Did you know Apple iBook’s bounce? I learned that the hard way when my laptop dropped out of my backpack in Charlotte-Douglas Airport as I settled down to eat my Cinnabon. Horrors of horrors: it was to be one of the integral tools of communicating during this adventure. Fortunately, the only damage it seemed to suffer is the AirPort card is apparently dislodged so I could no longer connect to the Internet wirelessly. Luckily, at our hosts’ home here in the suburbs of Darmstadt, I can be hard-wired. And thus you can be reading this port. And more luckily, David, my traveling companion, is wonderfully computer literate and figured out the problem. The jolt not only knocked the wireless card loose, it popped the antenna out of the card. He fixed it and it’s working!

My flight into Frankfurt from Philadelphia, the third and final leg of my journey that began at 5 a.m. at Northwest Florida Regional Airport, got in 35 minutes early. It was still dark in most of western Europe as we landed. Airlines have gotten real stingy, as most travelers know. Breakfast was a single blueberry muffin and a glass of OJ. I was expecting that and had a water bottle in which I poured a packet of powdered Tang-like “orange breakfast beverage,” and also had with me two packets of dried fruit to nibble.

But worst of all is what little legroom there used to be has vanished. My knees were already touching the seat in front of me even before its occupant reclined it the little bit that coach seats can actually recline (which is precious little). They are also skinnier, I think, unless my bottom has widened, which I hope isn’t the case! When I dropped my glasses on the floor midway through the flight, I had to wait until the guy next to me to get up to deplane before I had enough room to bend over and find the wayward specs.

Passport Control in Frankfurt went smoothly. I got the first visa stamp in my new passport, then claimed my luggage. I had plenty of time to tidy up and shave in the men’s room until David’s flight came in, also a bit early. After we gathered his luggage, we cleared German customs without a hitch and entered Germany.

Two regional trains and about 45 minutes later we stepped off the second train in Darmstadt Main Station, where my friend of 23 years, Dieter Heck, waited for us. His wonderful wife Regina had prepared a typical, massive German breakfast for us of various sliced meats, including the “Schinken” that I love, a smoked, thinly sliced ham similar to prosciutto. Fresh Brötschen, or hard rolls, and an assortment of jams also were on the table. Regina knows my fondness for fruit teas, despite her insistence that they are “children’s tea,” but brewed a pot anyway.

Despite being a tad jetlagged, we were eager to start our holiday. Dieter and Regina proposed a simple visit to downtown Darmstadt, where we enjoyed strolling a shopping mall and an outdoor food market. The visit also included a walk up to the 1920s Ludwig Church, a massive dome sitting on a square pedestal base. The dome was entirely rebuilt, having been bombed during the war. The inside was inspired by the Pantheon.

Our next stop was the hilltop Mathilde neighborhood, noted for many buildings of the Jugendstijl design movement, a variation of the Art Nouveau style. There is also a very ornate Russian Orthodox church on the hill. After strolling around, including passing through an interesting grove, we settled at a delightful outdoor terrace café where we had some refreshment. I enjoyed a sort of chocolate milkshake with a couple scoops of ice cream bobbing in it.

Then it was off for the nice drive through the countryside to Burg Frankenstein, the ruins of the hilltop castle once visited by English author Mary W. Shelley. (See the video here on our Web site.) Inspired by her hosts’ tales of the castle’s onetime use for medical experimentation that apparently included body parts, she crafted the famous Gothic novel Frankenstein. Today the castle is predominantly in ruins. An entry tower and the tower and some of the keep survive. Techies were busy decorating the ruin for a Halloween haunted castle production while we were there, taking full advantage of the castle’s reputation.

Back home we enjoyed one of Regina’s famed do-it-yourself dinners, in which we grilled various meats, shrimp and veggies hibachi style on a table-top grill. Afterward, the jetlag really caught up. Bed time! We slept like rocks for almost 10 hours.

After another great breakfast, we were off to Heidelberg Sunday morning. My college roommate had his high school senior prom in Heidelberg castle: how I envy him. It’s a fantastic town for walking around. You can rent PDAs with a preprogrammed tour and a pair of headsets and stroll around the various sites listening to guided history lectures. A medieval fair was underway in one of the squares, which we enjoyed poking around. Lots of food, crafts, jugglers and a sort of theatrical recounting local legends were going on.

We ultimately wound up on the hill in the castle after taking a funicular ride up there. Much of the castle is also in ruins, but what is left evidences its former beauty. A popular attraction is the world’s biggest wine cast, which actually has a dance floor on top of it. We enjoyed a pause at an outdoor terrace in the castle where we had some drinks before proceeding to the back terrace overlooking the town and the Neckar River below. We followed a path down the hill on foot, checked out the bridge, which is under renovation, then drove home in Dieter’s speedy Cadillac STS. At one point Regina, our driver, got it up to 200 km/hr.

As Regina and their son, Martin, were attending a dance performance, and their daughter Sophie is a picky eater, Dieter, David and I took the bus into town and had dinner at a Mongolian restaurant called Khan. It had a great Chinese buffet, plus a side buffet where you could load a bowl with various meats and veggies, almost as we did the night before, and chefs would grill them for you. We were ready to roll away from the table after our huge meal, which culminated with fried bananas and honey.

Monday morning, Regina had her piano lesson so Dieter assembled a good breakfast including my fruit tea and lachs (smoked salmon) for the Brötschen. Upon Regina’s return, we hopped back in the Caddy and headed up to the state of Hesse (where Hessians come from) and toured the Kloster Eberbach. (Video will be up soon. Keep checking.) The monastery was started in the 1100s, and finally went secular in the late 1800s. It is noted for its variety of wines. In fact, the lay brothers’ dormitory became a pressing room! Many indoor scenes for the film version of Humberto Eco’s book, The Name of the Rose, were shot at Eberbach. Imagine, I was in rooms where Sean Connery (and Christian Slater, in his screen debut) once trod!

Kloster Eberbach Monastery

After a visit to the gift shop (where the primary “gifts” available are bottles of the monastery’s wines!), we drove along the Rhein River to Rüdesheim, a very charming, very touristy river town noted for the famous Drossgasse, a narrow alley lined with restaurants and shops hawking tourist junk. We had lunch in a place with an outdoor eating area, which, I believe, is the same place I ate at with my relatives during my first backpacking trip in 1985.

We took the two-person cable car up to the Niederwald Denkmal, a mammoth statue of Germania overlooking the Rhein valley below. It was erected by one of the Kaiser Wilhelms in the 1800s, during his drive to unite the various Germanic principalities into one country. Dieter and Regina scoffed at the patriotic jingoism of the inscriptions, while I noted that Germania was having a very bad hair day. We took a half hour to walk back down to Rüdesheim, passing through vineyards and sampling the grapes along the way. Most were the blue variety and were very sweet. It looks like 2008 will be a good year for Rhein wine.

Now back in Darmstadt, Regina is preparing a soft cheese dinner comparable to baked brie. It smells great! I’ll keep you posted on our adventures. Now it’s dinner time.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.