Hallstatt, Austria July 2008
Oh no. No sooner had we returned from our trip to the Netherlands, when Michelle’s crown on her tooth falls out of her mouth into the bathroom sink as she’s brushing her pearly whites. With hands like a cat, Michelle makes a frantic swat for the piece of fake tooth as it rattles around the porcelain sink. Luckily, Michelle latches on to it before it continues
its spiral path down the drain. Phew – A nearly avoided catastrophe. It’s not easy finding dentists in a foreign country who speak English. It’s nearly impossible to find a reasonably priced dentist in Germany. Sure, we have insurance - we pay a ton of money for it. Unfortunately, like most insurances, it only covers part of the cost. Even with insurance, dental visits add up quickly to the tune of thousands of dollars with all kinds of charges.
Germany, along with quite a few other European countries, is an expensive country for dental work. Michelle did some research on the internet for dentists in former communist block countries, primarily Czech Republic and Hungary.
She located a dentist back in March and went to see him during spring break in April. She found Dr. Szorba in a small retiree health resort town, named Heviz. Heviz is famous for their natural hot spring lake; a huge mildly radioactive lake said to cure all kinds of aches and ailments. 
It’s the second largest natural hot spring lake in the world, the first being somewhere in New Zealand. The aged Western Europeans flock here like pilgrims on a retreat to Mecca. They walk around with orange water wings inflated around their bingo-flabbed arms, big straw hats, Bermuda shorts, white tank-tops, and black socks in brown sandals. Many of them display pasty skin, dangerously close to becoming a painful red. They remind me of the movie Coccoon as they ease themselves down the steep stairs of their silver tour busses in search of the cure to pain-free longevity.
Michelle explains her latest dental dilemma to Dr. Szorba and schedules an appointment for Tuesday. We just got back from our seven hour trip to the Netherlands and the Mosel River
in Germany. It’s now Friday in Stuttgart, a minimum of an eight and a half hour drive using the Autobahn through Germany, Austria, and Hungary to Heviz. We leave early Sunday morning.
Driving on Sundays in Germany is a thrill! Big semi trucks aren’t allowed to operate on the Autobahn. The rest areas are filled with pot bellied truck drivers playing cards and drinking beer next to their rigs. I smile as I blow by them traveling close to 100 mph on the legal racetrack. Sunday roads are free and wide open: BMWs, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Volkswagens, and Mercedes all jockey down the road for the pole position, some traveling at speeds in excess of 200 mph. It’s insanity, the speeds that are attained. Motorcycles pass me like I’m the tortoise and they’re the hare. Swoosh and they’re gone, nothing but a speck on the horizon.
In Austria, we stop at a gas station and buy a Vignette: a sticker for $12 that allows us to travel the Austrian roads for ten days. We drive for about seven hours, later opting for a side road off the highway in the Austrian Alps. The scenery is breathtakingly gorgeous. Huge mountains with snow covered glaciers. Sparkling clear blue lakes scattered throughout the valleys. Brown and white spotted cows and sheep graze peacefully in the lush green meadows.
I can’t believe I’m driving through the Austrian Alps. Michelle and I pull over 
and snap a few shots before continuing on our way. We have packed the tent and sleeping bag in the car and hope to stumble upon a campground. We drive around twists and turns, climbing and descending, passing farm tractors on narrow mountain stretches. We are tired of driving and more than ready to chill out with a cold beer. I begin considering knocking on the door of one of the many guesthouses we pass. Then, as fate will have it, we arrive at a campground in Hallstatt, Austria. 
It’s beautiful with few tents on the grounds. We pay for a night, park the car, and return back to the camp office for our much awaited cold draft beers. Draft beer? Yes. European campgrounds are civilized. They have hot showers, sinks, toilets, mirrors, kitchens, pubs with big screen TVs to watch the latest European soccer match and cold draft beer. We make small chat with the Austrian owner and drink our beers on the outside picnic table, watching the yellow sun set behind the majestic mountains. 
After setting up camp, we wander the quiet mountain village, learning that the village is famous for the oldest salt mine in the world…a youthful 7,000 years old. Now that’s old. I mention to Michelle I would like to tour it in the morning.
We are both starving and stop at the first restaurant we stumble upon; an Italian pizza joint – the worst pizza we have had in Europe. Yuck. The dough totally sucks, the sauce has no flavor or seasoning, and it’s covered in a massive pile of cheese. The pre-game show of Italy vs. Spain is blaring on their television inside the restaurant. I ask them if they are Italian and rooting for Italy.
“No. We don’t care about this game. We’re Turkish.”
Oh, I think to myself. That would explain the pizza.
After eating and wandering around a little more, we stop back off at the campground bar to watch the Italy/Spain soccer match along with several other campers and locals. The soccer game goes into several over-times before the game is decided in a shootout. Spain wins, one to nothing. We all cheer for Spain, then stagger back to the tent for some drunken sleep. We awake feeling like we spent the night sleeping on the dirt ground after drinking mug after mug of Austrian beer. We shower, eat some road fruit from the tailgate, load the gear, and then cruise to the parking lot of the salt mine. Michelle, terrified of gondolas after having had a nervous-breakdown riding one in Malaysia (now there's a story!),
chooses to explore the area on her own while I ascend in the gondola to get to the entrance of the mine. 
After arriving at the top of the mountain, I have to hike up another kilometer or so to reach the entrance. I take lots of pictures and learn about the history of the mine while listening to a self-guided tour on a rented iPod. There are skeletons of ancient warriors and tombs around the mountainside, dating back 7,000 years ago – that’s a long way back in time. I reach the entrance where I 
figure out with my terrible German that I have to put on special clothing to tour the mine. I don the clothing along with a Japanese couple, an American couple, a dozen Germans, and twenty five or so energetic Austrian school children. We walk way down into the darkness of the mountain led by a gorgeous blonde haired, blue eyed Austrian twenty-something 
woman. We watch a bunch of short films in German, hear a speech from a robot miner in German, and slide down a long wooden slide that has a mounted 
camera which photographs us skidding on our butts. A display screen at the end of the slide displays our picture and speed (I was 26.6 km/hr). We are later given the option of buying the photograph (No way!). We end the tour by taking a ride on a small train that runs through the mountain.
Oh no. No sooner had we returned from our trip to the Netherlands, when Michelle’s crown on her tooth falls out of her mouth into the bathroom sink as she’s brushing her pearly whites. With hands like a cat, Michelle makes a frantic swat for the piece of fake tooth as it rattles around the porcelain sink. Luckily, Michelle latches on to it before it continues
its spiral path down the drain. Phew – A nearly avoided catastrophe. It’s not easy finding dentists in a foreign country who speak English. It’s nearly impossible to find a reasonably priced dentist in Germany. Sure, we have insurance - we pay a ton of money for it. Unfortunately, like most insurances, it only covers part of the cost. Even with insurance, dental visits add up quickly to the tune of thousands of dollars with all kinds of charges.Germany, along with quite a few other European countries, is an expensive country for dental work. Michelle did some research on the internet for dentists in former communist block countries, primarily Czech Republic and Hungary.
She located a dentist back in March and went to see him during spring break in April. She found Dr. Szorba in a small retiree health resort town, named Heviz. Heviz is famous for their natural hot spring lake; a huge mildly radioactive lake said to cure all kinds of aches and ailments. 
It’s the second largest natural hot spring lake in the world, the first being somewhere in New Zealand. The aged Western Europeans flock here like pilgrims on a retreat to Mecca. They walk around with orange water wings inflated around their bingo-flabbed arms, big straw hats, Bermuda shorts, white tank-tops, and black socks in brown sandals. Many of them display pasty skin, dangerously close to becoming a painful red. They remind me of the movie Coccoon as they ease themselves down the steep stairs of their silver tour busses in search of the cure to pain-free longevity.Michelle explains her latest dental dilemma to Dr. Szorba and schedules an appointment for Tuesday. We just got back from our seven hour trip to the Netherlands and the Mosel River
in Germany. It’s now Friday in Stuttgart, a minimum of an eight and a half hour drive using the Autobahn through Germany, Austria, and Hungary to Heviz. We leave early Sunday morning.Driving on Sundays in Germany is a thrill! Big semi trucks aren’t allowed to operate on the Autobahn. The rest areas are filled with pot bellied truck drivers playing cards and drinking beer next to their rigs. I smile as I blow by them traveling close to 100 mph on the legal racetrack. Sunday roads are free and wide open: BMWs, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Volkswagens, and Mercedes all jockey down the road for the pole position, some traveling at speeds in excess of 200 mph. It’s insanity, the speeds that are attained. Motorcycles pass me like I’m the tortoise and they’re the hare. Swoosh and they’re gone, nothing but a speck on the horizon.
In Austria, we stop at a gas station and buy a Vignette: a sticker for $12 that allows us to travel the Austrian roads for ten days. We drive for about seven hours, later opting for a side road off the highway in the Austrian Alps. The scenery is breathtakingly gorgeous. Huge mountains with snow covered glaciers. Sparkling clear blue lakes scattered throughout the valleys. Brown and white spotted cows and sheep graze peacefully in the lush green meadows.
I can’t believe I’m driving through the Austrian Alps. Michelle and I pull over 
and snap a few shots before continuing on our way. We have packed the tent and sleeping bag in the car and hope to stumble upon a campground. We drive around twists and turns, climbing and descending, passing farm tractors on narrow mountain stretches. We are tired of driving and more than ready to chill out with a cold beer. I begin considering knocking on the door of one of the many guesthouses we pass. Then, as fate will have it, we arrive at a campground in Hallstatt, Austria. 
It’s beautiful with few tents on the grounds. We pay for a night, park the car, and return back to the camp office for our much awaited cold draft beers. Draft beer? Yes. European campgrounds are civilized. They have hot showers, sinks, toilets, mirrors, kitchens, pubs with big screen TVs to watch the latest European soccer match and cold draft beer. We make small chat with the Austrian owner and drink our beers on the outside picnic table, watching the yellow sun set behind the majestic mountains. 
After setting up camp, we wander the quiet mountain village, learning that the village is famous for the oldest salt mine in the world…a youthful 7,000 years old. Now that’s old. I mention to Michelle I would like to tour it in the morning.We are both starving and stop at the first restaurant we stumble upon; an Italian pizza joint – the worst pizza we have had in Europe. Yuck. The dough totally sucks, the sauce has no flavor or seasoning, and it’s covered in a massive pile of cheese. The pre-game show of Italy vs. Spain is blaring on their television inside the restaurant. I ask them if they are Italian and rooting for Italy.
“No. We don’t care about this game. We’re Turkish.”
Oh, I think to myself. That would explain the pizza.
After eating and wandering around a little more, we stop back off at the campground bar to watch the Italy/Spain soccer match along with several other campers and locals. The soccer game goes into several over-times before the game is decided in a shootout. Spain wins, one to nothing. We all cheer for Spain, then stagger back to the tent for some drunken sleep. We awake feeling like we spent the night sleeping on the dirt ground after drinking mug after mug of Austrian beer. We shower, eat some road fruit from the tailgate, load the gear, and then cruise to the parking lot of the salt mine. Michelle, terrified of gondolas after having had a nervous-breakdown riding one in Malaysia (now there's a story!),
chooses to explore the area on her own while I ascend in the gondola to get to the entrance of the mine. 
After arriving at the top of the mountain, I have to hike up another kilometer or so to reach the entrance. I take lots of pictures and learn about the history of the mine while listening to a self-guided tour on a rented iPod. There are skeletons of ancient warriors and tombs around the mountainside, dating back 7,000 years ago – that’s a long way back in time. I reach the entrance where I 
figure out with my terrible German that I have to put on special clothing to tour the mine. I don the clothing along with a Japanese couple, an American couple, a dozen Germans, and twenty five or so energetic Austrian school children. We walk way down into the darkness of the mountain led by a gorgeous blonde haired, blue eyed Austrian twenty-something 
woman. We watch a bunch of short films in German, hear a speech from a robot miner in German, and slide down a long wooden slide that has a mounted 
camera which photographs us skidding on our butts. A display screen at the end of the slide displays our picture and speed (I was 26.6 km/hr). We are later given the option of buying the photograph (No way!). We end the tour by taking a ride on a small train that runs through the mountain. I learn more than I ever want to about salt. I'm ready to get off this mountain. I'm sick of elementary school kids and race by them to get to the gondola before they do. I spent hours in a cave with them, I wasn't about to share another enclosed space. I hike down to the gondola and ride to the bottom where I meet Michelle four hours later. 
After driving for an hour, we stop at a cozy Austrian guesthouse
for some garlic cream soup, schnitzel and potatoes. We marvel at the Alps as we enjoy our lunch, then back on the road for another three hours. We stop once for gas and to purchase the Hungary Vignette which cost $15 to drive the Hungarian Highways (what highways?) for ten days. After surviving life on the road with the insanely crazy Hungarian drivers for a couple of hours, we arrive at our apartment in Heviz, hungry and exhausted at 8pm, Monday night.
Road Trip to Heviz, Hungary
Mission Accomplished
After driving for an hour, we stop at a cozy Austrian guesthouse
for some garlic cream soup, schnitzel and potatoes. We marvel at the Alps as we enjoy our lunch, then back on the road for another three hours. We stop once for gas and to purchase the Hungary Vignette which cost $15 to drive the Hungarian Highways (what highways?) for ten days. After surviving life on the road with the insanely crazy Hungarian drivers for a couple of hours, we arrive at our apartment in Heviz, hungry and exhausted at 8pm, Monday night.Road Trip to Heviz, Hungary
Mission Accomplished
3 comments:
So yeah, this was a lovely read...but...the part that truly caught my attention was when you said you outran a bunch of elementary school children in order to get to a gondola before they did. The brain picture that excerpt conjures up is brilliant!
Hey, thanks. Yeah, I had to put some distance between me and them. They were throwing grass and flowers at each on the path heading down to the gondola. That was it for me.
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