Finally after almost 10 weeks of traveling, I am preparing to finally go back to the States. It’s a welcome feeling, and I am looking forward to clean clothes, people speaking English everywhere, and my friends.
The last week has been very eventful. After leaving Freiburg, Germany, we took the train up to Offenburg and then a bus to Ortenburg, where our next hostel, which just also happened to be a castle (huzzah!), was located. The difficult part of this arrangement was that the castle, in perfect castle form, was situated on the side of a mountain. So we got to walk a few miles up steep and winding roads with our packs. We were pretty much drenched with sweat when finally arrived at the hostel. After a 30 minute check in process (who does that?) where we had to fill out cards, get a speach in broken English about our stay and about the Youth Hostelling International organization, we finally made it up to our corner room facing towards the west and the sunset. Gorgeous, to say the least.
The next day, we decided to go hiking in the famous Black Forest, for the castle also just happened to be situated right on the edge of it, and we couldn’t pass such a thing up. After hiking a few hours, we just happened to run into a family from Goshen, IN that was good friends with Nathan, which was crazy. It’s a small world I guess. After talking a while, we were invited to supper at their house, which safe say, was amazing. We had homemade lasagna and salad, and basically we were ecstatic.
The next day we went with the same family to listen to some delightful organ music in Offenburg that was being played by the George, bother in law and uncle to the family that had fed us. It was great fun. We spent the rest of the day wandering around Offenburg trying to find food for that night and the next day, which was actually quite difficult, because on Saturdays in Europe everything shuts down on Saturday afternoon and evenings. It was a bit annoying.
The next morning we had to get up at 4 am to get to Offenburg and a 4:50 am train to Mainz, where we caught a boat for a river cruise up the Rhine River. The scenery was beautiful, and despite the chilly weather it was a great day. There were a lot of castles more than I can remember, and I couldn’t possibly take pictures of all of them, because after waking up at 4 am, I had to have a nap, and I had several.
It was a great day, and the river cruise ended in Koln (pronounced Cologne) where we stayed in hostel for the night. We had just happened to arrive at the end of a large festival of some sorts, and safe to say there were tons of colorful people around. I use the term colorful loosly.
The next day we made our way to Berlin, which is one of my favorite cities to date on this trip. We arrived in mid afternoon, and with our host traveled to a number of really cool sights in the city. We started with the east wall gallery, which is the largest section of the Berlin wall still standing. The east side of it has been turned into an art gallery of street artists, and every few years the wall is re painted. It was a really cool experience to see, to say the least. After the wall, we walked to Berlin’s TV tower, which was constructed by the Soviets and was at one point the tallest structure in Europe. We toured a few parks and walked to the Parliment building, passing incredible buildings which ranged from museums to embassies. Berlin, as well as being a relatively cheap city to live in, is quite beautiful.
We finished our evening by celebrating Jasmine’s birthday and eating out (for only the third time on the this trip) at a great Indian restuarant. The food was amazing! I had some eggplant dish, which everybody else turned their nose at, but was quite delicious. The next day we slept in a little, and went back out into the city for lunch and then we spent the afternoon walking through a few parks and touring the monument dedicated to the Jews killed in World War II. It was definately a beautiful monument. That took up the rest of our time in Berlin, and so we made our way back to where we were staying, packed up, and headed to the train station to catch a night train to Brussles, Belgium.
After arriving in Belgium at 6 am, one of the worst days of the trip began. Our plan was to catch a train to Callias (pronounced cuh-lay) and from there a ferry across the English Channel to Dover, and see the Cliffs of Dover and whatever else the city had to offer. Our troubles started with missing our first train because we thought that a random number on our tickets was the platform number, which in reality wasn’t, so finally after catching another train we arrived in Callias too late to get on the 1:30 pm ferry, and so we caught the next one, which was at 2:40. This meant we had to get off the ferry in Dover and then right back on the ferry back to Callais if we were to catch a train back to Brussles where our hostel and all of our stuff was. This failed for several reasons. The weather was rainy and windy, and generally miserable, cutting back on our enjoyment of the ferry ride and causing delays in the ferrys. Despite me pointing it out to people, we missed the fact that we had to be at our return ferry 45 minutes early to check in or they wouldn’t let us on. So we decided to find a grocery store and get supper becaus we thought we had an hour to do so, which we did technically, but thus we missed our check in time by 30 minutes. The ferry we had desired to get on was 30 minutes late, and the one we were forced to get on was 40 minutes late. This put us beyond the point of catching a bus from the port to the train station and beyond any hope of getting a train to anywhere but maybe one station away from Callais, which would have been a better station to sleep in than Callais. So we were left with the option of sleeping in a train station or begging a ride from someone to Brussles or even Paris where we would have been able to sleep in a train station much more comfortably and caught a train to Brussles in the morning in time to get our stuff and head on to Amsterdam.
We ended up finding a German guy who agreed to take us to a gas station just outside of Brussles, becausee it was on his way. Elated, we hopped in this guy’s Chevy SUV, and took off. Well, we really took off, because the guy was averaging 180 kilometers an hour, which is definately over 100 miles an hour, and he approached 120 mph several times, I’m sure. On top of this, the guy was tired, as we all were, and was blaring horrible rap music. I was the guy in the front passenger seat, so I had to make awkward conversation with this guy every once in a while, while the other 3 in our group slept in the back. Talk about getting the short end of the stick. The guy was a decent driver, but we were still going over 100 mph most of the time. We were glad to be done with that ride. From the gas station, we had to call a taxi into the city to our hostel. At this point, I wanted the guy to just deliver us to the hostel, I didn’t want to talk to him, didn’t want him to be nice, I just wanted my bed. But this taxi driver insisted on being our own personal DJ while at the same time being our taxi driver. I was again the front seat passenger, so he was trying to talk to me the whole time about classic American rock that I knew very little about, and through his broken English I figured out that this guy knew more than me. Nathan should have been in the front on that one. I was getting pretty annoyed by the end of the ride. This guy was also woken up from sleeping to give us this ride. So we had some more crazy driving. When we finally arrived at the hostel, I was done. I wanted my bed. After 10 minutes of paper work and instructions we finally got our room. This was a horrible day, with tons of time and money wasted. 100 euros or so down the pot.
The next day was better, but it was till raining and depressing weather. We took a train from Brussles to Amsterdam where we toured the city, walking zombies from lack of sleep and being wet and weary of traveling. Amsterdam was a cool city, but I wasn’t quite in the mood to enjoy it. We departed from Amsterdam at 7pmish and took a 2 hour train ride to the northern part of the Netherlands where we were hosted by a 30ish year old woman Nathan found on couchsurfering.com. It was free, but awkward, and the next morning we woke up to a clogged up bathroom, with the toilet running back into the tub, and it was gross. We made our exit quickly (we were coming back for the night again after a day in the Netherlands, we weren’t just running out leaving our host with a clogged bathroom) and began our trip to the other side of the Netherlands to visit my cousin for the day. We again had some troubles as Nathan forgot his eurail pass and was kicked off the train and had to buy a ticket before we could meet up again. After losing an hour or so to this fiasco, we made it to my cousin’s office where he worked and where we had agreed to meet. We took the bus to his apartment where we saddled up on some bicycles and took off on an afternoon ride to the dunes and the coast. It was a beautiful day.
After our day was done, we made our way back to Amsterdam to try and reserve our night train for tonight, but there was a good 100 people in line, so we decided to split up so our host wasn’t freaked out because we weren’t getting in when we said we would. Nathan and I went back, and the train took forever, much longer than before because it was late and turned into a stop train, which stopped at every station on the trip. It was really annoying. Rhoda and Jasmine, after waiting for almost 2 hours in line, only to find out that the train we wanted was already full, barely made the last trains back to where we were staying. It was a little bit stressful.
After a poor nights sleep, I woke up with the rest of the group still asleep with nothing to do but pack and write this enourmous post.
With only 2 days and nights left in Europe, I am ready to go home, even though it has been an amazing time. Our last few days being less successful than most of our trip has put a downer on things, but all in all it has been a great experience. Hopefully our last 2 days work out okay. Our plan for today is to see a little more of the northern part of the Netherlands, and hopefully make it to Witmarsum where Menno Simons lived for a while. Tonight, since we can’t book a night train, we still have to figure out where we are staying, and then depening on that we have a long train ride to Copenhagen and a night in the airport before our departure back to the US. Its been a fun ride.
Mark