A Rental Car, a Map, and Some Change (Day 1 of Germany)

Yep, this one may be a bit lengthy.

As some of you know, my wife and I went to Europe from May 23rd-May 31st. Specifically 6 days in Germany and a day and a half in England. Boy what an experience! I have been to many countries in Europe before but only for a few days at a time. I had never been so immersed like I was for this brief stay...I say brief because my passion for Europe makes my stays always seem short. I'm proud to be American but I truly believe I was born in the wrong continent. So, what is this blog for? I want o try my best to recount each day as they went. Bear with me and if you make it through, fine. If not, oh well. I may just write this so I can look back on it, too. :)

Saturday, May 23rd, 2009. We’ve been waiting for this for a little more than 5 months. It's hot in Phoenix today. We leave tonight. Do we have everything? I sure as hell hope so. Plane tickets...rental car papers...first night in Frankfurt Hotel reservations...passports...International driving permit? Check! Spent the day with the kids and her mom. Took them to Peter Piper Pizza. They left for Yuma and it was all of a sudden just us. Get to the airport about 3 hours before takeoff and because we had not checked in until now, we could not get seats together. Uh-oh! She's scared to death anyway. Now I can't even sit by her? What to do, what to do...

So, we sat at Chili's in the airport and had our fill of beer, wine, and spinach artichoke dip with chips. :) YUM! Getting ready for takeoff, I asked a middle-aged British man if he would mind trading seats with me because I wanted to comfort my wife during takeoff. He was hesitant but conceded his seat just for takeoff and up until altitude. That was fair enough, I reckon. Off we go.... 9.5 hours in the air. I couldn't sleep at all, although we purposely did not get much sleep the night before. Instead, I watched movies on the plane for the whole trip. Several hours into it, I couldn't wait to get to Heathrow. Most of you know I'm a smoker so I was envisioning this cigarette in London. No dice. Damn. Instead, I suffered the three hours in the airport AND the 1.5 hour flight to Frankfurt. You bet your ass that's the first thing I did in Germany though.

So, we make our way through the Frankfurt airport. Sure, there were signs for things but they weren't many and very vague to say the least. We finally found the baggage claim area and there was a passport control point. No problem. I've done the international thing before. There were many desks for this control point but only 1 desk had any officers at it. So we went to that one. The guy was a plain dick. He asked me in English: "What is this line for?" "Passport control?" I replied. "What does the sign say?" he responded. I stepped back so I could see the sign and it read "EU Passports Only." Ok....but these were the only desks open so it's not like I had options. "So, why did you come to this desk?" he asked....clearly irritated. I checked my smart-ass nature for a moment and apologized for the misunderstanding. He cleared me anyway. Got our bags directly after this and headed to Hertz to pick up my car. Found it at level U1 in spot 19. A little FIAT Punto. Tiny 4-door, hatchback, manual transmission car. Verity called it "cute." I had to smile, of course. So, we get in and I couldn't find reverse. Shit! I'm trying everything I could think of. I remembered that the old VW's used to get reverse if you pushed downward and over but that didn't work. I kept playing with the shift until I finally figured out that there was a little collar below the shift knob that you had to pull up to get to that elusive reverse gear.

I should pause to tell you that we had no local phone, no paper maps of any sort and no hotel reservations after tonight. Instead, I bought a global blackberry off of ebay and activated a global voice and data plan. We LIVED on Google Maps for this trip...a little shout-out there.

So, we pull out of the parking garage and I found myself in the lane that automatically puts you on the Autobahn (A3 to be exact). Ok... seems like we're going a little far and I don't know the rules of the road yet. People are absolutely flying by me in the left lanes. My little Fiat has no shot at keeping up. So, we get off on the exit for the B43/44. Ok. We're not supposed to be there yet, I guess but these highways are on the directions list somewhere so we figure we're good. We go one way for a while, then turn around and go the other way. Then we figured out we were heading back to the airport so we turned around again. THEN we went through this little section of a suburb but I was in the wrong lane and headed back the other way (toward the airport).....again.....so we turned around.....again.... :)

This time I say I'm going to get into the far right lane. So I did and it proved to successfully get me the hell off of that highway. :) No idea where I'm going, the street I'm on isn't even on our directions list in Google maps. I took the first right because a car in front of me did and I knew I could. Now, we're in a residential area and I tell my wife we'll pull over and try to figure out where we are and how to get directions from there. Guess where we were? Right in front of our hotel. What are the odds that with all of those mistakes, neither one of us knowing how to read the directions, that we would end up right in front of our hotel? Whew! Sigh of relief. So we check in and find our room. I had forgotten to get cash at the airport like I had planned on so I needed an ATM (Geldautomat). The hotel receptionist told me there would be one at the end of the main drag we were on. We were both dying for a shower so I let her take care of hers while I went for a stroll down the road to find this ATM. After a while, I could not see the end of this street and turned back. No biggie. I got to stretch my legs after spending all that time in the plane and the car. But I did notice one thing. There wasn't really anything open. And we were hungry!!!

Went back, took a shower, got the car and finally found the "end of the street" I was looking for. Sure enough, there was a Deutsche Bank right on the corner. Pulled out some Euros and we found this little pizza joint not too far from the hotel. Ordered up a pepperoni and mushroom (champignons) pizza (these were Italians there in Frankfurt so the Pizza was good enough). Interesting thing is, they had these little peppers on the pizza that had a flavor like pepperoncinis but a little more spicy. This was very relaxing for us. It felt like we had been on the go for a week. We were having fun but were stressed and in a brand new environment.

After dinner we figured we would try our luck at driving around in downtown Frankfurt. Let's keep in mind a couple things as we go through this journey. First: Frankfurt is like any big American city, by the way. Large buildings, slums, and ritzy areas. However (and secondly), let's also remember that the streets in European cities are older than our country so driving can be a challenge. These streets and the structure of traffic was not originally setup for cars, buses and trains. We got a lost a few times that night...even found the Frankfurt Hells Angels clubhouse somewhere in the mix. Somehow, we found our way back to that familiar hotel that we had already accidentally found earlier.

So, after a late dinner and all the evening activities, we went back to the hotel and crashed. I'll also point out here that it stayed daylight until about 10pm every night. That was odd for us but welcome.