Throwing stones at Poland

Time: 6:29 AM CEST
Location: Way the hell off the map!
Mood: Not sleepy enough to go back to sleep (went to bed @ 10-ish)
Internet availability: What is this thing called the InterWeb?

Okay, so the story left off in Erfurt, location of churches, churches and this house Martin Luther stayed at. Getting to these locations meant more driving through the city. Yea! All right, not yea. How about yikes! Apparently part of socialist city planning included explicitly not putting signs on the streets you’re going to turn on only the street you’’re on. Meaning, if you’re on Johannesstrasse at an intersection and you look up at the street names, you will only see "Johannesstrasse." It’s the way Karl Marx wanted it dammit!!

So the little-GPS-that-could helped, but no street names and some more premature turns led us astray for a bit. Not the least of which was an Eisenbahnstrasse. What is an Eisenbahnstrasse? Well Eisenbahn means train and strasse is street. It’s a street where the inter-city streets runs and people can walk, but the only cars you see are commercial vans and trucks. Now, we didn’t get any obvious, bug-eyed stares as we desperately tried to get back on a more normal street but still, to repeat, yikes.

Okay, so underground parking, Church A, walk to Church B, get a little lost because Mom didn’t bring her handy city map and then walked back to the parking, deciding to drive to the third locale. That drive went a little better in particular because the parking garage we were headed to was the one we had driven around earlier when we were lost. See? Everything worked out!

On to Weimar, featuring buildings owned or occupied by Goethe. Again, no city map, so when we left the state road we had no clue to where to go until we saw some signs. Yeah not the Autobahn, but the smaller state road, which turned out to be a mistake, once we got behind a guy towing a mobile fish stand.

I wish that was a joke, but it was some guy towing an apparent fish stand really slowly.

Once in the city, finding parking was pleasingly insane. There were signs and the first time around we obediently followed them right to the point where the stopped. The second time around the block is where I noticed that the entry was underground. Steeply, sharply down. You’d think they’d give a clue like an arrow pointing downwards or something. The complex was huge, by the way. An entire city block dedicated to two stories of parking under a nice, green park.

Down the street was the main park. Very nice. The garden house of Goethe was... a garden house. The main residence of Goethe... was a house (with a major Greek fetish going on -- multiple white plaster busts of Greek so-and-so’s, three foot in diameter decorating the interior).

And finally a long drive from Weimar, past Dresden towards Görlitz, but turning off just before into Reichenbach.

Going deeper into in the East on the Autobahn, we saw a lot of construction. In Jena was a tunnel into nothing. By that I mean, alongside the current Autobahn was what I took to be a replacement, but it drove into and under at least 3 kilometers of concrete archway. This was half up a mountain side so they weren’t going to build anything on-top of it. It just appeared to be a covered roadway for no good reason. I’d like to come back just o see what the hell the final result will be.

Anyway, past Dresden. The people we’re staying with in Reichenbach are the grandparents of one my Mom’s students. (The student is in her early 20’s, the grandparents are Mom’s age -- yeah that bugged her). Now, Wolfgang, the grandfather, said he'd park by the road after the offramp from the Autobahn and wait for us. Now I thought that was a little weird. Until we met him and he drove us to his house, past... well, you can’t even call them towns, but teeny-tiny groups of houses. This is where the term "Dorf" is appropriate. So we’re deep in the countryside here. Some of the buildings are very new, others are much older, probably the original farms of the area. The settings of Lovecraft stories came to mind as we drove past them.

Have you noticed that my writing is longer when I’m off the InterWeb? Hm.