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I did not sleep on the transatlantic flight from Boston-- I almost never do. My lover and traveling companion B. fortunately slept basically the entire way. I say fortunately because our plans called for him to do a lot of driving on arrival. We'd had a two-hour delay before getting off the ground and so exited the plane in Munich not into early morning cool, but into steaming nearly-noon-and-getting-hotter, which did at least do us the courtesy of being accurate about the next several hours of weather. The Munich airport is way out of town, thirty klicks from anywhere, no hurry, one of those giant major airports which is not terribly public-transport accessible and which will cost you a fortune by taxi, so we had prearranged a car. The German word for 'rental car' turns out to be 'mietwagen', which I personally am never going to manage to forget if only because it makes me feel I ought to be renting an ambulance.
The rental car people gave us a random upgrade, so on trekking our baggage down to the garage we were met by a BMW Series 5, a car which has reached such a ludicrous perfection of engineering that if I knew the right German I could probably get it to make me an omelette. It was black, and sleek, and aerodynamic, and full of random little convenient and confusing details. The included GPS came in seven languages and did nothing so crass as speak to us, preferring to project upcoming turns holographically on the interior of the drivers'-side windshield. The keys did not need to be put in the ignition-- there was no ignition to put them in-- merely left casually somewhere in the interior of the car. The thing politely turned off its own engine at short stops such as traffic lights and had more than twice the legroom of a transatlantic coach seat. The whole experience was rather like expecting a car and being met by a vaguely disdainful, although in its own way friendly, sort of panther. I was moderately worried about breathing on the paint wrong somehow.
B. has driven in many countries and did not find the concept of driving in Germany at all intimidating, so we got on the road as soon as we had spent about twenty minutes figuring out how to work the GPS, and another ten minutes and a consult with the rental people figuring out how to put the thing in drive (as opposed to turning it on-- it turned on automatically, but the question was what to do after that). I had worn my usual plane clothes, jeans and T-shirt, but it became obvious I was going to die of heat exhaustion, so I managed the classic change-in-public shimmy and got into a long skirt. This proved to be a mixed blessing later.
My first impression of the German countryside was of fields and fields of solar panels, acres of them, black and sleek and shiny as the car; and also all the other cars on the road were polished and powerful and gleaming in the sunlight. The Germans evidently prefer their highways to be neither seen nor heard, when possible, a position I understand entirely, and so despite being, for the first chunk of the drive, on the road between a major European city and its airport it took a very long time for us to pass by even one visible building. The side views were mostly solar panels, and soundproof fences, and ludicrously green fields bordered in ludicrously green trees.
Eventually we finished bypassing the Munich metropolitan area and got onto smaller roads, and then there started being small villages, all alike filled with a combination of antique whitewashed houses with red tile roofs and gleaming modern chrome topped with yet more solar panels. The local church style (more than one per village) looks, to my untrained eye, more what I would have expected of Greek Orthodox than Lutheran, and is usually on the outskirts, an extremely whitewashed tiny rectangle with one proud redtiled domed tower. Rose trellises, woodpiles several stories high in sheds attached to houses, signs for beer gardens. The farther we got into the country, the smaller the roads got, and twistier. There started to be farm equipment sharing road space, and the way dwindled down to what in the U.S. we would consider one lane, while continuing to support traffic in two directions. We passed chunks of woodland, incredibly dense in a way I've never seen a forest manage-- when we passed an exit, we might be able to see that the tree-belt between the exit and the main road was not even ten feet thick, but it would be so lush, so full of undergrowth and verdancy, that even then you could not see light through it. This gives me some idea of why the Bavarian woods are so legendary, and why it is so very easy to lose one's way in them. You could get wildly turned around in that ten-foot belt, if you could force your way through it at all.
It was so hot it was hazy, and the initially flat ground started to ripple in gentle waves. To the sides were fields full of haying, bound round bales of new hay drying and sunburned men shepherding haymows in their gentle circles. (I thought hay was an August crop, but evidently not.) The cows looked whitewashed, Disney-eyed and sleepy in the few shadows. Eventually, in the distance, blue mountains stuck against the sky like cutouts of cloud-banks. They came nearer, and the snow on top of them became more and more wildly improbable to the summer country underneath it. A bike path started up beside the road at about the time the hills got really serious, so that it had clearly been designed by and for cyclists devoted to the point of lunacy, and the villages became full of bed-and-breakfasts, restaurants as well as beer gardens, and public tourist-filled parking lots. "Der Romantische Straße", B. said, "the Romantic Highway." Romantic, yes, but highway only in the sense that it is a road and it is paved and you can put cars on it and they can putter along behind the combine tractors. Finally, another belt of flatness, green and waving like an ocean, not even trees in it, stretching for several miles into a great horseshoe bay in those mountains, which lifted straight from the flatland with no preliminaries, just the green breaking against the lowering cliff-wall. In the most dramatic possible position in the center of the flatland, one of those proud and tiny domed-tower churches, surrounded by wind in skirling wheat, a splash of lake, a few defiant little trees and nothing else; in the most dramatic possible position on the lowest spire of the back of the bay in the mountains, the flashing towers of the overlooking castle.
( Cut for length. Also has some of B.'s photos. )
The rental car people gave us a random upgrade, so on trekking our baggage down to the garage we were met by a BMW Series 5, a car which has reached such a ludicrous perfection of engineering that if I knew the right German I could probably get it to make me an omelette. It was black, and sleek, and aerodynamic, and full of random little convenient and confusing details. The included GPS came in seven languages and did nothing so crass as speak to us, preferring to project upcoming turns holographically on the interior of the drivers'-side windshield. The keys did not need to be put in the ignition-- there was no ignition to put them in-- merely left casually somewhere in the interior of the car. The thing politely turned off its own engine at short stops such as traffic lights and had more than twice the legroom of a transatlantic coach seat. The whole experience was rather like expecting a car and being met by a vaguely disdainful, although in its own way friendly, sort of panther. I was moderately worried about breathing on the paint wrong somehow.
B. has driven in many countries and did not find the concept of driving in Germany at all intimidating, so we got on the road as soon as we had spent about twenty minutes figuring out how to work the GPS, and another ten minutes and a consult with the rental people figuring out how to put the thing in drive (as opposed to turning it on-- it turned on automatically, but the question was what to do after that). I had worn my usual plane clothes, jeans and T-shirt, but it became obvious I was going to die of heat exhaustion, so I managed the classic change-in-public shimmy and got into a long skirt. This proved to be a mixed blessing later.
My first impression of the German countryside was of fields and fields of solar panels, acres of them, black and sleek and shiny as the car; and also all the other cars on the road were polished and powerful and gleaming in the sunlight. The Germans evidently prefer their highways to be neither seen nor heard, when possible, a position I understand entirely, and so despite being, for the first chunk of the drive, on the road between a major European city and its airport it took a very long time for us to pass by even one visible building. The side views were mostly solar panels, and soundproof fences, and ludicrously green fields bordered in ludicrously green trees.
Eventually we finished bypassing the Munich metropolitan area and got onto smaller roads, and then there started being small villages, all alike filled with a combination of antique whitewashed houses with red tile roofs and gleaming modern chrome topped with yet more solar panels. The local church style (more than one per village) looks, to my untrained eye, more what I would have expected of Greek Orthodox than Lutheran, and is usually on the outskirts, an extremely whitewashed tiny rectangle with one proud redtiled domed tower. Rose trellises, woodpiles several stories high in sheds attached to houses, signs for beer gardens. The farther we got into the country, the smaller the roads got, and twistier. There started to be farm equipment sharing road space, and the way dwindled down to what in the U.S. we would consider one lane, while continuing to support traffic in two directions. We passed chunks of woodland, incredibly dense in a way I've never seen a forest manage-- when we passed an exit, we might be able to see that the tree-belt between the exit and the main road was not even ten feet thick, but it would be so lush, so full of undergrowth and verdancy, that even then you could not see light through it. This gives me some idea of why the Bavarian woods are so legendary, and why it is so very easy to lose one's way in them. You could get wildly turned around in that ten-foot belt, if you could force your way through it at all.
It was so hot it was hazy, and the initially flat ground started to ripple in gentle waves. To the sides were fields full of haying, bound round bales of new hay drying and sunburned men shepherding haymows in their gentle circles. (I thought hay was an August crop, but evidently not.) The cows looked whitewashed, Disney-eyed and sleepy in the few shadows. Eventually, in the distance, blue mountains stuck against the sky like cutouts of cloud-banks. They came nearer, and the snow on top of them became more and more wildly improbable to the summer country underneath it. A bike path started up beside the road at about the time the hills got really serious, so that it had clearly been designed by and for cyclists devoted to the point of lunacy, and the villages became full of bed-and-breakfasts, restaurants as well as beer gardens, and public tourist-filled parking lots. "Der Romantische Straße", B. said, "the Romantic Highway." Romantic, yes, but highway only in the sense that it is a road and it is paved and you can put cars on it and they can putter along behind the combine tractors. Finally, another belt of flatness, green and waving like an ocean, not even trees in it, stretching for several miles into a great horseshoe bay in those mountains, which lifted straight from the flatland with no preliminaries, just the green breaking against the lowering cliff-wall. In the most dramatic possible position in the center of the flatland, one of those proud and tiny domed-tower churches, surrounded by wind in skirling wheat, a splash of lake, a few defiant little trees and nothing else; in the most dramatic possible position on the lowest spire of the back of the bay in the mountains, the flashing towers of the overlooking castle.
( Cut for length. Also has some of B.'s photos. )
