Ah, Europe...

Guten tag!  I write to you from St. Petersburg, Russia, where we arrived yesterday from Berlin after spending a marvelous four days touring Europe.  We flew into Cologne, Germany, on Friday night from Venice and arrived fairly late.  We stayed over at a hotel within walking distance of the airport, and the next morning, we picked up our rental car - an diesel Audi A3 with a sport package.  I don't personally know what a "sport package" is, but Jim was pretty excited about it.  :)  Since we were going to be driving around Germany, Jim couldn't pass up an opportunity to fly (almost literally) down the autobahn, so we had to get a car that could keep up with his need for speed.  And because Jim is really an excellent driver, I supported the plan.

Jim with his speed machine at a French vineyard.

Our goal in renting a car was to hit as many countries as possible in the four days we allotted ourselves to see Europe, and we did pretty well, with 10 countries total!  We drove out of Cologne and headed west to the Netherlands (Holland) and Belgium.  We had a lot of ground to cover, so we pretty much just passed through those two countries.  However, while taking a wrong exit and getting back on the highway, we saw a pair of hitchhikers heading exactly our direction, so we picked them up.  It was a young married couple in seminary who were participating in a hitchhiking competition among some friends - whoever got to the destination first, won.  We decided to be on their team, and so we sped along towards Luxembourg.  Their names were Willem and Wilhelmina (I think? I couldn't quite get it with the Dutch accent) and we had a really nice chat with them about all sorts of things.  We bonded a little bit over all getting married quite young (they married at 20 and 21) and how most people think it's strange to get married so young.  We drove through Luxembourg, made a quick stop to take pictures in the city center and then kept driving.

Us at a beautiful valley park in the middle of downtown Luxembourg (city).

After entering France, when our hitchhikers' path was about to deviate from ours, we dropped them off at a gas station so they could seek their next transportation donor.  We drove on to Nancy, France.  We called Jim's mom, whose name is Nancy, to let her know we were visiting Nancy in her honor.  :) 

We had good timing, though, since Nancy was having a street fair and the whole city was abuzz with festivities.  We wandered through streets filled with the booths of vendors selling everything from salami to mops and found the central square of Nancy.  What a nice city!

We had stopped at the visitors center and were told about the nearby vineyards of Toul, so we decided to go in search of them.  We were, unfortunately, too late for any wine tastings, but we did have a lovely time driving through the French countryside, which was just so beautiful.  Tiny hamlets were dispersed among lush fields, thriving vineyards, and the occasional herd of happy, healthy cows.

We used our GPS to find a small restaurant, La Table de Saint Martin, in the little town of Écrouves.  It was fabulous.  We didn't really know what to order (our waitress was very patient with us), but we both ended up getting duck and I saw, or rather tasted, why French cuisine is so famous.  Mmm.  By the time we left the restaurant, it was getting quite late.  We had not made reservations at any hostel or hotel since we did not know where we would be in our driving route, and so we eventually decided to make our own hotel... out of our car.  :)  We obviously had all of our things with us, so we drove way out into the boonies, found an out-of-the-way pull-off, and reclined our seats into beds.  Besides our beds not being perfectly flat, it was like a countryside B&B.  We slept in our silk sleeping bag liners, awoke to beautiful scenery of orchards, vineyards, cows, and forest, and partook of a (previously purchased) breakfast of yogurt, fruit, hardboiled eggs, and cheese.  What else do you need?  :)

Waking up in front of our "luxury hotel" in the French countryside.

We drove onwards with a great affection for rural France for hosting us so well.  However, rural France was not done with us yet.  After driving for several hours, we came upon the town of St. Hippolyte.  We stopped to wander around and hopefully find some food.  The town was a perfectly picturesque European village, complete with quaint windy streets, tons of overflowing flower window-boxes, burbling fountains, and traditional architecture.

There was also another town fair!  France seemed to be pulling out all stops for us wherever we visited.  We were drawn by the sound of a band playing and found what appeared to be the entire hamlet of St. Hippolyte enjoying live music and fresh-cooked picnic food at a park overlooking the beautiful scenery.  We joined in the fun and got a "tarte flambée," which is in essence a French specialty pizza.  It's made with super-thin, crepe-like crust, some ultra-smooth 'fromage blanc', thinly sliced onions, lardons (pork bits) and gruyère.  We really enjoyed our little meander through St. Hippolyte!

Our tarte flambée.

After St. Hippolyte, we made our way southward towards Switzerland.  The scenery was gorgeous... somehow, the sky seemed extra blue and the vegetation seemed extra-green.

Ah... Europe in the summertime.

Due to the Schengen Agreement, which eased border restrictions between the members of the European Union, the borders up until this point had been little more than signs marking that we were entering a different country.  Switzerland, however, had a steep entry price of 40 Euro.  We decided that for 40 Euro, we'd better enjoy some of Switzerland, so we stopped for dinner in Zurich.  Zurich seems like a nice city, but I think Switzerland as a whole is just expensive, so we opted for some cheaper but tasty pretzel sandwiches (...pretzelwiches?).  The mustard came in these funny little metal toothpaste-like tubes, too, which made me laugh.

We pressed on after our pretzelwiches to get to our goal for the night, Liechtenstein.  To get there, we drove through part of the Alps, which left us both slack-jawed.  The Alps are gorgeous!  I'm sure we weren't seeing the Matterhorn or anything, but the little corner of Alps that we traveled through was incredibly beautiful.  We drove through a rainstorm and the tops of the peaks were covered with clouds as a result.  This is a picture of an alluring alpine lake we drove by:

We got to Liechtenstein after a while and checked into our hostel.  We liked the little we saw of Liechtenstein in the growing darkness, but the next morning when we were able to drive around, we were just charmed by Liechtenstein.  It is an absolutely prepossessing little country nestled in an alpine valley... an entire country in a single valley! ... but the tiny acreage of that itty-bitty realm is compensated for by the quality of the real estate.  After breakfast, instead of hopping directly on the highway, we headed up, up, up the steep and twisty roads to experience the country on all its planes.  We got to one vantage point and saw pretty much the entire country at a glance.

We love Liechtenstein!

Also, Liechtenstein is ruled by a prince who lives in a castle (um... awesome!), and we drove by the prince's castle... like... right by.  It's such a tiny country that I don't think they have to worry about too much in the way of security.  :)

We drove a bit further and found an awesome road that wound through steep alpine slopes.  Jim decided to conquer one and so he ran up the hillside, where he startled some groundhogs, who screamed like little girls.

We eventually had to leave Liechtenstein to continue our drive, but we were sad to leave the little gem of a country that we had just discovered.

Liechtenstein's newest fans!

We drove back into Germany, where Jim got some quality time on the Autobahn.  He really enjoyed driving as fast as our wheels would speed us along.  For several stretches, he got to set the cruise control at 120mph, and at one point, he reached his maximum speed of 137mph.  We went really, really fast!

"The name's Bahn, James Bahn."

We drove to Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, which is the castle that the Disney World castle is based on and which is renowned for its beauty.  Unfortunately, although the setting was amazing, we could hardly see the castle, as it was covered in scaffolding for repair and maintenance.  I was kind of disappointed not to be able to get the full experience, so we took a picture of approximately how we felt:

We kept moving towards Munich, but stopped for an authentic German meal first... some wurst, sauerkraut, red cabbage, spätzle, etc.  Yummy!

A short while later, we made another stop at Dachau.  Dachau is the site of one of the first (if not the very first) concentration camps of World War II.  We toured the camp where so much awfulness took place.  It was designed as a work camp and not as an extermination camp, so there were no gas chambers, but it was still very sobering to walk through a place where so many thousands suffered and died.  

The entrance gate to Dachau concentration camp with the German words "work will make you free."

The open space that you can see behind the gate is the courtyard where they would conduct roll call.  The prisoners would regularly have to stand at attention, motionless, for hours, no matter how sick or tired they were or what the weather was.  I read on one of the signs that some of the weakest prisoners could not handle this, and would collapse and even die during these awful roll calls.  Their fellow inmates were forbidden to help them, too.  What a truly terrible piece of history.

We drove on and made it into Austria.  Our night in the car in France had gone so well that we decided to do it again in Austria.  We pulled our mobile hotel into a conveniently secluded thicket, brushed our teeth, and conked out.  

The view out of our hotel's windshield the next morning.

In the morning, we passed through Linz, Austria, and went to the Schloss Hartheim Castle.  This, as opposed to Dachau, was a Nazi extermination center where they brought loads of people, mostly the physically and mentally handicapped, to be gassed.  

Despite its outer beauty, it contained this awful little room where so many people were murdered:

We read that generally not more than a few hours passed between the arrival and the death of most of the victims.  They would arrive to admissions, be stripped down and processed for the records, and be pushed through that low metal door into the gas chamber with a "shower," where they were killed.  There was an eerily efficient set-up of rooms: the admissions room, the gas chamber, the room to store the bodies, and then the crematorium, all in a row.  The ashes were either tossed into the nearby Danube or buried in the garden.  What a sad and despicable history in that building.

We left that solemn memorial and headed north.  We got to drive along the Danube for a while.  It's so pretty there (like most all of Europe)!

We drove a bit further and then stopped to add the Czech Republic to our list of countries.

We even had our first dual-country kiss!  :)

We got back on the road to roll onward... that day was a long day of driving.  We were a little bit behind schedule, so we had to utilize the Autobahn to our advantage.  :)  Our firm destination for that evening was Berlin.  We had to make it there in order to fly to Russia the next morning.  However, we really wanted to add Poland to our list of countries, so even though it was getting quite late, we drove a bit out of our way to hit the border.  

Our visit was quite brief.  We had a little meet-and-greet with the German police at the border, and when they verified that we weren't stealing our car, they let us pass into Poland.  We literally drove up the street, turned around at a traffic circle, and drove straight back into Germany.  That was it - shortest tour of Poland ever at 5 minutes, tops.  :)

We made it to Berlin late, had a snack, and fell into our hostel beds exhausted.  We had to get up early for our flight, but set aside just a few minutes on the way to the airport to see the Berlin wall in an ultra-condensed tour.  We stopped quickly at Checkpoint Charlie for a picture.

At the most famous checkpoint between East and West Berlin.

Then we drove by a long chunk of the Berlin Wall that has been painted by artists in all sorts of styles.  They ranged from attractive to meaningful to downright odd, as you can see in the picture below:

We ended our tour of Europe very tired, but thrilled with all we'd been able to see and do - drive through 10 countries in 4 days and take away some spectacular memories as souvenirs.