25 October

Our Ryanair flight back to Germany didn’t suck too much – they did try to sell us lottery tickets and booze but they were roughly on time and didn’t hit any birds. A drunken guy got up while we were taxiing though, so someone was buying the booze.

Mandi went looking for our rental car while I sat on the luggage. We ended up with another sweet minivan, this time a VW Touran. Is that the same minivan as the Routan that Brooke Shields is trying to sell Americans? It was comfortable enough, black, and had a navigation thing. Unfortunately, the navigation thing only seemed to know German, so we got a bit lost before we managed to decode enough German to get headed towards Breidel. I never did figure out how to change the language, so by the time we got to Frankfurt we knew a smattering of navigation-related German words.

I’d reserved us a couple of rooms in Weingut Reis-Kroth. The owners’ daughter had helped translate my emails so I wasn’t sure what we’d find there. Lucky for us, they were very friendly and the place was nice so it worked out great. They found us a place in town to have dinner, Breidler House, which was loaded with masterpieces of taxidermy, but did have good food and nice Mosel Riesling. In the morning we had breakfast at the weingut, got a tour of the wine cellar, and bought some wine.

26 October

We wanted to visit the Jewish cemetery above Beilstein, but we figured the hike up the hill might be tough, so Mandi tried driving up. I thought we’d get stuck or high-centered and Bette thought we’d roll down the hillside, but we made it up to the castle without incident. The castle is a jumble of ruins with a beer garden inside, only worth it if you’re thirsty. The view of the Mosel River with the castle is a classic though, and a short walk up the hill leads to the evocative little Jewish cemetery. With only a couple of other people around, it was quite a different experience from the Jewish cemetery in Prague, where we were in the middle of a crowd.

Mandi didn’t let Bette and I ride back down in the minivan for fear of sickness or screaming, so we walked. There’s a cute little chapel between the cemetery and the castle, then some fresco things along the path down, and another chapel in town – I assume all maintained by someone at the monastery. At the town square we ran into a crowd entranced by a choir performance. When that ended we spotted Mandi and the ladies having tea and espresso at Gute Quelle, where Mandi and I stayed a couple of years ago. We’d tried to stay there again for the night of the 25th, but they were full – staying at Reis-Kroth weingut was at least as fun as staying in Beilstein though.

We should have had lunch right there in Beilstein, but we did need to get to Aachen sometime so we headed for Burg Eltz. On the way there the whining of hungry travellers overcame our driver and we stopped at Landhaus Neuhof for lunch. The house speciality was some sort of flame-broiled pizza thing. I had a salad, but Bette and Mandi seemed to enjoy their pizza thing. There was some sort of horse activity going on behind the restaurant, so Bette and Mandi were completely distracted through the meal.

Burg Eltz was as impressive as the last time we visited. It’s a big old castle that was never destroyed during the golden age of castle destroying – so it presumably looks just like it did hundreds of years ago, and still has all the fun historic stuff inside. I’d gone on the tour the last time, so i decided to hike up the hill above the castle for some exercise and some photos from a different angle. The others took the shuttle in and out while Bette and I walked for still more photos.

Our German-speaking navigation thing led us right to Aachen, with one rest stop for snacks and coffee. After a little confusion we found our friends Silke and Markus’ place and met Renata, who was letting us stay in her spare apartment.

27 October

In the morning our friends Joseph, Silke, and Markus led us on a tour of central Aachen. We stopped at the city hall and the cathedral, and wandered around. Renata made us lunch and we headed off to Monschau. Monschau is a little old town that looks something like Beilstein, but with a small river running through it. It was cold and drizzly so once we were nearly hypothermic we stopped for tea and apple strudel. We missed the castle above town in the daylight, but your hosts were not deterred – we went for a spooky walk through it in the dark. Okay, it wasn’t really all that spooky since the castle complex hosts a youth camp and it’s fully lighted and Silke and Markus’ son came along and didn’t seem afraid, but still! There’s an old mustard mill in Monschau, with an attached restaurant where we had dinner. I had some venison goulash, I assume with a mustard sauce.

Our hosts talked Mandi and I into leaving very early in the morning for our flight, a good thing because we did hit some traffic around Cologne on our way to the Frankfurt airport. Bette, Nancy, and Cassie stayed a couple more days and got to go to Maastricht, which sounded pretty cool.

18 October

Mandi and I flew in to Prague, but flying out was crazy expensive, so we planned to meet up with the rest of our party at the Frankfurt airport using a combination of train and rental car with a stop in Nuremberg. The train ride from Prague to Nuremberg was beautiful – it looked like it’d be fun to take a couple of days, stopping in Plzen and some small town between there and Prague. Just from the train we saw rock climbers, bicyclists, and even a golf course.

We arrived in Nuremberg at dusk, and did a little investigation at the train station to figure out how to get to the airport to pick up our rental car the next morning. Nuremberg happens to be one of the few cities in Germany where you can take the metro to the airport. We dropped our bags off at Le Meridien Grand, our fancy but dated Starwood hotel, and promptly got lost. You’d think we’d know by now, the maps in Rick Steves guidebooks are usually a little simpler than reality. It also didn’t help that there were three streets starting with “Konig” in our neighborhood. We finally got going in the right direction, towards the castle and market square.

We never made it to the castle because we got hungry and found a place to eat a bunch of “nurembergers” – delicious little sausages that look and taste like breakfast sausages. I’d go back to Nuremberg just for more of those little sausages, but I suspect there’s a lot of other stuff to see and do there. It reminded me a little of Berlin – a bustling mix of old and new.

19 October

We had a very expensive breakfast at the hotel, but there were nurembergers and eggs, so I guess it was worth it. The u-bahn/metro took us straight to the airport, where Avis upgraded us to a sweet minivan from the Passat wagon we’d reserved. I’d written down some Google Maps directions to Frankfurt airport while on the wifi at our hotel in Prague so we got on the autobahn pretty easily. On the way I figured out how to switch the navigation thing from German to English, which made it more useful but less entertaining.

We left Nuremberg a little late and our crew arrived a little early, so by the time we got there they’d been chatting with the airport police about how to call us. Apparently Bette’s phone required the prefix stuff but Mandi’s didn’t, odd because they’re both on AT&T. I’ve noticed my phone has something called “International dialing assistance” – maybe Bette’s phone didn’t have that. We eventually collected Bette, Nancy, and Cassie and hopped back on the autobahn for Trier.

On the way we stopped at one fancy rest stop, complete with a restaurant and restroom attendant, and one that was just a 7-11-like gas station. The second one did have giant cans of Dutch beer, so it wasn’t all bad.

The last time Mandi and I were in Trier we spent about an hour driving in circles trying to find Hotel Frankenturm, probably because we were trying to use the Rick Steves Germany book’s map to navigate. This time Mandi drove right to it, thanks to our minivan’s navigation thing, not my uncanny sense of direction. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anyone at the hotel to check us in, so we put our bags back in the car and went for a walk around town.

Trier is an old Roman city, allegedly the oldest city in Germany, so it’s full of tourist-pleasing Roman ruins. Coincidentally, later in the trip we visited friends in Aachen, which also claims to be the oldest city in Germany. Hotel Frankenturm is just off the market square so we headed there first. From the square a big cobblestone pedestrian street leads straight to Porta Nigra, a huge Roman city gate. After our stroll, our hotel’s restaurant opened promptly at 5 pm and we managed to check in, even though they’d lost our reservation. October isn’t exactly the peak of tourist season, but we still felt lucky we didn’t have to wander around looking for other accommodations. We had dinner right at our hotel’s restaurant, where we enjoyed a meal that looked remarkably like some of the meals we’d enjoyed in Prague.

20 October

In the morning we walked the other way from Porta Nigra, past the cathedral, basilica, and palace to the Roman baths. The baths complex includes a small museum, a sprawl of excavated tunnels, and a huge chunk of what I assume was an exterior wall of the baths. We had lunch at a place back on the market square and hit the road for Hahn airport for our flight to Finland.

Next stops: Tampere, Helsinki, and Porvoo.