Long Weekend Part 1

Hey Everyone,

I had an awesome weekend. It was our first of two free weekends, and since Monday was a holiday here the weekend was extended an extra day. Travis and I took this opportunity to do what any sane person would: Rent a car and drive to Austria!

We went to the car rental place here in Weimar early last week to make a reservation for this trip. They couldn’t tel.l us what kind of car we were going to get until the day we left. Luckily, we ended up with a decent black Audi A3. The downside to this is that it was a Diesel. A lot of cars here in Europe are Diesels, it is kind of weird.

Anyway, after class on Friday we rushed to get the car and then some clothes for the trip from our dorm. We then hit the road. But much to our dismay we also hit some Stau, and by Stau, I mean Traffic. It was a long weekend and everyone and their grandmother’s pet goose was on the Autobahn it seemed. In the beginning we waited out traffic jams, but we quickly learned to utilize our GPS.(A computer program on Travis’ laptop not a standard in car GPS. It had a usb dongle which connected to satelites. It was really cool. Since I have never learned to drive a standard I navigated.).

We used the GPS to plot alternate courses around places with traffic. We were gods of the road. Until we needed somewhere to stay that is.

The traffic left us tired after the first day, and we didn’t have it in us to make it all the way down to Salzburg(not our final destination, but all the places we wanted to go were within an hour of there).

We stopped in Regensburg. It was actually a really cool city. There was a river and a huge church that looked really cool. We scoured the town for the cheapest hotel possible. We didn’t have any internet access so we had to go by what we saw. First place we walked into was a pretty nice looking hotel that we probably didn’t want to pay for. Anyway, they didn’t have any double rooms free, and we weren’t privy to bed sharing.

The second place we walked up to had “Gasthouse” in big letters on the front. As we were about to ring the bell outside the door a man dressed in a black casual suit that looked like a fat Stephen Segall approached us and asked something along the lines of “Can I help you?” in German. Now, Travis is pretty good at German. He has his grammar down pretty well, but for some reason, when he tried to speak with this man, the most broken sentence came out. He basically tried to ask if the man had any rooms available, but he managed to use Du(informal you) and Sie(formal you) in the same sentence. I don’t even remember exactly what he said, but I’ll never forget Stephen Segall’s fat German brother’s answer: A scoffing “Nein”. We had been taking turns doing the talking throughout the trip, and I thought for a brief moment that maybe I should try to convince the man that we wouldn’t be a bother, but it was too late really. Such a “Nein” was so staggering to us that before we knew it he was already in the door.

We went back to the car discouraged, but not for long. Our third companion--GPS! Came to the rescue. Travis had stayed in this place before, Regensburg. But he couldn’t remember which hotel he had stayed in. We searched the city on the GPS and eventually found it. We plotted a course and made it to the hotel. It wasn’t particularly cheap, but it was a place, and we were tired.

This is already quite a long post! There is a lot more to tell, but my week is going to be pretty boring with classes/homework. So I will finish the tale in a post tomorrow.

Tschüss!

Beau