March ARB, CA, to Germany and back in 50 days.

We did not go to Europe last year because of medical problems and were later than we wanted this year for the same reason. As it turned out we missed some bad weather. I sent out my sign up letters about 7 weeks before we planned to leave for the trip over and the sign ups for the trip back after we got there. I signed up using takeahop.org except for March where I signed up in person. I live just across the freeway from March.
On 13 June we caught the regular scheduled Friday bird that goes to Dover-Ramstein-Sandbox and returns every Tuesday from Ramstein. March always gives the number of seats as 10 but the bird was empty and they took all who showed up, about 15. We had hoped to go all the way to Ramstein on it and asked to be manifested thru but they could not. Dover would release the seats for the next leg. As it turned out, they did not release any seats because of hazardous cargo. I explained to the pax reps that I had spent 4 years hauling hazardous cargo to people who were very emphatic about not wanting it. To no avail. It was about 2AM Sat. and the NCOIC called the hotel and found that they had a room for us. He was going off duty and was kind enough to give us a ride to the hotel and even helped us with our baggage. I reserved a room for three days.
While at Dover I tried to log on to pepperd.com both on the computers in the terminal and the hotel but it was blocked. I don’t know why. The hotel has wifi in the lobby. At McGuire they have wifi throughout the terminal and I logged on to pepperd.com with no problem.
There were no flights to Germany on Sat. or Sun. but there was a C-5 to McGuire Sunday with a 1700 show time. I called McGuire and found that the same C-5 was going on to Ramstein after taking on cargo. We got on with about 6 people and were booked through to Ramstein so we did not have to take our luggage off at McGuire. About 30 people got on at McGuire so we had plenty of seats and we both had a row of three seats to try to sleep in.
At Dover Sunday we had a show time of 1700 and did not want to wait in the terminal so stayed in our room until the cleaning maid showed up on our hall about 1400 and then went to check out. The girl at the desk said I would have to pay for Sunday night because we were late checking out. I explained we had not delayed the maid and had checked in very late. She would not budge and said if I did not check out I could use the room if I did not make the flight. So I kept the key card. I found out when I checked my credit card that they also charged me for Monday night when I was staying in the BOQ at Ramstein. So I got charged 4 nights for a room I used one and one-half nights.
The Dover Inn is about a mile from the terminal. It is across the freeway so you have to exit the base and re-enter on the other side. After the check point it is about 100 yards, left and left again. The building across the parking lot from the lobby has a fitness room. Behind that building is a small BX annex. The golf club house is across the street and they serve breakfast and lunch.
At Ramstein we got a suite in a building near the mess hall and Chili’s for two nights. I picked up my car in Ramstein Village and we went to Spangdahlem to rest up. We made some trips to Trier and Luxembourg and had a really nice stay. The hotel is brand new and very nice. It has eathernet connections to the internet free in every room. We had to extend our stay every three days but had no problem.
Before I left home I called my cell phone provider and got the unlock code for my phone. After I picked up my car at Ramstein village I looked for an Aldi grocery store to buy a sim card. I did not find Aldi but went to a Penny Market and they sold sim cards. The lady at the register was kind enough to call in to activate it after I inserted the card and used the unlock code. The only problem was the phone co. wanted an address. I gave my room number and they said that was not a valid address. Finally they accepted it when told that I was a tourist and would be living in hotels. I paid EUR 10 for the card and it had about 65 minutes I think. I never did use all of it. I could reload at any Penny market. I had my laptop with me with Skype installed. I bought $10 credit with PayPal and made almost all my calls on Skype. I called the States numerous times and many calls in Europe and still had about $4.00 left. At 2 cents a minute you can talk a lot for $10. I had an internet connection almost every where we stayed.
As a retiree, if you have a medical problem in Germany, do not expect any help from the military medical facilities. They will not even talk to you. You have to use German medical care. You may have to pay up front and file a claim to Tricare for a part of the cost. I had to make use of it and am still trying to pay for the ambulance by bank transfer. It is difficult to settle bills once you are back in the States.
As a retiree I could not use the commissary or BX so one of the first things we did at Spangdahlem was to go to a big supermarket in Bitburg, near Spang, and stock up on good thing to eat. We bought good German roggen brot (rye bread), several kinds of raw, cured ham, wurst, drinks, fruit, and two paring knives. It was cherry and strawberry season and we ate lots of them.
After 10 days at Spangdahlem I called the American Arms Hotel in Wiesbaden and reserved a suite for 3 days on a weekend. You can almost always get a room on the weekend. Monday morning I was waiting at the door of Reservations when the lady came to work and was able to extend our stay until the next Sunday. The hotel is run by the Army and is almost downtown. It has wifi in every room. You can walk to the main shopping street in 15 minutes. A continental breakfast comes with the room and there is an Italian restaurant for lunch and dinner. We usually had lunch downtown. Sometimes we bought bread, hams and wurst and ate in our room. We went to a wine village named Frauenstein just outside Wiesbaden for lunch at the Winzerhaus. Great German food and wine. Keep going uphill thru Frauenstein to the top of the hill and there is a left turn to the golf course. Just around the turn is the Foresthaus, another great place to have lunch. We bought enough wine to last about 3 weeks. There is a Bavarian restaurant in the basement of the Rathaus (courthouse) that has tables outside on the Market Square. It is a very pleasant place to have lunch and has excellent beer. The pedestrian shopping street is Kirschgasse and can be found by walking down hill from the hotel and then up hill without turning. When you reach Kirschgasse, turn left and you will find my favorite shop. I wish I had one next door. It is called Schlemmermyer and sells every kind of smoked and cured meat. Dozens of kinds of wurst and several kinds of cured, raw hams such as Parma, Süd Tirol, Schwarzwald, (Black Forest), and others from Spain and France. My favorites are Süd Tirol and Parma. Süd Tirol is best with butter and rye bread and Parma is best with butter and a white brotchen (roll). As a snack when sipping wine, I love the hard, smoked blütwurst (blood wurst). If your mouth does not water when you walk in, you are not normal. One day we went for lunch to the Domaine Mechthildshausen. It is an old farm likely from the time of Napoleon. It is huge and houses horses in one section and is sill a working farm. It has its own wines and sells fresh produce in one of its halls. It has a gourmet restaurant as well as a wine café. It is very impressive. To reach it, go toward the Wiesbaden Air Base and when you get to the roundabout at the gate, turn right. You can’t miss it. It also has its own butcher shop where you can buy its cured hams. They hang from the ceiling. It was the only air conditioned place I saw in Germany.
After 8 days we had to move on. Our reservation in the Edelweiss Hotel in Garmisch-Partenkirchen started on Sunday so I topped off the Opel Astra station wagon and off we went. We went east past Wurtzburg and turned south on autobahn 7 to Ruette, Austria and then east to Garmisch. No trucks are allowed on the autobahn on weekends but the highway was full of Netherlanders pulling camper trailers heading south for vacation. Fortunately, not many were taking autobahn 7 so we had an easy drive with very little traffic going south. The Opel was a 1.6 liter diesel with a 6 speed stick shift. It was very easy to drive and had a nice short gearbox. I drove my normal 75 mph and, of course, was the slowest thing on the road. I had reserved a Ford Escort type station wagon and they did not have that class so they moved me up one. I had to turn it in on Tuesday and after seeing where the hotel was I decided we needed a car. I had another reservation for the end of our time there and just moved it up. (I used Charter USA). The car I had was having fuel pump problems so they gave me another and upgraded me again to an Opel Zafari, a 1.9 liter diesel with a 6 speed shift. For some reason it was cheaper. It was pretty big but very efficient. I figured out my fuel miles per gallon and it was about 40MPG for both cars. That was nice since diesel cost about $10 per gallon and gas costs more. I have a Mercedes 300SD and it gets about 20MPG and diesel cost $5 so it cost me the same per mile in Germany as I pay at home. The first thing you notice in Germany is there are lots and lots of very small cars. Most have engines of less than 2 liters, are diesel, and weigh less than 2000 pounds. Some are them are cubes and seem too high for their length. We saw one upside down on the autobahn and it looked like he got airborne and landed on the roof. I checked the specs on the Mercedes A-class and it will go 110MPH. That is how fast they drive it. Even the larger cars have small engines. I saw Mercedes E and S Class that in the US have 3 liters or more and in Germany they have a 2 liter engine. The road tax in Germany is determined by horsepower. That may be a factor as well as the gas price.
The Edelweiss Hotel is really beautiful. If you have not been there you can go to their web site and see it. We had a room on the third floor on the front of the hotel with a view to the mountains. The advantage of the third floor is that you have very high ceilings as it conforms to the slope of the roof. We had a balcony, they all do, and I spent lots of time sitting out there sipping wine and watching the para-gliders sail around up over the mountains. There were good updrafts and some of them came down to land only when they got hungry, I guess. Years ago we were vacationing in the Alps and I was sitting on our balcony watching the para-gliders. I saw one trying to find an updraft and he sailed under a small cumulus cloud and up into it he went. A couple of minutes later he was spit out the side of it about 3000 feet higher with some of his shroud lines over one end of his canopy. He was spinning rapidly and falling fast. He disappeared into the trees and if he survived he found out what every pilot knows: there is vigorous convective activity in cumulus clouds.
As nice as the hotel is, it has some faults. There is no micro in the room. There is a coffee maker and a small, and I mean small fridg. It would hold two bottles of wine and a liter of coke and a little wurst. The first thing I did was get on my knees and find the temp control and turn it full cold. I saw some smart people unloading coolers, a must if you have kids. Each room has two queen sized beds. The hotel has high speed internet but they want $10 for 24 hours or $50 for a week. If you get your password at 1700 you only get 18 hours because it ends at 1100. I used it once. In the BX/commissary area is an espresso café that has free wifi and I used this every 2-3 days to get and send mail and make phone calls. The food in the hotel is not great. In the sit-down restaurant the steaks were excellent but their attempt to cook German dishes were a laugh. We found a small family owned restaurant in a nearby village and had some excellent home cooked German food. There are some excellent places to eat in Old Partenkirchen, such as the Drei Mooren and the Shatten. We also had an excellent lunch at the Post Hotel in Oberammergau.
Since we could not use the commissary, we found a market just 2km from the hotel in the opposite direction from town. It is an EDAKA market and has a meat, wurst and cheese counter so you can order what you want. We bought fruit, bread, buttermilk, yogurt, wurst, ham, drinks, etc. If you like buttermilk, try kafir. The cassocks made it from sour mare’s milk but it is now made from cow’s milk (I hope). There is a deposit on all bottles and in every market is a machine where you can feed in your bottles and it will issue a ticket you can redeem when you check out.
We drove to Munich one day to go to the new museum and had lunch there. The traffic in town is awful and the signage is worse. We were not sure we were at the museum until we walked up the steps and saw a 3 inch sign on the side wall. There is not one polite driver in the town. We also drove over to Mittenwald. The mountain there looks like it is going to fall onto the village. We took some beautiful drives in the mountains around some large lakes. There were places where water was pumped up to a high lake at night and then let run down in the daytime to generate electricity. We drove up to the town of Murnau on the Staffelsee and went to the museum in the castle there. The two lane roads were a pleasure to drive on. They are well marked and it looks like every one was freshly paved. I never saw one pothole on the whole trip to Germany. I don’t know how they do it in the mountains where there is lots of snow in the winter.
The hotel had tours every day to two different attractions and two bus loads left every morning. We did not take any of them as we had already seen all the places they were going. There were wagon rides from the hotel to town every evening and they were very popular with the kids. And speaking of kids; I didn’t realize how many kids the military families have. The hotel was over run with them, especially at breakfast. Breakfast was the best meal. For $9.00 you had every thing you could want for a typical American breakfast. They even had biscuits and gravy and grits. The evening buffet for $19 was not so great. That is why we ate in town or our room most of the time. We had a few days of rain but we didn’t mind too much as we are from Southern California and seldom get to see rain.
After 16 days it was time to start home so we packed up and left for Ramstein. There were no rooms available on Ramstein and we asked for and got a suite at Sembach. It is our favorite place to stay while in the Ramstein area. It is a base where the runway and hangers/shelters were turned over to the Germans and the Air Force kept the communications facilities, housing, commissary and some other facilities. There are dozens of 3 story, 16 unit apartment houses on top of the hill sitting empty. I don’t know why they don’t use them to house the people from Ramstein as it is only a 15 minute drive north.
We got there on a Tuesday and planned to try to catch the March bird home the following Tuesday. We took some side trips like the one to the Deutche Weinstrasse which runs from Gruenstat to the French border. The town of Didesheim has a famous restaurant where Chancellor Helmut Kohl brought all the heads of state who visited him. There are many pictures of famous people with the chef including Queen Elizabeth and Gorbochov. We had a very nice lunch there and I got my saumagen (sow stomach) card punched. With three glasses of wine, a soup, a water and coffee it was just over $100.
The following Tuesday we packed and checked out but told the desk to hold our suite as we might be back. When we got to the terminal it was bedlam. There were hundreds of people trying to go to the States and most of them seemed to have 2 or 3 kids. Most were Cat III or higher so there was no hope for us. Back to Sembach. We went through the same drill Wednesday. O Thursday the crowd got smaller and there was one C-17 with 101 seats and another with 53. We could have gotten on the last one but there was a non-stop to McCord, WA in the afternoon and we waited for that. We made it and I waited until they called us to board before I dropped the keys to the car in the box. Thirty minutes later we got the bad news: the airplane was broke and would not go until Friday. I quickly got on my cell and called Hertz in Ramstein Village and asked them to get someone out there to give me my keys back as I could see the car still in he parking lot. They did and we went back to Sembach. Friday morning we found out that the plane was hard broke and we were manifested on another C-17 to McCord that was stopping at Dover. We were already manifested to McCord so we did not have to meet roll call and just checked in our baggage. I checked pepperd.com for flights from McCord to Travis but no luck. I checked Whidbey Island and there was a C-40 going to North Island in San Diego on Saturday with 121 seats. We planned on renting a one way car and catching that.
The flight to Dover looked like a big picnic. There were dozens of kids and the mothers spread out blankets and pillows all over the floor. Kids ran around and generally had a good time playing with each other. Many of the women were wives of deployed soldiers traveling on CAT III Plus status. One mother had 4 children, the oldest about 10 and the youngest about 18 mo. She read a book the whole way while the oldest looked after all but the youngest. As soon as we got through customs, I reinstalled my old sim card in my cell phone and started trying to reserve a room in the BOQ in McCord. I could never get them on the phone. I think they were busy registering the week-end trainees. There were not so many people on the plane to McCord and many people made beds on the floor and tried to sleep. It did not work for me. I am too old and stiff to sleep on a steel floor. The aircraft looked like a slumber party. I was the only one upright. I talked to the load master and told him about our plans. One of the other passenger’s wife also talked to him and he told me that this couple was trying to do the same as us. I talked to the man, an O-6 in the Marines, and we agreed to share a rental car to Whidbey Island the next morning to catch the Navy flight to North Island. By the time we arrived at McCord the terminal was closed and we got our baggage and was looking for a telephone number for a taxi. The O-6 had DV quarters but could not help us lower ranking folks. As often happens, a fellow space A traveler came to our rescue. From Dover I had made a reservation at a Hotel in Tacoma. A couple we met at Ramstein lived near Tacoma and offered to give us a ride to our hotel as it was on their way home. The next morning the O-6 and his wife picked us up in a rental car and off we went to Whidbey Island. It was further than we thought and we raced the clock to get there. We made it and got seats on the C-40. A great airplane after the C-17. A real airline type. We arrived in North Island about 1800, too late to rent a car on the island as they closed at 1730. I called Hertz from Whidbey and they quoted me a price of $200 from San Diego Airport for a one way car to Riverside because every thing was closed on the weekend and we could not turn in the car until Monday. Again, the fellow travelers saved us. The O-6 and his wife had a car at North Island and lived in a city near our home at March and offered us a ride home. And so on 2 Aug 08 we arrived home after 50 days with many memories good and bad of our trip but it was worth it.