Chapter 3:ONWARD AND NORTHWARD

When last I blogged, we had left Greece and driven to Montreux, Switzerland. Bear in mind that it had now become a habit of ours when traveling not to make any hotel reservations ahead of time. Oh, the joy of surprise! Therefore we arrived in Montreux without any idea as to where we were going to stay before going on to Germany. This, however, did not worry my husband so we drove around until we saw a lovely hotel on Lac Leman, (popularly called Lake Geneva). I can't remember the name of the hotel, but anyway, we went in to the beautiful lobby and strolled up to the desk whereupon my husband gave his name and asked if our room was ready. The clerk couldn't find our name in the register so my husband began one of the spiels he used when convincing someone of something rather "iffy". Registering disappointment on his handsome face, he asked the clerk to check again and of course, our name still wasn't there. By then the manager had noticed the difficulty and emerged from his office to tend to the situation. My husband explained that his parents had stayed in this hotel right after World War II, and had spoken so well of it that he wanted to experience that pleasure as well. The manager said, "we have records dating back to before the war so let me check and see if I can find their names." Well, I thought surely we were "dead in the water" so to speak, but lo! he came back with the information that they had stayed there! Understand, that was just a tale my husband told them but we figured that the manager thought it was so good, he went along with it. We were given a lovely room with a balcony facing the lake, gold plated fixtures in the bathroom and chocolates under the pillows.
That evening we met my friend whom I mentioned before, the young lady I met on the plane, and we spent a couple of hours visiting with her in the bar. She spoke only French and English, her sister spoke Spanish and German and a man we met spoke only German, so there was a lot of cross-translation going on. They took us to a nightclub in the center of town and OMG! The floorshow made the ones in Mexico look like kindergarten plays! There I was thinking that the Swiss were sweet,clean, quiet, serious people whose main occupation was counting other people's money. What ho! This was straight outta porno, so we left. This little old Beeville girl couldn't take it.

After two nights in that lovely hotel we left and drove through the Alps and up the middle of Germany. Not having hotel reservations wasn't the only thing: we didn't have a map either and GPS was still many years away.(don't know if I told you, this trip was in 1975)  Fortunately when you get on the autobahn and you know which way is North, it's not too difficult. Germany is a beautiful country and even if they do stare, they are very friendly. I could read a bit of German so that helped. I learned that "ausfahrt" was "exit" and "einfahrt" was "entrance". We enjoyed the trip and after one night in a comfortable hotel in Karlsrue, we drove on to Bremen, near the North Sea. My husband was to meet some shipping people there and that's another story but this is getting too long.

If I can manage it, I'll try to describe a bit more to the end of this story later on. The photo on the left is of Tannenhof Restaurant and the right one is in Trier.