Saturday August 11th, 2oo7

Saturday August 11th, 2007

We go up early today and loaded the car. We said bye to the Polish family, and got a picture. Then we went down to the tourist office to sign out, and they gave us apples and water. How nice. We headed down that winding road for the last time. 9km in 12 minutes. Dad is quite confident with that road now I guess. We began our 12 hour trip around 9:30am towards a town that mom wasnt able to find on any map she had. Thats reassuring. When we left the Alps, we were sad. I think Switzerland was the favorite of us girls, but not mom, who says she is more like Besta, and likes the flatness better. We went over a bridge, and there was an island in the middle of the lake, with ruins of a castle and a church with a walkway into the water. Our drive was really long and started off pretty uneventful. Then we had a near disaster right at the German boarder. The officer pulled us over, and let us run...RUN to the bathrooms. Another officer stopped an entire row of cars to let us cross the street. What a memorable boarder crossing. We drove through Frankfurt, and counted all the Ikea's that we passed. We stopped for lunch and ate all the German delicacies like schnitzels, schweinebauch, and hahnchenschenkels. A hitchhiker stopped me and asked if i would drive him. OH, and the bathrooms automatically cleaned themselves! I dont know if I can add a video on here, but I definetaly taped it. Hahahahahaa, the toilet seat would swivel all the way around while a sponge-thinger cleaned it. Twice we stopped to call Kathi (the person who owns the place we are staying for the week to tell her we would be late). She apparently speaks english. MOM: "hi, Kathi?" KATHI: "yeah, yeah, yeah". MOM: "we just passed Frankfurt, so we are going to be late". KATHI: "yeah, yeah, yeah". MOM: "We'll get there around 10 o'clock". KATHI: "yeah, yeah, yeah". She didnt have a clue what was going on. We drove and drove and drove. We were leasurely driving in the slow lane going 140km/hr. Dad would look in his rearview mirror and say, "Ruth, look at this one", then a car would speed by us like we were just sitting there. One time a Porsche sped by going probably 629km/hr (thats exaggerated), and dad just chuckled to himself. We FINALLY got to Kathi's house around 10pm...after spending the last half an hour driving around in circles. Kathi is a cute old woman who showed us where we were staying. She lives in a really big house (that had a stuffed fox in the entrance way), and we get the entire top level suite. She showed us around, but she had ZERO english. It was slightly awkward. The place was gorgeous tho. I guess our Rook and Kaiser games are going to have to be a bit more quiet than they were in Switzerland this week.