Guten abend! I'm here in Germany and I finally have wi-fi available, so it's about time for my first blog post from the road. I am posting from my hotel in Dinkelsbühl, but I'll start with my arrival in Germany and describe what I've seen and done since then.
First I'll get the bad stuff out of the way. The flight here confirmed for me that I really hate flying. Virtually everything about it sucked. That's really all that needs to be said.
Things started looking up when I landed. The Munich airport is great, probably my favorite in Europe now. I had little difficulty finding my hotel's shuttle and getting to my hotel. While I was waiting for the shuttle I struck up a conversation with a South African-Scottish (from South Africa but lives in Scotland) lady and her daughter, which was a lot of fun. That encounter, and another I had the next day with a pretty eccentric old guy from Sweden, is an example of one of my favorite parts of travel. I have met and made friends with people from all over the world, and those experiences have always been fun, rewarding, and memorable. Anyway, the rest of that arrival evening was pretty quiet and forgettable, so I'll move on.
I had arrived in the evening and basically just crashed at my hotel that first night, so the next day was really the first of the trip. I slept great, as I seem to always do when I'm traveling. The first order of business was to pick up my rental car back at the airport. It was a surprisingly smooth and easy process, but then that is pretty much the norm in Germany. My car is an Opel Corsa 1.2 - the 1.2 indicates the engine size in liters, which is tiny. Some motorcycles have bigger engines. It took me several tries just to get it up the steep spiraling ramp and out of the parking garage. But while small and gutless, the car is in good condition, is easy to park and maneuver around tight European streets, and most importantly, gets me around and gives me unequaled freedom to explore.
It is incredibly cold here. Like, single digits Fahrenheit cold. There is a decent accumulation of snow on the ground, although in true German fashion the roads are all perfectly clear (thanks to the many plow and sanding trucks I saw out and about). I'm actually enjoying the cold weather though, and the cover of snow makes this already-beautiful place even more so.
So once I had my car I made my way to Dachau. Thanks to excellent signage it was easy to get there and find the concentration camp. The camp itself was among the most evocative sights I have ever seen in Euope. The place seems so unassuming until you enter and begin to see and understand just what went on there. You enter the camp as prisoners would have, through a gate that says in bent iron lettering, "Arbeit Macht Frei" (rough translation: "work sets you free"). Upon entering the gate, you are immediately struck by the size of the camp. I don't know how many acres it is, but it must be quite a few. There is a main building on the grounds which houses an excellent museum, so I went there first. The museum chronicles in chilling detail just about every aspect of the concentration camp; how it came into being, how it was operated, who was imprisoned there (as I learned, it wasn't just Jews), and the treatment its prisoners were subjected to. The museum at Dachau achieves what no textbook can - it conveys the truth of the concentration camp so strikingly that one cannot help but be affected emotionally. More than once I felt close to tears. I will leave it to you all to see it for yourselves in order to understand why, mostly because the power of the place is almost indescribable. One must see it for themselves to truly understand.
One thing I was struck by at Dachau was how many groups of school kids there were. They were all about high school age and had teachers showing them around and explaining things. I was impressed by how the Germans seem to invite both their own people and the whole world to come see and understand what transpired at Dachau and other places like it. The Germans seem to understand that it is of utmost importance that we never forget what happened there, so that we may never repeat it.
After the museum I toured the rest of the grounds - the "Bunker," where special prisoners were held and particularly terrible torture was administered, the barracks, where prisoners lived, and the crematorium, where their bodies were disposed of. To walk through and see those things made the place and its history real in my mind. After that, I could no longer think of a place like Dachau as some foreign thing, as something that doesn't really exist in my personal world. It is there for the world to see, and now that I have seen it, I will never forget it.
While sobering, my visit to Dachau was great. I hadn't planned on going, but I am so glad that I did. If I ever lead a tour through here, I will make it a priority to take people there. Anyway, after my self-guided tour, it was time to head to Dinkelsbühl. The trip to Dachau from Munich had been short, but on the road to Dinkelsbühl I began to really get a feel for German driving. I had a blast. While my car is pretty gutless, it's still fun to drive. Europeans drive differently than we do in America. People are far more assertive on the road here than they are in America. If you can't join the club and be assertive yourself, you'll get left in the dust. That kind if driving is right up my alley though, and I'm enjoying it. I will definitely rent cars on future trips, especially for groups of people. The freedom that comes with it, and the ability to access hard to reach places, is so liberating compared to train travel. Certainly trains have their place in travel, but I'm finding that with a little courage, a car is definitely worth the expense.
I got in to Dinkelsbühl after dark, around 5:30. I had selected a hotel out of my guidebook, but I had been unable to reach them by phone when I tried to call ahead, so I had decided to just drop in and see if they had a room available. When I got to where it should have been, however, I couldn't find it. I walked all over, checked and re-checked my map to make sure I was in the right place, but to no avail. As far as I could tell the place must have gone out of business. I'm glad though, because it gave me the opportunity to hone my hotel-finding skills. The town was pretty full of German day trippers, but almost no foreign tourists, so I figured the hotels were probably pretty empty, giving me the advantage of having many to choose from. I consulted ratings online and walked around to several different places before deciding on the place I'm at now, Hotel Eisenkrug. I got a great rate and the place is nice and homey, in an old building on a nice street and with a great restaurant downstairs.
Once I got settled in I had dinner and then walked around the town. Dinkelsbühl is an old medieval walled town, and it has certainly preserved much of its medieval character. There is an old town wall, a moat surrounding it, and guard towers over each gate. The buildings display much of the same medieval character, made all the more enchanting by the twinkling Christmas lights and ubiquitous blanket of white snow. It isn't quite Rothenburg, but it's a nice place nonetheless.
I'm in my hotel room now and am bedding down for the night. Tomorrow I plan on exploring the Romantic Road and visiting some Christmas Markets. I'll post again tomorrow, but until then I bid you all Gute Nacht und Auf Wiedersehen.
P.S. I'm posting this from my phone so I can't include pictures from today, but I'll try to get my laptop connected tomorrow and include pictures in my next post.
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