Arrival
Originally published July 5, 2017.
There’s an old superstition that if you see actor Henry Winkler in an airport bathroom, you’re in for a great European vacation. (Don’t bother looking it up. Just trust me on this one.)
My unforgettable two weeks in Europe got off to an auspicious start when I met the aforementioned actor in the men’s room at LAX. For the more seasoned TV viewers, that’s Arthur Fonzarelli from Happy Days (or for my millennial friends, that’s Jean-Ralphio’s dad from Parks and Recreation and the hilariously incompetent family lawyer from Arrested Development). Probably unaware that he was a harbinger of good fortune, he did me the honor of asking me if the touchless faucets were working for me, which I figure is celebrity-speak for a warm greeting.
With my trip properly blessed by the gods of travel, my hearty band of travelers—myself, my mom, my 18-year-old sister Abby, and my 16-year-old brother Quinn—traveled to Stockholm, Sweden. We didn’t get much of a good look at the country outside the airport windows, but it seemed like a pleasant place. From Sweden we went to Munich. Our first minor hiccup of the trip came when I couldn’t figure out which button in German disengaged the parking brake on our rental car, but crisis was averted and we found our way to a pleasant little hotel on the outskirts of Munich. We would only stay here one night, but we would return to Germany later in the trip.
In the morning we sampled the local bakery and found, to our delight, that German pretzels are made from fairy dust and children’s laughter, in addition to regular flour and salt. No pretzel I’ve ever had is as good as the pretzel bread I had that morning in Munich. We set out toward Switzerland, stopping at two castles on the way. Lichtenstein Castle was notable because, as the tour guide informed us, it once housed the guy who invented the pretzel. Since said baked bread product was still warming our bellies, we were infinitely grateful for that guy’s contributions to culinary science. Next we visited Hohenzollern Castle, a grand fortress looming over a wooded hill. It’s a stately edifice, still in use for ceremonial functions and even a summer camp for needy German children, but as far as we could tell its owners have yet to make contributions to the field of pretzel-making. Keep trying, guys.
This is Hohenzollern Castle. Europe just has castles lying around everywhere like we Idahoans have old tractors.
Switzerland
That night we slept in Zurich, Switzerland. We wandered the streets around sunset, appreciating the cleanliness and friendly people. The public parks have giant chess sets full of old men of various ethnicities squatting around with looks of intense concentration. Some of them broke concentration long enough to look at us funny when we used the giant chess pieces to play a rousing game of checkers, the uncultured Americans that we were. (In case you’re wondering, I soundly defeated my little brother Quinn.)
From Zurich we headed into Switzerland with the vague intention of finding something called Trift Bridge, a suspension bridge over a 300-foot gorge. For a few hours we corkscrewed around winding mountain passes, each successive turn bringing us to quaint alpine vistas that looked more and more like our mental image of Switzerland. After driving our car past several no-vehicles-past-this-point signs (they were in German, so cut us some slack, please), we found out that the the bridge was only reached via several hours of hiking. After two hours, some ominous-looking stormclouds started to roll in. A seasoned-looking Swiss hiker warned us to turn back, but we pressed on, undaunted, and reached the bridge late afternoon. (They were Swiss stormclouds, after all, so they never really threatened anybody.)
Trift Bridge is a dizzying suspension bridge over a yawning expanse of granite and icy water far below, the kind that conjures up completely irrational images of crocodiles snapping below, a la Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, because most things make me think of pop culture references. My pride compelled me to cross the bridge before my mom and younger siblings, but I did it slowly and while repeating I am not afraid of this under my breath.
Not pictured: certain death far below. I'm not lying whenI say that one of Google's search suggestions for Trift Bridge was "trift bridge deaths."
We stayed that night above Lauterbrunnen Valley, a picturesque Rivendell of a community where the cliffs are practically pinstriped with gorgeous flowing waterfalls. A cable car brought us to our destination, Gimmelwald, a hamlet of less than a hundred people inaccessible by road. The Hotel Mittaghorn, our sleeping accommodations for the next two nights, was a creaky three-story building run by a mostly deaf old Swiss gentleman named Walter Mittler, where the shower was a coin-operated contraption located in one of the other rooms. Whatever inconvenience the showering situation presented, it was more than remedied by the realization that we had wandered into a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle. Our front porch was a portal to another world, a titanic panorama of natural majesty whittled from the bare rock by a masterful Creator.
Anyway, here's the view from our balcony.
The next day began with a morning run up the trail to the neighboring town of Mürren and continued with a hike down from the Männlichen station down to the resort town of Wengen. That hike provided us with our most stunning view yet. Because I’m the super cultured type who occasionally takes a break from books with titles like Monster Hunter Nemesis and Star Wars Battlefront: Twilight Company long enough to delve into great literature, I likened it to a passage from Frankenstein, where the eponymous doctor wanders the Alps in search of solace after abandoning his creation:
"Still, as I ascended higher, the valley ... was augmented and rendered sublime by the mighty Alps, whose white and shining pyramids and domes towered above all, as belonging to another earth, the habitations of another race of beings."
The endless vistas helped me gain a newfound appreciation for the glories of the natural world—and for the powers behind them. It’s hard not to look out on the majesty of creation and not feel some small measure of reverence. Even the most avowed heathen feels it, even if they don’t choose to ascribe it to the same source I do. There’s no doubt that the mighty glaciers and jagged peaks and filaments of water cascading down the sheer face of the mountain were created by natural processes, nothing unexplainable by science, and yet to me the evidence of a supreme Creator isn’t in the sights themselves but in the irrepressible, undeniable deference to the divine we feel when we gaze upon their wonders.
Or maybe, to paraphrase Paul Bettany’s Chaucer in A Knight’s Tale, sights like these are far too rare to cheapen with heavy-handed words. So here's another picture.
No caption needed.
Germany
But I digress. We left Gimmelwald after two days, sad to have spent far too little time in so heavenly a place. We hit the road to Germany again, stopping at the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen. I’m not ashamed to admit it—I’ve always had a weird fixation with the glory days of lighter-than-air travel. There’s a stately grace to an airship that no fixed-wing aircraft can equal. Or maybe their abrupt departure from public use early last century earned the airship a permanent place on the shelf of mankind’s most tantalizing might-have-beens. Whatever it is, I’d have loved to board one and see the world from within that rumbling chariot of steel and cotton fabric. At least until its gas cells caught fire and exploded and everyone aboard died a horrible death—which, as the museum informed me, was pretty much what zeppelins liked to do from time to time. (You can’t have everything, I guess.)
And so we were back in Munich—for a few days this time. It's a clean, orderly city. A sprawling park near our Airbnb provided a place for us to run every morning, and the fish market in the middle of town afforded us a pleasant place to eat. The town center is home a various cathedrals and medieval-looking buildings. One of the most arresting sights for me was a glass casket in an alcove in St. Peter’s Church, where the bones of a saint named Munditia are coated in jewels. She died a martyr at the hands of the Romans. Hundreds of years later, the Pope decided that dying a martyr was a pretty swell thing to do for the Church, so he showed his appreciation by having her bones plastered with shiny rocks. (If it doesn’t work for me to be frozen in carbonite when I die, Han Solo-style, I would like my next of kin to consider a similar method of interment. Maybe have a bake sale at the funeral to pay for it.)
St. Munditia: rest in bling.
While in Munich we visited Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, now converted to a sobering memorial and museum. More on that later. It should be noted, however, that we saw Henry Winkler for the second time there. Seriously, what are the odds? The Fonz followed me from Los Angeles to Germany. I thought about approaching him, but there are probably better places for that than outside a Nazi barracks. Regardless, I took it as an omen that our trip was still blessed by the travel gods.
Two nights in Munich later and we were on our way to Vienna. For this we ditched the rental car and took a train. A multi-country European train ride is something everyone should experience at least once, so we did. More than enough for our liking.
Austria
I had heard a lot of favorable things about Vienna, and for the most part it didn’t disappoint. Most of the things people recommended to me when I asked about Vienna dealt with Mozart or The Sound of Music, which are both things I have only a distant, detached appreciation for. So I wasn’t in Vienna to visit any Julie Andrews sites or embed myself in the classical music scene, but there was still plenty to do. For instance, there was the ice cream.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had whatever Viennese ice cream we had, but to say it is the best dessert ever created by the hand of man is to slightly undersell it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the recipe included ground-up Prozac with a sprinkling of that really good cocaine that movie stars take. I may never love a woman like I loved that strawberry ice cream.
This ice cream is fluffier than a box of poodles. And way more tasty.
Months before, my mom, sister and I decided to partake of some real Vienna cultural experience, and I saw that Swan Lake was playing at the Vienna State Opera House, so that seemed like as good an idea as any. For Mom and Abby, this turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip—to see world-class dancers exhibiting nearly inhuman levels of athleticism and grace, accompanied by one of the finest orchestras Europe has to offer. I appreciated everything about it, but it was three hours. I mean, three hours. If I'm gonna watch something for three hours, there better be hobbits destroying a ring in there somewhere. If you don’t know the story—and I still wouldn’t, if I hadn’t read the helpful synopsis in the program, because there’s zero dialogue—Swan Lake is the story of a prince in really tight pants who falls for a girl who’s been turned into a swan by an evil magician who turns girls to swans and keeps them in a gigantic magic swan preserve for some reason. Prince Tight Pants promises to break the spell by falling in love with her, but the evil magician tricks him into falling for her doppelgänger, a mysterious black swan. (Which I guess is a risk when you’re in love with a bird.)
Halfway through, I found myself wondering if there was an alternate production I could watch that just had the highlights, like maybe just one of the times the prince did that twirly thing. Still, there were several truly arresting moments, like the dramatic finale, where the famous theme plays (you know the one, you’ve heard it) and the hapless prince is swept away by a flood conjured by the evil magician, his tragic fate accented by the thrilling swells of the music.
Here's the opera house. I didn't take any pictures of the actual performance. I'm pretty that would be punishable by death.
We went to church in Vienna. Mom convinced me to depart from my preferred travel church policy and go to all three hours, which—are you reading, Mom?—turned out to be a good thing, because one of the people we talked to there recommended that we take the train to the neighboring town of Melk, see the abbey there, and then bike back in the direction of Vienna.
We took our fellow traveler’s advice. Melk Abbey sits atop an outcrop of rock overlooking the Danube. Our favorite feature was its expansive, elegant library, the kind of thing Belle from Beauty and the Beast would really fall in love with a giant hairy buffalo-man for. But the best part was the ride back. We rented bikes and cycled twenty miles or so along the Danube, where every bend in the river concealed a new castle and every pit stop proved to be another charming Austrian town.
Here's me biking by the Danube. This is just before I was passed by another pair of extremely fit septuagenarian cyclists.
Our last night was spent in the Klastergastof Raitenhaslach, a mouthful of a monastery partially converted into a lovely hotel. There were no monks in sight while we were there, but upon checking out our hosts proudly presented us with some monk-brewed beer. None of our party are beer drinkers, but our hosts were so earnest that we didn’t dare reject the gift. We ended up giving both bottles to our very appreciative taxi driver. He didn’t speak much English, but I guess the gift of alcohol is a universal language.
The monastery took a leaf from Gaston's book, using antlers in all of their decorating.
The journey home would have benefited from another Henry Winkler sighting. Several hours on a train took us back to Munich, where we flew to Sweden, then to Malaga, Spain. You can imagine our sheer delight when we checked our itinerary and realized we had a seven-hour overnight layover in Spain before our long transatlantic flight. (It was similar to the delight you might feel if somebody told you it would be necessary to rip off all of your body hair with duct tape, or maybe watch an Adam Sandler movie marathon.) We were already plumb tuckered out (a phrase that leaps inexplicably to mind), but no weariness is enough to make the prospect of sleeping on an airport floor appealing.
We soon traded not sleeping in Malaga to not sleeping on the plane to Los Angeles. And, just like me on the ride back, you’re probably ready to be done with this, so let’s just get to the end.
We made it back an indeterminate time after leaving Germany. Honestly, I have no idea. Between the time change, several trains, and four flights, our journey home lasted anywhere between a day and the length of the entire unabridged works of Tolstoy on audiobook. But in the end we staggered back home to our own beds. Thrilling vistas are nice, but sleeping in your own bed after a long journey, it turns out, has a certain thrill of its own.
Afterword: Dachau
It seemed a sacrilege to sandwich my experiences at the former Nazi concentration camp between jokes about funeral bake sales and ice cream cocaine, so there's one more section this post, presented out of chronological order.
This arresting sculpture captures some of the horror we can't afford to forget at Dachau.
The words “Arbeit Macht Frei”—“Work Makes Freedom”—are wrought in iron over the gates of Dachau, after which you stroll through a devastating tableau dedicated almost entirely to man’s utter inhumanity. It’s hard to stomach at times, but it’s worth the visit. At Dachau, the Nazis not only subjected prisoners to hellish conditions, but they also used their victims for human experimentation and denied them the most basic human dignities. It was my second visit to Dachau, but the impact was no less vivid for me.
I don't know which was harder to believe—that my fellow humans were forced to endure such horrors, or that it was other fellow humans that inflicted those horrors upon them. My brief time at Dachau made me reflect, readjust my perceptions of the world around me, and resolve to do what I could next time I saw the chance to keep another Dachau from happening.
There's no denying that such a shift in perception is part of what makes travel appealing. It's not the only reason, of course—who doesn't go for the new cuisine, Instagram-friendly vistas, or the chance to tell stories? I sure do. But I count a trip successful when something happened that forced me to shift my view of the world around me, to add a few strokes to the mental picture I've painted about humanity. That's something no hashtag can accomplish.
