a nice park about half an hour walk from the terminus of the train at Uetliberg. where the two towers rise.
There’s a small lookout platform 70 meters up the smaller tower. You need a 2-Franc coin or the ability to read the incredibly dim German instructions on the credit-card reader to get to the platform. I had been there before and knew to carry the former. They call the view “The Top of Zürich,” for good reason.
We got back down the hill to the Uetliberg station, only to see the train pulling away. I bought a beer and we hung at the outdoor cafe on the train platform waiting for the next train, about 40 minutes later.
Back at the main train station, we caught another S-bahn to closer to our hotel, remembering the streetcars weren’t running the route back the way they had. We were only on the train for 2 stops. As we made our way to the door there was a bit of snarl. It turns out there was a conductor checking tickets. In four trips to Switzerland, this was the only time I had encountered any check that you were actually ticketed while on public transportation.
That night we made a reservation at Bibim Shack, a little, high-quality Korean place. It was a short streetcar trip (that was actually running) away. The menu was a little limited, but the bulgogi was worth the trip.
The next morning started our longest driving day of the trip. I had left a flannel shirt at breakfast the day we left Luzern. Once I had talked to the hotel to make sure it was there, we decided to make that small backtrack to pick it up. On the trip back, we got a nice view of Pilatus from the north on the road.
We picked up the shirt, in a bag hand-labeled “Mr. Banta,” turned back around and headed back toward Zürich. There was a more direct route, but it would have routed us through Liechtenstein and Austria. Uninterested in dropping 30 Euro for tolls for a 20-minute transit of the two, we decided to head north to the German border before making a right toward München. This turned out to be a longer trip than we had planned. The “best” route followed the northern edge of the Obersee and Bodensee. Much of it was two lane road, it was Saturday, and we were to learn it was the day of a soccer match.
We stopped at a small Autohof early afternoon to visit some pay toilets and grab a bite to eat. There was a small stand with a very limited (but cheap) menu. I ordered a Bockwurst, which turned out to be a hot dog. Linda ordered a “Fleischkäse im Bröt”, which we both assumed was a meat and cheese sandwich. In fact, Fleischkäse is roughly bologna, making it a bologna sandwich. The potato salad side was the treat of the entire meal.
While we were eating, a bus full of soccer fans stopped in the same Autohof. Luckily we had used the toilets, avoiding the line. We could not avoid the large collection of fans who were obviously not allowed to smoke on the bus and took advantage of their stop.
We crawled along through several towns, eventually even spotting a blimp, presumably for the game. Once we turned away from the shore of the Bodensee, our pace picked up and we made it to near our place in western München by late afternoon. The area was packed and I needed to pick up the key for our airBnB from a sushi joint before we could get into the parking area. I found a place around the block, hoofed it all the way around the block and we got in to enjoy our balcony over the block-center park.
As the sun was setting, we walked to a nearby Rewe hoping to pick up some breakfast supplies. When we went there, we found it was closed that late on Saturday night. We found a convenience market that had a few supplies and passed a bakery where we could buy some rolls at the next morning. The walk took us over the railway bridges and we got this view as we crossed over.
The real treat we found was Pizzeria da Toto (with signage that reads CIMBOM), a Turkish-owned mediterranean eatery. When we got there, half the place was loaded with Turkish soccer fans glued to the big screens showing some piped-in Turkish match.
We ordered the Insalata Greca (Greek salad) and wood-grilled salmon. The salad was a genuine treat, and the salmon was very nicely grilled. With potatoes on the side, of course. They had a bunch of wine by the glass, but only a few bottles. We got one of the higher-end bottles and had a pleasant young waiter who enjoyed working on his English with us.
We were seated away from the TVs, at a table closer to the door. Later in the dinner, the West-Munich, Turkish version of the godfather came in to a table near ours and held court. He was older, with a heavy face and various people circulated to his table to chat.
We got info from our host that there was a nearby grocery store, an Edeka Hammerer, just a half block away. They had a bakery in their entrance. We went there for a few provisions.
The next morning, Monday, we had tickets to Salzburg. Our local train station was 3 stops, about 6 minutes, from the Hauptbahnhof. From there, we had booked the trip on the Austrian rail system, Westbahn, instead of the German system, DeutscheBahn. This meant our boarding track was way off in a far corner of the quite cavernous München main station. I was impressed with the prominent signage in the station in a handful of languages with instructions for Ukrainian refugees. Settled in, we enjoyed the just under 2-hour trip, followed by a 15-minute stroll to our hotel.
Salzburg is a small city divided by the Salzach river. In an effort to be closer to the train station, we booked a hotel in the newer portion northeast of the river. Nearby was the Mirabelle Palace, its grand courtyard now a city park.
In the distance you can see the Fortress Hohensalzburg on a cliff on the far side of the river.
Salzburg had several claims to fame. As you might have gleaned from the name, it was famous for its salt mines. In the middle of the millennium, salt was referred to as “white gold.” A barrel of salt was said to have the value of a house. Later, Salzburg was the birthplace of Mozart and is pocked with various landmarks commemorating him. It was also the setting for the Sound of Music story. (My sister tells a story of visiting the abbey of the real-life “Maria” from the story and hearing the nuns singing somewhere hidden from sight.) The latter two facts have shaped more of the city’s culture than the former, and it’s known as a musical haven.
As we set off to the older portion of the city, we crossed the Salzach on the Mozartsteg footbridge. From there, we wandered to the cathedral square.
Around the corner is the Residenzplatz, or Residence square, bordered on two sides by the old and new palatial “residences” of the archbishop. Both are now tourist buildings. Wrap around the block and you end up in the Kapitelplatz, or market square. In addition to several open-air markets, the square is known for its golden sphere with a man on top, looking up at the fortress.
It seems rotating art exhibits are shown in the square. This is one that was so well known that it has become permanent.
The cemetery outside St. Peter’s church is on a walkway behind the church and is of note for being a working burial ground for over 500 years with many finely-crafted gravestones and markers.
That evening, we took a tram to the Gasthaus Brandstätter where we had dinner with Matthias Eisner. He had traveled out from Vienna to have dinner with us. Often, the restaurant has veal lung on the menu, which I figured was worth a try. Unfortunately, not that night. Linda had a veal goulash and I had a venison dish with a Swiss-like mushroom and cream sauce. We also had a great red pear schnapps with our dessert.
The next day, we were taking the train to München, then Ingolstadt. We had plenty of time, so we walked back over to the old part of town and huffed up the steep trail to the Fortress Hohensalzburg. It’s a large fortress capable of holding the entire town’s population when it was built. It is in such an imposing location over the town that in almost 800 years, it was never attacked.
Salzburg had been its own sovereign region for quite a while. By the time Napoleon showed up in the early 1800s, instead of using the fortress for its intended purpose, the city fell under fairly light attacks. After falling into disrepair for a lot of the 1800s, the Fortress was spiffed up for tourism in the 1900s.
The fortress has a lot to see that we didn’t see. The views from the walls down on the main city are impressive.
Rather than hiking down, we took a funicular down to the main city. This one was unlike any others I’ve ever been on, where it operates on a single track except for the midpoint where the track splits into two and the cars pass each other.
We walked back to the hotel, grabbed our bags and headed to the train station. We had a sandwich for lunch while sitting on the platform waiting for the train to arrive. About 10 minutes into the ride we hit the German border, where the train stopped and the German police entered to check everyone’s passport. It was our only border crossing in the duration of the trip where ID was checked.
In München, we changed trains from Westbahn to DeutscheBahn and took the short trip to Ingolstadt. We tried to take the tram to our hotel, working from google maps. As we boarded the tram, I showed the driver our destination. He simply started repeating “Nein, nein, nein.” and pointed off the tram. We got the idea. We walked to the other side of the island and caught the same numbered tram in the opposite direction.
The son of our dentist had started a brewery in Ingolstadt, forming Yankee&Kraut brewing. We had talked to him about meeting up, but his new brewing equipment had showed up the day we arrived, so he was unable to meet. We did go to ZWØLF, the Yankee&Kraut tasting room, where I was able to get 1cl tasting of just about all of their beers. I also picked up a few cans of their IPA, “It bites back.”
From there, we headed to Weisbräuhaus to eat, on the recommendation of our brewing acquaintance. Dinner was ordered by pointing at the menu, again, but was excellent German fair. I couldn’t tell you exactly what. By the time dinner was served, the place was packed. I do remember when dessert time came up, I simply asked “Schnapps?” which brought a response very reminiscent of Iseltwald: “Ahh... schnapps.” The waiter started telling me a list of schnapps, most of which I couldn’t follow. I just replied “Etwas gut,” which got me a mirabelle schnapps. It was very good.
The next morning, we had an English-language tour of the Audi museum at 11:00. We had been to the museum before in 2017, but had wandered it on our own. We had also been there on Friday that time, when the production line wasn’t running. The museum tour was interesting, talking about the convergence of the four companies that formed the early Auto Union. There’s a lot of pre-history, but the end result was a spectrum of companies and product lines. The bottom of the line was of powered bicycles, Wanderer. This one was nicknamed the ass-warmer.
Audi and DKW were another pair of companies. During this tour, we learned that fenders were added to the early Audis to prevent horse droppings from being flung into the (open) cabin. To this day, the German word for fender is Kotflugel, which literally translates to “shit wing.”
The high end was Horch, the luxury car line. The museum included an example with a sink with hot and cold running water. Our guide, Julia, can be seen in the reflection on the car door.
A handful of the pre-war competition cars are restored. One was recovered from a Soviet barn in the early ‘90s, in bad condition. Front to back, the hillclimb car, the land-speed record car and the Formula 1 car.
Post-war, fortunes turned. Most of Auto Union’s factories were in East Germany. While a few utility vehicles were produced, the company ceased to exist a few years later.
Audi re-formed in Ingolstadt in the late 1940’s, and started producing low-end vehicles based on the pre-war DKW (one of the previous companies) design, including this panel van.
This effort faltered, and the remnants were swept up by Volkswagen in the ‘60s. Audi was left to build Beetle components for the next 10 or so years. Underground, a couple engineers designed a “modified Beetle,” which turned into the new Audi line.
From there, as they say, the rest is history. The rally-based Quattros followed the next decade, and the high end of the Volkswagen Group took off.
We had lunch in the facility cafeteria, serving high-end seasonal food at very reasonable prices. Protip: Pumpkin soup is a savory, tasty side, unladen with the nutmeg and cinnamon you’ll find in the US.
That afternoon, we had a tour of the production line. As with other factory tours we’ve been on, cameras are not allowed. We first went to the sheet metal stamping facility. The tour went by an example of a “raw” sheet metal car, where I won the contest of how many stampings go into forming such a car. We then went to the line where, bit by bit, the car was assembled. We toured the “A” chassis line (making A3s and Q2s) as the “B” chassis line (for A4s, A5s, etc.) was down for retooling.
The line turned out cars for all markets and all configurations. There was almost no duplication in the models as they progressed. This includes all drivetrains, including AWD, for all global markets. They have 34 different steering wheels available, alone. The line turns out 25 cars an hour, mostly full time, all year. Our guide mentioned that out of around 300,000 cars produced a year, an average of 2 identical cars are produced each year.
There’s a limited showroom at the Audi Forum, in the center of the Ingolstadt complex. I found an R8 in my size.
I’m not sure of the circumstances, but there was a movie car on the grounds that day, as well. I’m also not sure of the movie, but it did a slow-motion drive through the complex while we were there.
There were other interesting examples in the Forum parking lot, there for customer pickup. A few pictures are in the gallery.
We needed to get back to München that day. Having figured out the tram lines, we caught the right one to the train station. While waiting for our train, we saw the carriers of cars waiting for transport.
Back in München, we went back to Pizzeria da Toto and had the Contessa pizza with ham, mushrooms and hot peppers.
We took it easy on Thursday, having been on the road for the previous 4 days. We went to the downtown area late morning and had lunch at the outdoor eatery, Tambosi. This little Italian joint is just outside The Residence, which was the palace of Bavarian royalty for several centuries, up until the end of the first world war. After lunch we spent a couple hours wandering around the Englischer Garten.
It’s an immense park, the main park in the center of the city, running along the Isar River. We could have easily spent the entire day without seeing all of it. We stayed in and had dinner at the airBnb that night.
Friday rolled around, a bit drizzly and gray. We decided to visit the Deutsches Museum, a massive technology museum in a small campus of buildings. Like many of our trips, we took the S-bahn to the main train station, then took an U-bahn to the location in the city we wanted to get to. This worked great to get us to the Deutsches Museum, where we tried to hit a handful of exhibits. Our first stop was the modern aviation hall. The aviation exhibits occupy a voluminous building, tiered into three floors. The first floor is modern aviation, with a vast array of sectioned airframes and turbines showing the evolution of the jet age.
(Photo courtesy of Wolfgang Stief)
The second and third floors contain vintage aviation and satellites and telescopy, respectively.
In an adjacent gallery, there’s a compendium of powered engines, including one of the earliest examples of Rudolf Diesel’s engine design.
The room also had a variety of windmills and waterwheels, showing the various designs of each. From there we went to a gallery of bridges, dams and waterways. There were models of loads of different designs, describing when they had been dreamt up. Spanning the gallery was a small suspension bridge where you could walk above the exhibits.
We ducked out to lunch at the museum cafe, then took in two more exhibits. The first was on the human body. They had the outline of the body on the floor with little features around the room roughly related to where you were on the body. Unlike a science museum that might explain anatomy, this was more a functional description, including technological innovations that might be applicable to that part.
Our last stop before exhausting our attention was on agriculture technology. Again, being fairly exhaustive, it had a diorama of an 1800’s vintage brewing monastery, history of farming implements and crop and animal-raising techniques. An interesting piece of info on the dairy industry was that the US and Canada are the only places in the world that were in the 0-20% of lactose intolerance. Every other portion of the world was higher.
Having barely seen a fifth of the museum, we called it a day at that point. The U-bahn station was tucked into the center of a handful of shops, one of them being an Indian grocery. We decided on the spot to cook our own Indian dinner one of our remaining two nights, and stopped in to shop for some basics. Then took the short ride back to the Hauptbahnhof. Once there, we found the now-packed platform for the S-bahn back to the apartment.
After standing there for a few minutes too long, there was an announcement. A few people moved, but not that many. It was repeated a few minutes later, and I caught “kein Zug” (“No train.”) in the middle of it. I figured that was enough for us to find an alternative. At the top of the stairs and out the door was a tram stop. Google navigated us by tram back to near the apartment quickly, via two trams. The first one was packed to the gills. When we reached our transfer stop, I had to pull Linda through the horde to get off. The second tram was better, and we made it back.
Rather than cook that night we decided the easy way and ate at Pizzeria da Toto one more time. That night, we had some awesome lambchops, plus the now obligatory Insalata Greca.
Note the potatoes were not skipped.
Saturday, the 22nd, was our last full day in Europe. Er, correction: our last scheduled full day in Europe. We decided to go to one of a collection of art museums, the Alte Pinakothek. There’s also the Neue Pinakothek and the Pinakothek der Moderne.
When I checked navigation options, the usual first step of taking the S-bahn was missing. Looking out the window of the apartment, we could see maintenance being done on the S-bahn tracks. When we looked online, we saw that all of the city S-bahn lines were down for the weekend. It being a weekend, the trams were much less crowded, and we made our way.
We specifically went there because some of the 19th and 20th-century impressionist masters from the Neue were on display while it was closed for renovations. Goya, Manet, Picasso, Van Gogh, plenty of others.
We walked through a bunch of the permanent Alte galleries, some with Da Vinci, lots with German artists and a smattering of Dutch. Some of the most impressive were the Rubens galleries, which were high-ceilinged halls, sometimes with two rows of pictures, high and low.
The entire museum, actually, was very impressive. We had lunch during our perusing.
Back at the airBnB, we enjoyed our final sunny afternoon on the balcony.
That night, Linda cooked up a flavorful Madras curry that we had with some naan and instant sides we picked up the day before, plus supplies from the neighboring Edeka Hammerer. After, we packed and consolidated and cast off spare foodstuffs, our mugs and cooler.
We also did laundry. In that apartment was the only place I had run into a ductless dryer. It did generate heat, and maybe moved some air, but all of the water it removed got put into a tank that needed to be emptied from time to time.
Sunday morning, the 23rd, we loaded up the trunk of the Citroën and headed to the München airport. Our scheduled flight took us to Zürich where we were to connect to SFO. As with many large European airports, instead of a jet bridge that leads to the plane, you take a bus from the gate to the plane. From there you climb stairs up to the plane. This adds to boarding time, as did needing to pass through border patrol in Zürich on our way to our next gate.
We got to our gate about 15 minutes before scheduled departure, but the doors were already closed. Discussion with the gate agents wasn't going to change that, in spite of the plane sitting on the ground for the next 45 minutes. There was a transfer desk right across from the gate where we got to watch, while waiting, queued to figure out our options.
The transfer agent was polite and tried to be helpful. Since we were booked in Business Class to San Francisco, and weren’t willing to get downgraded, the next chance we had to fly would be the following day. We got rebooked the following day to Frankfurt, then on to SFO. She also gave us an overnight voucher for a nearby Hilton. It included a 20-Franc dinner voucher (each). I asked the agent if she lived in Zürich. She said she lives near Zürich. I commented to her that 20 Francs is about enough to buy a bottle of water.
We got all of this wrapped around 2pm, about an hour and half later than we were supposed to be taking off. We headed outside to the hotel shuttle area. After waiting for a few, I called the hotel to ask for a shuttle. The guy on the phone said the next shuttle would be at the airport at 3:30. Seriously. There would be no shuttles for an hour and a half.
I looked up on navigation that it would be about a 45-minute walk to the hotel. So we got another chance to wander the side and back streets of Zürich to get to our hotel. Since the only bags we had were our backpacks, it was easy enough to hike it. We got checked in around 3pm, having missed what would have been our delightful United Business lunch.
The buffet in the hotel lobby was closed, but when we talked to the bartender, we told us they had a special meal that was supplied for those with airline vouchers. That day, it was a beef stew with a salad and rice on the side. Tasty, plenty of food, and definitely not something you could have bought in the average Zürich restaurant for 20 Francs. The restaurant did have one table set up inside a ski lift cabin.
We talked about going somewhere that late afternoon, but just ended up hanging in the room. I went down later on and had a snack of a sausage, since the beef stew had been early for our regular dinner time.
Our first flight, to Frankfurt, was early Monday. We took the shuttle this time, and got to the airport in plenty of time. This flight was reasonably trouble-free and reasonably on time, getting us to Frankfurt with about 3 hours before boarding to SFO. If you haven’t had the chance, the Lufthansa lounges in Frankfurt are quite nice. There are plenty of comfortable places, good wifi, a large self-service bar (with a pils and a weissbier on tap), and a continuous food buffet, changing meals about when you might expect.
Our leg into San Francisco was a United-badged flight, different from the Lufthansa-badged one that brought us to Frankfurt. (For those who haven’t seen them, Lufthansa’s inside-Europe “business class” is economy seats with a plastic box belted into the center seat. No extra legroom, just extra shoulder room.)
At the gate, we had our passports checked then started filing through the line to board. When our boarding passes got scanned, both of them said “See gate agent.” So we got into line, and ended up talking to different gate agents, both of whom said we weren’t booked on the flight. We had boarding passes (with seat assignments) in hand that had gotten us through border control and security, but wouldn’t get us on the plane.
The gate agent basically said we weren't getting on the plane, and they could help us after boarding was done.
While the plane was boarding, I called the United booking number, talked to a very helpful agent, and got confirmed seat reservations for the same flight the following day. I had tried doing that in Zürich the day before, but the call just continually failed. Once boarding was complete, we talked to the gate agents who couldn’t explain what had happened. They printed our boarding passes for the following day and pointed us at Lufthansa customer support to get our voucher for yet another bonus night in Europe. You can see the note the United gate agent started writing on the boarding pass above. “Please accom. them with a hotel room …” as it continues on the back.
At Lufthansa customer support, they told us it wasn’t their problem. The representative we talked to implied that United had lied to us and was just plain not interested in helping us. We turned around and headed back to the United gates, and met the gate agents headed toward us. We explained what was going on, and they entered the back door of the Lufthansa customer support counter. About 5 minutes later, the Lufthansa representative we had talked to earlier emerged, sour-faced, and handed us hotel vouchers for a Moxy nearby and meal vouchers for 18 euros, each.
Moxy hotels are the postage-stamp-sized Marriott affiliates. This one was two train stops and a 10-minute walk away. The “voucher meal” wasn't nearly as good as what was offered in Zürich, in this case cheese tortellini very lightly covered with tomato sauce and a soft drink. We dropped another 35 euros to actually get some real food.
Tuesday started off poorly, with horribly organized security lines that took us about an hour to get through. We had left plenty of time, and again got to hang in the Lufthansa lounge. We did head to the gate a little early because I had been selected for “secondary screening.”
In this case, they just wanted to check my shoes and turn on my electronics, which took all of 2-3 minutes.
Over the course of three days, we had traversed border control five times: twice in Zürich as we left, and then re-entered Europe, and three times in Frankfurt as we left, re-entered and finally left.
We were able to board on Tuesday, the 25th. The guy originally seated next to Linda was willing to swap seats with me, so we were even able to sit next to each other for the 12-hour flight to San Francisco, wrapping up our adventure. The bags we had checked in München on Sunday met us at the airport on Tuesday evening.
Hey Andy, It looks like you had a really nice trip; thanks for sharing.
We missed each other in Amsterdam by a couple months.
Glad to see you're doing well.
Gary