Day 4 - Drag Racing on the Autobahn

After our poker and Krombacher binge the previous night, we decided that we didn't need any alarm clocks and we could sleep as late as we wanted on Monday morning. On our schedule was a quick day trip down to the beautiful small town of Heidelberg. I had been to this town a few years back with Alex and knew it was a quaint little town full of students with a nice castle up on the hill overlooking the city. But let's not shy away from the truth - this is such a nice little city that it is jam-packed full of Americans (students and otherwise) as well. This little town is so Americanized that they have fireworks on the river for the 4th of July! But we didn't have much else to do that day and my memories were pretty fond of the place.

Before that, we had some errands to run in town, buying some cleaning supplies, milk, and a couple other small items at the local Aldi. We had lots of good stuff to eat, but were missing some of the important things needed to eat breakfast with - we had nutella, but not bread. We had cereal, but no milk. We had a voracious appetite and we had Daniel who kept saying to me "Kelly makes the best toast in the world. I sure would really really like to eat some of that toast right now" . But we had Kelly who kept saying "We don't have the right bread". Daniel kept pleading but in the end he was out of luck. Maybe next time, Daniel ;o).

Speaking of nutella, Stefan and I quickly learned that Kelly has a serious nutella addiction. There wasn't a day that went by without her taking a nice, sizeable spoon and taking out a nice chunk of nutella to eat. She was like a kid with a lolly-pop with her nutella :o). Daniel doesn't even like the stuff, but he says that they go through about one jar of the stuff a week! Other than nutella, her favorite thing to eat was the double-box of discounted no-name Honey Smacks-type cereal. I swear we didn't leave the house without that thing packed somewhere in the car. In fact I think we had to give away a bottle of rum to Alex because we didn't have room for both the cereal and the bottle :o/ . She would eat each puffed rice one by one and at one point asked Daniel if they could buy a few boxes to bring home with them....

This was the first time we got to really utilize the Navigation system and see what it could do. We plugged in Heidelberg, told it to go to the town center, and pressed go. It worked amazingly, with a lovely voice telling me "Rechts, zweihundred meters....jetzt, rechts" whenever it was appropriate. We made pretty good time getting down there around 3:00, just in time for lunch. We still hadn't had a real typical German meal altogether yet, so we set out down the main street in old town and checked out places until we found one with a typical German menu, typical German "bier banken" (benches) outside, and typical German customer service. We sat outside for a good five minutes, all of us starving and parched, before I finally went in to find the waitress sitting at the bar smoking a cigarette and talking to the bar-keeper. Ahh....the life in a non-service oriented country :o) . We finally got our sausage and spaetzle ordered up, along with some beer and a side of potato salad that I had to ask twice for, of course. The food was actually really good, although the beer could have been something a bit more authentic than Lowenbrau. When Daniel ordered his second glass of beer and said "regular" (you know you have to differentiate between the ten different kinds of Lowenbrau they have), the waitress apparently misunderstood him. She brought him his beer and he had a sour look on his face and said it didn't taste right. He had in fact got to experience the popular German drink called "radler", which is actually a mix of beer and Sprite. It's actually a pretty refreshing drink, but not what he was looking for...

The rest of the afternoon was spent waltzing down the street looking for World Cup paraphanelia and trying to keep hydrated in the ninety degree weather. Unfortunately for the rest of us, Stefan found an Italian flag that goes on the window and hangs up above the car. They didn't have Czech flags :o/ . He and Daniel bought some more goodies that afternoon and I'm pretty sure that Stefan alone made a material difference in the German GDP this year with all his shopping for trinkets and souveniers ;o). At the other end of town we climbed up a massive hill to get to the castle that overlooked the city. It's an impressive view of the city from up there, even if we had to burn off sausages and gravy from lunch just to get there!

We took lots of pictures from the castle since it was the best view we'd had yet. At one point, there was a very nice image that I wanted to capture, so I asked a couple from Peru if they would take a group picture. They took a nice picture, but it didn't have the background that I wanted. That's okay, I'd have Kelly take one with me and Daniel. Left....no move a little to the right. No, more to the left. OK, take it. Again, it didn't have the angle that I wanted. Kelly tried about three shots and none of them had the angle. I was cracking up by now because it was a pretty simple picture to take. OK, I let Daniel take it since he knew what I wanted. Or did he? No, he took our picture with a boring wall in the background. I was busting up at how pathetic we were! Finally I got Kelly and Daniel in the pic and took it myself. Here it is, on the right!

We walked around the grounds a bit before heading back into town and back towards the car. At some point, like many other times on the trip, two of us got seperated from the other two. Despite my hard-nosed, annoying insistance that the soccer shop Daniel had gone to was up ahead of us when it was really ten minutes behind us, we eventually found him and Kelly after about a half hour of walking up and down the street. And buying more soccer trinkets!

Once we met up again, we decided to go the other direction in downtown and found ourselves outside a McDonalds, who had decently sanitary facilities for us to use. Being the anti-fast-food goon that I am, I represented it by waiting for the others outside and glaring at people as they walked in and out of the evil empire's flagship Heidelberg franchise. We spotted a very relaxing-looking gravel patio area with lots of people chatting and having cocktails underneath some large, impressive trees and decided that we should check it out and have a bevvy and snack before our excursion ended. Plus, the waitresses were all young and cute and dressed up in white with black bow-ties on, so it was clearly a swanky place. I was personally pretty drained from being in the sun all day and sweating like a pig (speaking of that, do pigs actually sweat?). As the designated pilot for the trip, I needed a pick-me-up before we headed back so I wouldn't fall asleep behind the wheel while on the autobahn.

So we ordered some desserts like Apple Struedel and I got me a nice iced capuccino to wake me up a bit. Daniel told us a story about an email he had written to Alex at some point during the planning stages of the trip (they hadn't met each other yet). He made some comment about how they would eat lots of apple struedel when they got to Germany and Alex made a typical one-line comment about how that was Austrian, not German. It wasn't a snide response, but his writing style could definitely be misconstued as such. No wonder he was worried about how rude the Germans would be on the trip ;o).

Intent on researching how to buy tickets for Tuesday's game that was being showed inside the Frankfurt stadium, we made a pit stop at an internet cafe on the way back to the car and, of course, found absolutely no information on it at all. We'd play it by ear, though, and see what we could find the next day at the stadium.

So it was back to the car in the parking garage. We walk over to the entrance and the driveway exit gate was closed and a sign said something about the hours and how it closed at 6:30. Uhhh...hmm. The garage is closed. The car is in the garage. My mind started racing and I started internally calculating the cost of splitting a hotel room and what the heck I would wear the next day and how much breakfast would be and....oh wait. The entry door was still open. Right. The gate shuts, but opens up when you put your paid parking stub in the machine. I knew that, of course :o| .

The ride home wasn't very interesting, just more of the same, stressful driving on the German autonahn. I swear, people are so stressed out, they'll ride your bumber and wave their hands, yell at you, honk, flash their lights and blinkers, etc. to get you to move over a lane (it's illegal to pass on the right). Apparently they don't see the twenty cars that are in front of me. Take a chill pill man and relax before you have cardiac arrest on the highway. Good lord! In any case, we were driving along and I realized that we had a looooong straightaway that went on for quite a bit and there were very few cars around. The pedal went to the metal, we were gonna see what the Benz could do here. I pushed it and pushed it and it finally got up to about 235 km/h (146mph) before I had to slow down because of traffic. Wow, what a rush! You don't really realize how quick you are going until you see cars that are a tiny dot ahead of you suddenly growing in size a few seconds later. Crazy! So that set a new speed record for us and one that we wouldn't bypass at any point on the trip. We got home at around 11:00pm and had some snacks.

We played poker into the wee hours of the night with Rum and Cokes by our sides the whole time.

Justinho

My pictures are posted and so are Stefan's.