This month, I had a business trip to Oberndorf am Neckar in Germany. KrisDi and I met in Munich afterwards to commence a two week, five city, four country European vacation, to resume our pandemic-interrupted “let’s have a travel vacation every other year” pattern. I’ll start posting about this covering my business trip and the day I met KrisDi, and then I plan to do a post for each day. I also do not plan to filter the photos very much, so expect tons of them. I will link in the posts to the photos I think are best, or illustrate whatever I’m saying.
My trip started with a 45 minute wait in the TSA Precheck line. The sign said to expect a 3 minute wait at that location, and a 15 minute wait at the other one. The guy behind me’s wife made it through regular security faster than we did. I therefore did not have time for a beer and a sandwich before my direct flight to Amsterdam.
In Amsterdam, I had what felt like a three mile march to my gate, interrupted by a ~45 minute passport control line. There were several food options and lots of shopping. One of the few regular sit-down type of places there was a Dutch airport imitation of an Irish pub, and I thought why not. I had a full English breakfast (very mediocre) and a Murphy’s Irish Stout (very nice). While I was there, a guy who looked military was there with someone I thought might have been his younger brother…the younger brother wasn’t even able to stumble out unassisted, he was half carried. It was something like 10 AM.
The most positive thing I have to say about this airport experience is that I didn’t need to retrieve my checked bag and take it through customs/passport control — it just went straight to my plane.
I connected to Stuttgart. I was supposed to be on the same flights as my boss, who was renting a car and was going to drive me to Oberndorf. His flights got changed so that he could get an upgrade. This meant I waited at the Stuttgart airport for a couple hours for him to arrive. They had a full blown, 24-hour grocery store (Edeka) there, with a respectable beer selection, and Germany is pretty open minded about drinking in public places. So I had a beer while waiting in the airport, and then found a biergarten and had another beer.
The drive to Oberndorf wasn’t very notable (aside from trying to figure out how to change the in-car GPS from German to English). When we got there, there was some strange thing about having to check in at another building that was several kilometers away, but our hosts just checked in for us and brought our keys to a fairly large welcome dinner — we arrived a bit late for that, had food and beer, and went to our rooms.
Oberndorf is not a big town. It doesn’t seem to have big chain hotels or anything like that. All three times I’ve stayed there have been smallish hotels, seemingly privately owned, in renovated old buildings. My room had a huge, dangerously placed beam in it, and sure enough, I clonked my head hard enough that I went down on hands and knees. This worried KrisDi, since I sent her a message saying it happened and then went to bed and didn’t respond to any further messages (because I was unconscious in my bed, not because I was unconscious on the floor). The hotel also had a creepy basement, and a cooler full of beer with an honor system payment scheme. But zero capacity for customers to have coffee in their rooms.
Coffee when I travel is often a challenge. Hotels usually have shitty (or no) coffee making capability, and apparently the US is the only place in the world where coffee shops are open early enough for freaks like me that are up before 5 AM. Luckily, I found a bakery nearby that opened at 6 or 6:30, which is not bad.
Day of meetings, then a little bit of time before dinner — I walked around town, looking for beer places. Not many options aside from a grocery store, but it was a long walk. I didn’t buy anything. I discovered there are still plenty of open-air cigarette vending machines.
The next day, I went back to the same bakery, but I couldn’t get coffee because they had been robbed, and the polizei had blocked off the room where the guy needed to go to turn on the water for coffee. Interestingly, my colleague got trapped in the elevator, which requires a little bit of explanation about the elevator itself, which is kind of strange.
I mentioned before, it was a renovated old building. I think it was four stories, and they sort of tacked an elevator onto the side of it. Without some special keycard or something, the elevator would not go up when controlled by the passenger. We did not receive special keycards or anything. I learned this when we arrived at the hotel, couldn’t figure out how to make the elevator take us and our bags up to our rooms, and then we dragged our suitcases up the stairs.
I learned later that you can make it go up by using the call buttons on the floors above the elevator. But, it will only go up *while* you are pressing the call button. To make it go all the way up, you have to press the button until it arrives. Once it gets to your floor, you can get in, and you can press a button for one of the floors below…but again, it will only move while you are pressing the button. To get off at the ground floor, you have to hold the button down until you get to the ground. Additionally, the doors are not typical elevator doors — they’re more like regular, hand-operated doors, and they only unlock to open when the elevator is at the proper position at one of the floors.
So, my colleague called the elevator up to his floor, got in with his bag, and pressed the ground floor button until he thought he was at the right spot to open the door, but it didn’t open. He must have been slightly above the correct position. So he pressed the button until it stopped moving…and the door still wouldn’t open. Best guess is he hit some weird point in the position detection system. But, he was then unable to go up, and unable to get out. So he called our boss on his cell phone, we tried (in vain) to explain the situation to our hostess, and I went to the elevator on one of the upper floors and called the elevator until he could get out on my floor. And then he carried his bags downstairs.
We got out of work early, and my colleague drove me to the train station in Stuttgart, which was an excellent adventure because Google Maps first took us to an industrial train station, then we had to spend an extra 20 minutes driving to the passenger train station. I still got there early enough that I decided it was worth buying a ticket for an earlier train and abandoning my pre-purchased-online ticket for 8:15PM. The ticket machines were either incomprehensible or I just couldn’t find Munich/München as a destination (possibly because I wasn’t using an umlaut). I got on the website on my phone and bought one that way. I had a beer and a shitty sandwich at the train station. I did have a much nicer beer on the train, served in a very classy paper cup. The top speed that I noticed on this train was 199 km/hr.
KrisDi had already arrived in Munich via airplane (similar connection experience in Amsterdam, except passport control was not so bad). She had no problem with the local train or the hotel. She checked in, showered, and went to nearby Liebig for dinner – a Schwabian spaetzlepan and liver dumpling soup (and a dunkel). I didn’t have any big problem with the local train, either, and I met her there, and ate some of her leftovers. We went back to the hotel, I showered, and then we went to Hofbrauhaus’ biergarten.
We each had a maß (1L of beer in a big stein; pronounced “mass”), we saw a brass band play some music, and we wandered around a little bit. It’s a cool building; spacious and touristy.
Then we walked back to the room and went to bed.
