Believe it or not, here I am in Bamberg, Germany (that’s West Germany in case you were wondering) in our hotel, the Hotel National. It’s a lovely hotel in the city centre of Bamberg. It feels a little weird to be here actually, although when we got close to Bamberg the forests and countryside started to look very familiar, and I even recognized the exit that my school bus used to take on the way to Strullendorf where my elementary school was! 25 years is a long time…amazingly I feel just about every minute of it today. In a way it feels like someone else’s life, like a movie that I remember watching, but in some ways it is very very real. Surreal I guess sums it up.
You might be interested to know what it’s like driving from the UK to Germany. It’s incredibly easy actually- crossing the border into France was easier than driving across one of the bridges to Canada, and way easier than the Windsor Tunnel. J You pull up to the checkpoint station, and they didn’t even take our passports- we showed them, he said “Oh, US- ok.” And that was it. EU citizens don’t need to bother with passports, they can just show their National ID card if asked. Talk about easy. You drive the car up inside a massive train- it looks just like a normal train, except on steroids. Huge. You put the car in park, then off you go and in 30 minutes you’re pulling out into warm and sunny France! Wow. Driving across Europe is fantastic- except for the road signs changing languages you barely notice if you’ve gone from one country to another. Like driving from one state to another in the US. There are no checkpoints, no borders, no border crossings. 90% of the laws that govern each country are set by the EU now. You can see why the Euro would be such a helpful thing given the situation of basically no borders anymore. It’s hard to believe there was ever any war or unrest in Western Europe, it seems so lovely and pristine. There are highways everywhere, just like we have in the US (and in the UK) and even rest stops. Germany has very good rest stops actually, they all look very new. Everything about the roads in Germany looks new.
Last time I was on the Autobahn I was in the back seat- this time I was behind the wheel, and I had our little Honda Civic going 110mph. J On our way we passed Frankfurt Airport, which is quite close to the road- I didn’t grab the camera in time to take a snap of it, but I remember being picked up from the airport in 1985 and hitting the autobahn, and my mom thinking my dad had lost his mind. J My turn to lose my mind now I guess!
Tomorrow we are going to walk around Bamberg, and take lots of photos. I’m hoping to get a bit of video of the city center. Everything is generally closed here on Sunday still, so we should have a quiet walk around and time to enjoy the city. I’m hoping to get some night photography in since the sun sets so much earlier now. The sunset today was fantastic.
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