Dotson European Vacation 2007

18 May 2007

Americans just love to drive

Posted by tjdotson under: Planning stages .

Germany and Switzerland have a lot of different cities and regions.  Stating the obvious?  Yeah, well, it wasn’t to me until I started trying to decide where in these countries this fearless traveller wanted to go.  Most people say, “Yes, I am going on holiday to Germany.”  That immediately conjures up images of gigantic steins of beer and cuckoo clocks.  That doesn’t tell me a particular place that I should visit to drink a beer the size of my head and buy a cuckoo clock.  So again, I yank out my maps.  We decided to actually drive from the Netherlands to Switzerland via Germany for many reasons:

1. We are Americans, we can’t go two weeks without using up a nice supply of gasoline.
2. We are Americans, we pack a lot of crap to travel across the ocean.  They just don’t have any stores over there and heaven forbid that I get caught without my favorite brand of shampoo.
3. The toddler factor.  On a train, we have to worry about her screams waking up the disgruntled Frenchman next to us.  The French always seem disgruntled to me.  If we drive, we can travel on our schedule and just turn the radio up loudly to drown out the incessant pleas for juice and Goldfish crackers. 
4. We can see more scenery that way.  We chose to drive around Ireland the last time we went to Europe and just being in the car watching the countryside go by was one of the best parts of the trip.  We stopped at a lot of little places along the way that otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to on a train or in a plane. 

By tracing an imaginary route from Amsterdam to Switzerland, I looked to see what was along the way.  About 4 to 5 hours from Amsterdam was a city called Heidelberg.  I liked the name, sounds pretty German to me.  I looked it up in my handy-dandy Eyewitness travel guide and noticed that it was a college town with a castle.  Excellent!  Our schedule also happened to accomodate the biggest fireworks display of the year over the castle.  We’ve got to see that. 

Deciding where to stay within Heidelberg was the next question.  I am finding that a lot of cities in Europe have “old towns” and that is where a lot of the quintissential charm hides out.  Heidelberg is mostly a walking town so I wanted to position us close to the old town section and preferably near the river.  Why near the river, I don’t know, it just seemed like a good idea.  Since Mom would be with us at that point I was interested in finding a “hotel” that had family rooms.  It’s a cheaper way to go than getting two different rooms while at the same time, providing some much needed privacy.  I went back and forth for months between various hotels, reading a gazillion reviews online and sending numerous emails to the establishments.  I finally settled on the Hotel Hollaender Hof.  It had the location, room style and price that appealed to me and they had availability.   Now, on to Switzerland…

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