Destination Bavaria

BANG…BANG…BANG! Hammer. Hammer. Saw. Saw. Ah. The head pounding sounds of an apartment tear-out and reconstruction that began at 7:00am on a Monday morning. We are surprisingly awakened and told that the apartment above us is being renovated over the next three weeks….only now we are into week six and the construction continues. I have a complete freak out over the noise, throw some camping gear in Michelle’s Twingo, and we hit the road, planning to be gone for three days. Three days comes and goes and suddenly becomes four, then five, six and upwards adding up to fourteen days total. Michelle only packed one pair of pants while I brought one pair of shorts. We were clothing minimalists, only having to buy underwear and a few toiletry items along the way. Our fourteen day journey covers two countries; Southern Germany and two cities in the Czech Republic. Our mission? To explore the beer scene in these two countries and experience the local culture.

We have no plans, reservations or schedules. No laptops or cell phones. There is no need to get anywhere fast. We have a full tank of gas, the GPS, survival gear, and a desire to explore and stay away from home.

We take off and hit the southern German back country roads of Bavaria, Bayern, and Badden Wurtemburg. The scenery is gorgeous. Luscious fields of wheat, corn, and hops greet our senses. Fruit orchards whiz by, trees full of apples, plums, and pears. The air is fresh and clean. Ninety minutes into our journey we pull off the road in a sparsely populated town for schnitzels and spatzle at a small local restaurant run by a cute old lady. We are the only customers.

Well fed and back on the road, five minutes later we run into the town of Zwiefalter, famous for their monastery and brewery. Originally brewed by monks, their hefe-weizen beers are some of the best in the region. We stop in for a couple of cold beers….Michelle as my designated chauffeur unfortunately has to stick with the non-alcohol beer. We marvel at the enormous portions of food that go by on trays carried by traditionally dressed women with heaving cleavages. Plates of schweinhaxe (pork knuckle), bratwursts, kraut, spatzle, rouladen, and cheese spatzle are brought to tables of hungry Germans. Everyone is drinking beer. After sampling the local beverages, we meander to the monastery across the street and are struck with awe at the beauty of their church. It’s absolutely stunning. We are both overwhelmed at the artistry. We both shed tears at the beauty and amount of work that encompasses the church.

Back on the road again another 90minutes, we pass by a sign that says “Kaserei”. Hmmm. Kaserei? I think that means cheese factory. We drive into the small parking lot and as luck would have it, they have a cheese store and it’s open! We purchase three unbelievably good cheeses: A chunk of Emmanthaler from a big cheese wheel on the counter, a German Burg cheese, and a Biercheese. All three are fresh, creamy, and delicious. Unfortunately, they won’t last long, so we have to eat them right away. German Burg cheese gets a funky smell quickly and breaks down quickly in heat.

Arriving at a campground in the town of Tettnang, famous for Tettnanger Hops, we set up our tent in a quiet area of the campgrounds. A short distance from the camp is Brauereigasthof Schore, (http://www.schoere.de/) a small, family owned brewery who grow their own hops. They don’t bottle and the only place to find their beer is at their brewery. Their beers are some of the best I have sampled in Germany. The freshness of the hops in the Pils is heaven. I don’t ever want to leave, it’s that good. We snack on marinated camembert cheese with wurst salad and incredible onion rings. The onion rings are so good, we wind up ordering another round. They are the perfect accompaniment to the bitter lagers.

The next day, we tour the Hop Museum, explore the local countryside and visit the town of Tettnang.

The Hop Museum is located in a barn in the middle of enormous towers of hops. It’s a little hokey, but informative. They have a movie in English that we get to watch by ourselves. It’s also children’s day at the museum, so they have all kinds of hop games, like tabletop fooseball, except you use a hop cone for a ball and a squeeze bottle to blow air and propel the “hopball”.

After a couple of nights of sleeping on the wet hard ground, Michelle has had enough of spiders, bees, and flies. We decide to go to one of the most beautiful towns in Germany, if not the world; Garmisch. As luck would have it, Garmisch is having their annual beer festival! It is a fest not to be missed! Now we just have to find lodging. We strike out at the first guesthouse run by a little granny as I’m a little scary looking in a demonic rock t-shirt and several days worth of growth on my face. I hide behind Michelle at the next place and we score a relaxing room where our hostess serves us breakfast in our room everyday at 10am. We are a short walk from downtown Garmisch and the festival tent! Wahoo! One night, we stumble across a parade of the locals and their children, heading to the tent to dance, eat, laugh, sing, socialize, and drink fresh Lowenbrau Bier by the liter. It is a crazy good time. We attend the festivities for two nights. The first night is rock night and filled with teens and twenty-thirty somethings as well as a few forty-somethings. The second night is traditional night with Umpah Umpah music and lots of toasting and prosting. We meet kind, interesting people and have the time of our lives on both nights. Make sure you check out the video of the parade and the fest in the pics below!

Tettnanger Hop Country, A Hop Museum, The German Alps, A German Beer Fest. Mission Accomplished

The Black Forest, Germany

Black Forest
Bad Wildbad, Germany

It started in Seoul, Korea on a cold winter day in December. Michelle, while walking to the Vietnamese Embassy to secure our visas for an upcoming Christmas trip to Saigon, suffers a horrible ankle break by slipping on ice on the sidewalk. She winds up having nine pins/screws and a metal plate put into her ankle. We spend countless hours in the orthopedic department and become fast friends with several of the army medics who work there. That’s how I met Rich; an avid rock climber and thrill-seeking adventurer. As destiny would have it, Rich winds up retiring from the Army and moving to Stuttgart to work as a civilian at the base hospital.
Rich gives me a call last week and suggests taking off for the weekend. Michelle does a little research and suggests camping in the Black Forest. Rich and I are both totally down with the plan and load the gear into Rich’s Honda on Friday evening. We take all the back roads, missing the German traffic jams, and arrive at our destination a quick ninety minutes later.
We check in with the camp owners, getting the lay out of the premises. Camping in Europe is not camping in Montana or Idaho. You have to camp at designated campgrounds. A campsite for a tent, two adults and a car cost around $30 per night. It’s not cheap. As I reported in my Hallstatt, Austria Blog, campgrounds have showers, sinks, toilets, community kitchens, and are normally close to restaurants, pubs, bakeries, and other conveniences. As we enter the tenting area, the first observations we make are the size and quality of the tents. They are big expensive canvas houses staked out for a serious length of time…like weeks. These are the kind of tents one finds at the base camp in Nepal. Rich comments that he could run a medical clinic in the mountains in one of the tents. In European fashion, we greet everyone in the tenting area as we cart our gear on borrowed children’s wagons from the parking area. Almost everyone is from the Netherlands. We help each other set the tents up, and in a matter of minutes, are relaxing, cooking Bubba Burgers on the grill and drinking Bitburger Pils. We meet a few of our neighbors and find out they are in fact staying for several weeks. Almost everyone has young kids. To our right, we have a British couple with two children, ages 8 and 10. To our left, we have a Dutch couple who also have two children, ages 2 and 4. We are camped directly across from the swing set. It’s not exactly the camping paradise we had envisioned. Its camping heaven for European families and not so heavenly for two American guys who want to blow off steam by getting drunk, cooking hotdogs, and howling at the moon. We crash hard that night. When morning comes, we fix breakfast of Korean noodle soup, hot tea, bread, and cheese. Everyone at the campround, after fixing breakfast, take off to explore and sight-see. Rich and I hang out at camp, drinking beer, enjoying the stillness and fresh air. I stroll around the town and along the creek, loving every breath of mountain oxygen while Rich naps in the afternoon. Saturday night, the families come back just in time for a major cloud burst, complete with booming thunder and lightning. Rich and I hit a German restaurant for Hefeweizens and some great grub. I have a jagerschnitzel and Rich goes with a venison dish. We walk back in the drizzle, hang out for awhile until it’s really raining hard, and then hit the sleeping bags. I love sleeping in a tent in the rain, especially when it doesn’t leak!
Sunday morning arrives with a hot sunrise that dries the night’s moisture from our tents and gear. We decide we have had enough kids and families for the weekend, especially from the crying two year old next door, and pack camp up. We decide to hit a thermal bath for a nice soak and toxin-cleansing sauna before getting back to my place. A Greek restaurant in my small village of Mittelstadt is open on Sundays, so we chow down there on some soulvaki, gyros, french fries, and grilled lamb cutlet. Rich winds up calling in sick Sunday night and crashes at my house where we continue b.s.ing with Michelle until the wee hours of the morning.

Camping in the mountains of the German Black Forest
Mission Accomplished

Halstatt, Austria: Dental Road Trip: Part One

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.

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