Germany: We'll get there... somehow

Traveling to Germany

Armed with our backpacks and a train itinerary that contained all of the necessary information about times, trains, stopovers, and platforms, Jennifer Alkema (from here on out known only as "Pug") and I departed the familiar Zwolle Train Station to go out into the unknown of Germany. The itinery was exact, and the trip from Zwolle to Heidelburg went as expected.

We arrived in the fine city of Heidelburg around 7 o'clock in the evening. Pug was in charge of the reservations for the youth hostel we were staying at, so she looked at the instructions that would get us to the place of our weekend residence. "Take bus line 33 to ..." I didn't catch the name of the bus stop, but from what we could see from our vantage, there was only one bus stop. The sign at the bus stop definitely did not say "33," and it didn't mention the stop where we were supposed to get off the bus either; basically, we were lost. And because we were lost I started to panic just a bit, but then I realized that 1) it would do no good, and 2) we have to get to, and will get to, our hostel, somehow. After walking around a bit, studying a map (which didn't help us much) and a tourist information board (which had information about hotels but not hostels), we stopped to contemplate our next move. I was a bit worried because I had heard that Germans don't speak English, but we decided to ask a nearby police officer if he could help us. "Excuse me, sir, do you possibly speak English?" I realized right after I said it that I probably should have dropped the "possibly" and all the other superfluous words, but he managed to comprehend my question anyway. "Uh.... a little" was his heavily accented reply. So we showed him the street address of the hostel and asked if he could tell us how to get there, and surprisingly, he pointed us in the right direction and even told us an approximate distance: about 1.5 kilometers (I think, judging that the 1600 meter run is usually considered a mile, that 1.5 kilometers is a little less than one mile. I also think, judging by how long we walked, that the officer's estimate was a bit on the short side). With the aid of a map about half way to the hostel and after walking right past the entrance, we arrived safely at our very spacious and impeccably clean living quarters.

Travelling to Hohenzollern Castle

Like a pair of crazy sight-seers, we awoke bright and early on Saturday morning to get a good start on our travel to Hohenzollern Castle. But of course, any time a hostel offers complimentary breakfast, one has to take advantage of their hospitality and gorge on the vast array of food. And it was a good thing we ate our fill of strawberry yogurt covered Corn Flakes, because that was almost all of the sustanance we would have for the day.

After filling our bellies with the almost-like-home combination of cereal and milk product, we started walking the "1.5 kilometers" to the train station. The night before we had the young and eager staff at the hostel print for us a train route to a small town called Hechingen (your guess at pronunciation is probably as good as mine), where we wanted to board a bus at 11:20 am. This itinerary had us boarding a train in Heidelburg at 8:10 headed for Mannheim, and seven minutes after arriving in Mannheim we would be on our way to Stuttgart. So far, it had been my experience that European trains are incredibly accurate with their schedules (in fact one train we had ridden earlier stopped at the platform exactly as the clock changed to the minute it was scheduled to arrive) so we thought we would be just fine. Well, for once the train schedule wasn't so accurate, and the train to Mannheim left ten minutes late. Because of this uncommon unpuntuality, we missed our connection to Stuttgart; we figured it wasn't a big deal, and we looked at the train schedule for another train to our intermediate destination.

To glaze over much of the story, we found every place we needed to go by the posted train schedules, but we had plenty of layover time so we had time to walk around Mannheim and Stuttgart (where I purchased a nice red VfB Stuttgart Flag), and we arrived in Hechingen exactly two hours after we were scheduled to arrive.

So Pug and I excitedly hopped off the train in this nearly deserted small town called Hechingen, ready to explore Hohenzollern Castle. The only problem was that, as far as we knew, the only bus to the Castle left nearly two hours ago; to add to the problem, there was nobody around. Again, we were needed to get to the castle (which was basically the only reason we came to Germany), so again we contemplated our next move as we stood in front of the lifeless train-station. We could see from our pondering place the castle through the fog atop a far-away hill, but we certainly couldn't walk there and there were no buses in the bus station that at this time resembelled a ghost town. We had contemplated a few different strategies, one including hitch-hiking which neither of us had ever attempted before, when a taxi pulled up and waited for its passenger. Figuring that a taxi might be our best bet, I walked up to the taxi, knocked on the window, and asked the large German at the wheel if he spoke English. "Uh... a little" was his response, which by this time I was beginning to suspect that all Germans are taught to say upon hearing this question. He told us that if we would call the taxi company, we could get to the castle for €11. We were so close, and finally after all of our trouble we might get to the castle! Hating phones, and especially the foreign type that have foreign language on the other end, I passed the responsibility of calling the taxi company on to Pug. Ironically, "Uh... a little" was the response she was given upon asking if there was anybody who spoke English available, but we later determined that the "taxi company" was just the one driver who answered the phone while he was driving. And, to get to the point, he eventually drove us to Hohenzollern Castle.

It seems that this account is getting quite long, so I'll gloss over the castle by saying that we went on a tour of the castle given in English, we walked around the castle for a while, and then we left the castle to board the shuttle that would bring us to the base of the hill. As we were waiting for the shuttle, a family of four approached us and explained that the father, mother, and I'd say about late-20's son wanted to walk down the hill, but their young girl wasn't up to the hike, so she was going to ride the shuttle; they wanted us to keep an eye on her. Being the nice people that we are (and assuming this wouldn't require any work unless an insiduous stalker suddenly came out from the middle of nowhere), we consented then struck up conversation with these people. We asked if they knew when the bus that would get us back to the train station would come, and for some reason they decided that they would drive us to the train station. Well, what a good deal that was!

The rest of the day was uninteresting: we got back to Heidelburg easily, walked back to the hostel, planned to go to a disco, decided we were too exhausted to go the the disco, then went to sleep.

Sunday Morning

We awoke late Sunday morning, again stuffed our bellies with food, and again suckered the overly-nice staff at the hostel into providing us with an itinerary back to Zwolle. But before we headed back, we decided to see what Heidelburg had to offer a couple of sight-seers. There were a few other English speaking youth at the hostel who explained how to use the bus system, so we decided to give it a shot, and we somehow made it to "Schloss Heidelburg," Heidelburg Castle. In my opinion, it was more interesting than Hohenzollern Castle, but oddly it reminded me a little bit of the Queen Bee Mill in Sioux Falls because the castle was built almost entirely out of a pinkish stone.

Oh, and we made it back to Zwolle (and then I made it back to Hattem) safely.

So basically we went to Germany and we saw a couple of really nice castles. But I would have to say that the excitement of travelling and getting lost in foreign cities, yet still managing to get to finally arrive at our destinations, was more exciting then the sights we actually saw.