Germany
Arriving in Frankfurt
The non-stop Lufthansa flight between Portland, Oregon and Frankfurt,
Germany has us going through Frankfurt almost every year. The Frankfurt airport
has a train station in the basement, making it a snap to get into the city or on
to another destination. The downside of Frankfurt (as well as Cologne) is that
it is a frequent host to huge conventions, filling the hotels and driving up
their prices. Since we usually stay at least 1 night in Frankfurt to clear our
heads a bit, we don't want to arrive during a busy time.
Our ritual before booking the Lufthansa flight through
Frankfurt is to check for events by checking hotel availability. The easiest way
we have found to do that is through the Ibis hotel
website: www.ibishotels.com. There are
at least a half dozen Ibis hotels in the city and by checking a couple of the
centrally located ones for prices and availability, you can quickly determine if
there is an event in town. The prices can be wildly different from one day to
the next. We usually check hotel availability for a 3 or 4 day window for both
our expected arrival and departure dates. When we find a quiet window where the
prices are down to their baseline, we proceed with booking our flight. Prices of
course can vary from day to day on flights, so having a bigger window on the
hotel availability cuts down on the need to jump between websites while making
reservations.
Biking
Biking in Germany is great as cyclists are given the
right of way and there are many bike lanes, routes, and paths. BikeLine
makes a wonderful series of route books that unfortunately are mainly available
in Germany though they have routes that extend into other countries. They can be
purchased at bike shops and bookstores. They are beginning to translate some of
their route books from German into English. The maps in the route books are
still worth having even if you don't read German.
Biking along the rivers is a favorite summer activity in
Germany and people flock onto the routes on their 1 or 7 speed bikes for a day,
week-end or week-long trip. Many will bike down stream and take the train back. The
river routes are generally out of traffic, well marked and the usually the only
climbing is for going over rail or road overpasses. The more popular routes have
charming B&B's and beer gardens sprinkled along the routes with signage to
nearby banks
and bike shops.
Just about anywhere a train goes in Germany, you can take a
bike on the train for a fee, usually in the passenger cars of the non-express
trains.
Both Germany and Austria have bike tour companies offering
package deals at affordable prices. I don't know if they are set up for
non-German speakers, but we sure admired the complete services offered in their
catalogs including bike and day pannier rentals, luggage transport, and guides
for some: www.donaureisen.com for
Germany and www.austria-radreisen.at
for Austria.
In 2009 we saw an enticing brochure for self-guided touring around Lake
Constance/Bodensee in southern Germany:
www.bodensee-radweg.com. Their lodging + route info + bike rental + luggage
transfer package would make it easy to drop-in for a 6 day tour without bringing
a bike or buying panniers. They were also promoting
www.donau-radweg.com on the Danube.
www.radweg-hotels.com
was another site on their brochure.
Some lodging establishments hang out "Bett & Bike" banners, indicating
that they are a member of an organization with lodging well-suited to
cyclotourists. Features like not having 3-night minimum stay penalties, having a
secure area for bike storage, and making a drying room available are among the
requirements of members. We stayed a several and found them to be good values.
We didn't buy the books listing each hotel but noticed that they have a website
www.bettundbike.de, in German, no doubt.
Grocery Store Finds
My special treat is a "Radler," which is a
beer cut in half with lemonade so the alcohol content is about 2.5%. "Radler"
translates as "bike rider" so the label will often have a cyclist on it.
We also
look forward to the hearty dark breads throughout Germany and the readily
available muesli cereal.
Near Christmas time
the prepackaged "Lebkuchen" cookies appear in the stores, which are a
moist, gingery cookie. With careful label reading I can usually find a
relatively healthy brand cooked without saturated or trans-fatty acid oils--an unusual
find in prepackaged bakery goods.
Trains
Discounts are available on the German trains and we are just
learning how to access them. We were able to get fares less than half the usual
price by purchasing online more than 3 days in advance for a 1 way trip from
Munich to Frankfurt on the website www.bahn.de.
It appears the the deep discounts are only available on trips of more than 100
km. You do need to board the train with both the credit card you used to buy the
ticket and a hardcopy printout of the online order.
Bikes can travel on many German trains and often special cars allow you to
effortless roll them onto a low car rather than shove them up steep narrow steps
as on many trains. You must buy a ticket for your bike which can often (always?)
be purchased at the same machines when you purchase your tickets at the station
or online.
In Munich we were pleased to find an online trip planner for
using the city transportation network at www.mvv-muenchen.de. We needed to
arrive at the main train station for a Sunday morning departure when fewer local
trains and buses were running so it was great to have a to-the-minute schedule
for changing trains.
We found both of these German websites by searching on the
internet and both had English language options.
Business Hours & Holidays
Only the smallest businesses close for an hour or 2 at
lunch time but many businesses close early on Saturday afternoon and are closed
on Sunday. Some banks close early on Friday afternoon for the weekend also.
www.buyusa.gov/germany is a good site to check for holidays in Germany.www.german.about.com/library/blbraenche-ostern.htm
gives the school holidays, with the 2 week Pentecost holiday for the Catholic
regions of southern Germany being especially important if you are heading to the
Italian lakes and beaches as they are.
Berlin
The Berlin Mitte Ibis hotel rates are quite low in the
winter months. At 49€ for 2 people (February 2006)
without breakfast it was substantially below the youth hostel rates. Its
location near Alexander Platz which has a Kaufhaus with a food market in it made
it very convenient. The rooms were bigger than some of the other Ibis's and our
only regret was the lack of English news on the TV. (www.ibishotels.com)
If you are coming or going through Berlin's Tegel airport
very early or very late, consider staying a night at the Mercure Hotel Airport
Berlin Tegel. It is adjacent to the runway but with very effective soundproofing
windows. The rooms are the best we've stayed in in Europe with comfortable with
good beds, bathtubs, mini-refrigerators, and CNN & BCC on the TV. We took
advantage of their fitness room with 3 pieces of equipment and the free airport
shuttle van. Their Wifi and customer internet terminal are overpriced but we
were able to connect to the internet for free via the room telephone line. It's
too far out of town for a satisfying sightseeing base but great for an overnight
while in transit. Our internet special price on 2 different weekends in March
2006 was 49€ for 2 people without breakfast.
Like Ibis, they are a part of the Accor chain, though a notch up from Ibis in
quality and usually in prices. Email:
h0791@accor.com, Telephone from outside of Germany: 49 30 41 06 0, from
within Germany 030 41 06 0. Address: Kurt-Schumacher-Damm 202, 13405 Berlin. We
didn't know to try it, but you may be able to make a free call for a shuttle
pickup from the airport at the hotel advertising board near gate 7.
Make no assumptions about the Berlin museums. Ever since East
and West Berlin merged, the museums have been playing musical chairs with their
exhibits. Entire museums have been closed, combination ticket deals have been
restructured and open hours have changed. What's housed at a location maybe
entirely different than what is indicated in your guide book and it takes some
persistence to sort out what's available.
We dropped in on Fat Tire Bike Tours at Alexanderplatz to use
their inexpensive WiFi service. The enthusiastic and friendly English speakers
looked like they would be fun bike tour guides. If you'd rather rent a bike and
tour on your own, you can also do that. Berlin is pancake flat and a bike tour
would be a good way to get acquainted with the city and its history.
www.FatTireBikeToursBerlin.com,
Tel: 0049 (0)30 24 04 79 91.
Nuremberg
We enjoyed the "Historischer Kunstbunker" tour of the
14th century beer cellars converted into art preservation vaults during WWII.
Foresighted city fathers started moving cherished works of art underground as
soon as war was declared, almost 4 years before the first air raid sirens
screeched in the city. Objects as well as casts of ceilings and stonework
were also stashed. The same people constructed concrete bunkers around unmovable
objects inside churches and outdoors in the public squares. The underground
storage areas were staffed 24 hours a day by 3 men and were air conditioned and
humidity controlled. The last of the stored art treasures weren't moved out
until the 1970's for lack of reconstructed buildings to return to. The tunnels
can only be visited at 3 pm with a guide. Ask for the very informative English
booklet as the tour is only in German.
We ducked into the "Spielzeugmuseum" or Toy Museum on a lark
after other plans fizzled and thoroughly enjoyed the visit. The substantial
collection with some insightful comments in English held our attention for
hours.
We have visited the "Dokumentationszentrum" at the old Nazi
party rally grounds twice and appreciated the slant they presented on
Nuremberg's place in that dark history. The audio guides deepened our
understanding of the cult created around Hitler and how his organization
carefully maintained parallel policies of keeping a happy, upbeat spin on
affairs before the public eye while simultaneously implementing vicious
segregation and extermination policies.
The much lauded "Germanisches Nationalmuseum" was a major
disappointment. The special exhibits that drew us in the door missed the mark
for us and 3 of the 4 of the permanent exhibits that we looked forward to were
closed.
Visiting Hitler's Eagle's
Nest (2006)
Try to coordinate your visit to the Eagle's Nest or "Kehlsteinhaus"
as it is known in German, with the weather. We unfortunately were in the area in
the middle of a 2 week-long storm system in early August of 2006 and missed the
fine views. The round trip bus fee and admission ticket to the Eagle's Nest from
the nearest departure point, the Documentation Center, is almost 30€ for 2
people and there isn't much to the building up there. It was sited for the
dramatic setting in a cluster of sharp peaks and we saw it shrouded in
clouds. It would be a much more satisfying visit to see the magnificent
panoramas it was intended to capitalize on.
Next time, I would buy a 1 way ticket up to the Eagle's Nest
and save time to walk back down to the Documentation Center to savor the views
even longer.
The Documentation Center at Obersalzberg between
Kehlsteinhaus and Berchtesgaden covers the history of Hitler's regime. It's all
in German so the inexpensive English audio guide is essential. We underestimated
the extent of the audio guide coverage and realized too late that it would take
4-5 hours to hear it all. We listened to over half of the more than 80 different
info points on the guide and then decided in was time to move on to see the
bunker ruins and the Eagle's Nest. The first 15 info points were of the most
interest to us as they explained Hitler's carefully crafted cult, which is key
to understanding how the Nazi's were so successful. Most Nazi exhibits we've
visited focus on the Holocaust without enough emphasis on the backdrop that
allowed it to happen.
The round trip bus tickets between Berchtesgaden and the
Dokumentation Obersalzburg were 8.20 € for 2 and the audio guides and admission
tickets at the exhibit were close to 10€ for 2. The bus schedule that tourist
info gave us had the wrong bus number on it: we were waiting for 849 and really
wanted 838. It's very confusing as there is a stop for 849 at the same place as
838 but neither of the 2 scheduled 849 buses showed up. (Our guide book listed
the old, 4 digit bus numbers.)
