‘The date of this post, and the date of this day don’t match, because I am still catching up.
We arrived in FRA about 30 minutes late, cleared immigration in very quick time (after some joking by the police officer staffing the immigration desk about the infinite number of Muellers), our bags were one of the first to arrive on the belt an advantage to travelling contingent; they go on last, and are usually off first). AVIS was a treat, with their preferred customer membership they guarantee that you will have keys to car in 3 minutes or they pay you 25 Euro; and they really meet that.
They upgraded our promised car to a C class Mercedes diesel, much like Scott and I had last year, only this one is a sedan, last year we had a wagon. Still a really nice car to drive, get’s about 6.2 litres per 100 km, and in Germany diesel is about 20 Euro cents (30 Canadian cents roughly) cheaper than regular unleaded, although that still works out to about $1.50/litre Canadian!
After installing the Garmin GPS, and fitting the luggage in, we were off north-eastward to our first stop, the city of Fulda. The GPS promised just over an hour driving, except that there was what must have been a horrendous accident on the Autobahn (at least 7 police vehicles and ambulances came up the middle of several km of standing still two lanes of traffic, then a med-evac helicopter went over, and the highway was closed at the next exit, to which we finally got after about 45 minutes of creeping along. At that exit everything came down to a single line, up the ramp, and to a T-junction with a L class (Landstrasse, usually pretty good roads, with a 100 km/hr speed limit except through the frequent villages, where it is 50). However, going north meant a left turn, with pretty steady traffic coming both ways. You’d think with all the cops that had gone up the road, they would have posted one there to direct traffic; you’d think! But they hadn’t ; and that was actually the major delay, ‘cause Germans are usually very good at merging lines of traffic, because they are trained to use “zipper” merges, and without the left turn delay, we’d all have been out of there twice as fast. Anyways, this doubled the length of the drive to two hours, incidentally in light rain.
We got to Fulda, the rain had stopped, but it was gray and cool. Fulda is the burial place of St. Boniface, the English monk who has been called the apostle of North Germany, so the cathedral (Dom) is quite magnificent, although also quite modern, 18th c. However, they have artefacts going back more than a thousand years before that, that have been found during excavations and repairs. They also have most of St. Boniface buried under an altar in the crypt; his head is in the cathedral museum, mounted on a silver pedestal, with a bishop’s mitre! Oh, and it is thoughtfully turned so you can see the back, and the large hole the axe with which he was killed left after he annoyed some locals by cutting down a sacred tree (no word on whether he used the same axe for that).
After we left the cathedral we found the sky had turned blue, the sun was out, and the day had become pleasantly warm. We went on to tour a nearby ancient church, the former cemetery chapel of the Benedictine monastery, whose earliest part goes back to the early 9th c. That part is Carolingian in style (later on they added transepts, a nave, and an apse to turn it into the usual cruciform church. But the earliest part is almost a miniature of Charles the Great’s church at Aachen (Aix la Chapelle); a round church, with an interior circle of pillars, the altar in the centre, and a circular gallery that looks down from a 2nd story. Beautifully simple, and in a lot of ways preferable to the over-elaborated cathedral.
After finishing up our sigh-seeing, we continued north for about 2 1/2 hours, stopping a pre-booked little hotel in Giesen (not Giessen, which is about 100 km south, but caused much anxiety when several exits promised to take us there, but Emily the GPS calmly persuaded us to do it her way) just south of Hanover. Checking in was a bit of a problem, as no-one was there! A sign on the door gave two phone numbers, suggested you call if you wanted in, and perhaps someone would come over. That made having a cell phone with a German SIM card worth the cost, ‘cause otherwise we’d have had to find a pay telephone, which are becoming increasingly rare in Germany, because (of course!) everyone has a cell phone. Eventually someone did come over, and was very helpful actually. She suggested a place to go and eat, which we did quite early; and were even able to eat outside in a very nice garden with a fish pond.
Then back, to bed, and to try and get ahead of the sleep curve! We managed about 11 hours (not counting the couple of hours in the middle of the night when you wake up because after all, who sleeps at 8 p.m. in Canada), and we woke up feeling not too badly, and ready to face the next day.
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