Germany Trip Diary #1

The following is a diary entry from August 8, 2017 that I have lightly edited and added material in brackets.

Trip preparation post.

Flight from Los Angeles to Düsseldorf

2017.08.06, Sunday evening in Los Angeles

I closed up all my work files and transferred them to a thumb drive and my phone, finished some yard work under the gaze of Phil Rrig, and showered after Chuck returned home from volleyball. We were out the door before noon! That fact took Mitch by surprise, and he was just tying his shoes when we arrived to pick him up.

The auto trip into Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) was a typical Sunday traffic situation—two delays getting from I-10 to I-210, then little problem until heavy traffic again on the 605 and 110 freeways, but no stalls.

With arrival at LAX by 14:45, I had plenty of time for security check and finding the gate: arriving there a solid hour in advance. The flights were atypical, but uneventful. On the 12-hour flight from LAX to DUS (Düsseldorf), my seat-mate watched films the flight long, dozing occasionally. I put stoppers in my ears, a sleep mask over my eyes, and I slept from 15 minutes after takeoff until midnight or so, more than 6 hours, After a pee break, I slept for another 2 hours or so, and I was awake from the flight over Europe, from the Atlantic shore until touchdown.

Düsseldorf to Stuttgart to Tauberbischofsheim

2018.08.07, Monday

Germany

The flight from DUS to STR (Stuttgart) was by a much smaller turbo prop. We were bussed from the gate around the terminals to our plane, which we boarded outside by rollaway stairs. The flight lasted only an hour.

My rental car, a VW Beetle Cabriole, is very nice, although the rear hatch area is too small for my luggage to fit through its opening. I'll try to remove some articles from the bag to see if it can squeeze through then.) [I later found levers to open the hatch access wide enough to allow the suitcase.]

Route from Stuttgart Flughaven to a bike shop

My first errand (to find a Fahrradgeschäft [bike shop] and buy a helmet and SPD cleats) was frustrating.

• The nearest on-the-way shop found by Google Maps was closed, or never was at the location. [The Google Maps information placed me in a suburb of Stuttgart, in the middle of a residential neighborhood. I knocked at the door, and nobody answered. I asked a deliveryman on the street if a bike shop was in the area, and he said there had never been one nearby.]
• The second shop did not take a visa card and had almost no selection of SPD cleats. [I had used Google Maps again to find a bike shop along the way to the library, and I chose one that was on one of my planned streets. It turned out the shop was pretty small, not oriented toward road bikes, but e-bikes and neighborhood biking.]

So I gave up on that for [later] following up in Tauberbischofsheim.

Route to the Württembergische Landesbibliothek

My arrival at the Württembergische Landesbibliothek [state library of Württemberg] was hampered by the building renovation, street closures, and a very hard to maneuver street layout. [Though I arrived in downtown Stuttgart quickly from the airport, taking wrong turns and finally finding a parking place took at least an additional hour.] I arrived too late to order and view books by the end of the afternoon hours. (It takes a minimum of two hours to receive books from the stacks for use in the Lesesalle [reading room].)

So I headed off to Tauberbischofsheim by 19:00 Uhr (7 p.m.), stopped unterwegs for a sandwich and juice, and arrived at my hotel —Landhotel am Mühlenwörth in Hochhausen, about 2.5 miles north of Tauberbischofsheim— as dusk turned to night.

Route from Stuttgart Flughaven to Hochheim

[Google Maps "told" me that the drive from Stuttgart to the Tauberbischofsheim area was to take about two hours, including the side trips without the visiting time at the library. I'm not sure I took exactly the route that Google devised, since I used the GPS system installed in the Cabriole.

[The route took Autobahn A27 north from Stuttgart, with a short connection via A10 to A81 that took me to the turn-off to Tauberbischofsheim. Larger towns that I bypassed included Ludwigsburg (population 93,000) and Heilbronn (pop. 124,000), and the route stops 15 miles short of reaching Würzburg (pop. 126,000). None of these towns were visible from the freeway, and I saw only a few much smaller towns along the way. For the most part, the route was through alternating field crops and thick forests that covered rolling hills.

VW Cabrio (think Mini Cooper)

[It took more than a few turns underway before I became adjusted to the German instructions from the GPS and to the amount of distance between an announcement of an upcoming turn and the actual corner. I found the German GPS system much more suitable to auto driving than the GPS in Chuck's Toyota Prius and the iPhone GPS I use in my Mazda MPV.

[Certainly, though, the Cabriole GPS system took me to the east around central Tauberbischofsheim and connected me more efficiently to the street from Tauberbischofsheim to Hochhausen. (Google Maps names this street "Pestalozziallee," though I never saw that name the many times I took the street.)]

2017.08.08, Monday, Hochhausen
Heute I am to meet Stefan Lindtner at 9 a.m. here at the hotel. Then I plan to go to the Königheim Standesamt and perhaps meet Otto Spengler afterwards.

Next day's post.