I had some hotel points remaining so we decided to stay a night in the same city and hotel where we spent our first couple of days when we first arrived in Europe in early September 2008.
Our hotel was in the old section of Heppenheim – they gave us the same room we’d stayed in our previous visit – and, as before, we were impressed by the view from our room of the rooftops of the old city.
I had used some hotel points and booked a hotel for two nights in a place called Heppenheim, about 50 km south of Frankfurt, so we fired up our TomTom 920 GPS (more about this in a later post) and went a nearby gas station to top up the tank since a regulation prohibits shipping a car in Europe with its gas tank more than 1/4 full. Shipping the car from somewhere in France (Peugeot factory?) to Frankfurt (or other European destinations) is part of the Auto Europe service for which we have paid a small surcharge.
This trip south was not without its events, most of which reflect poorly on us, but it was our first contact with a German autobahn. Everyone who has visited Europe describes it but its still a new experience to be traveling at 120 km/hr and have a Porsche or Mercedes go by you at 200+ km/hr like you were standing still. Or more startling, to be in the passing lane, checking your rear-view mirror regularly and not seeing any overtaking cars and then suddenly glancing up to have one of these vehicles flashing their high beams at you wanting to get past.
After a short drive made longer by some of the events mentioned above, we arrived at our hotel in Heppenheim and began the process of checking in and getting our car parked in the hotels garage. Even then we were already starting to realize that we couldn’t take anything for granted and that some things are done differently in Germany.
Fortunately, one of the front desk staff at our hotel, the Park Inn, who spoke English very well (we learned the next day that she had visited Canada as part of a student exchange and had a home stay with a Maple Ridge, BC family!)
Heppenheim’s skyline as viewed from our hotel window.
Another view of Heppenheim from our hotel window, this time showing some of the streets of the old part of the city.
Our story begins with our flight from Vancouver to Calgary and then Calgary to Frankfurt. All told about 11 hours flying with the Calgary – Frankfurt leg taking about 9.5 hours. None of us got much sleep – it was hard to get comfortable in the seats. In Allister’s case, the ability to select his own movie was probably the key factor in his insomnia – he claims to have only watched only 3 movies but the rest of us think it was closer to 5 movies. He was in heaven.
Frankfurt is a big airport, second only to Heathrow in the number of flights it handles. It isn’t the largest city in Germany, Hamburg, Berlin, and probably Munich (and likely others) are all bigger but it is central and on most of the major transportation routes so maybe this accounts.
As some may know, we are traveling in Europe by car so the next task after recovering our bags was making contact with Auto Europe, the company that administers the Peugeot buy-repurchase program that is supplying us with a new Peugeot 407 Station Wagon for our trip. Even though you worry that somehow we won’t figure out how to make contact we do and we’re picked up in a van and taken about 20 km away to where our car is parked. We’ll include pictures of the Peugeot later but when we took delivery it had only 11 km on its speedometer – so this really was a new car.
