Frankfurt to Eisenach

Did you know that Louise’s passport was due to expire the day we got to the airport to leave for our 2009 family tour of Germany?

Neither did we, til we handed it over to the lady behind the Qantas counter at Adelaide airport.

Oh the hilarity that ensued! The 15th of May 2009? Goodness, that’s a familiar date! etc. Real Basil Fawlty stuff.

Long story short: me and kids plus luggage did the trip on one day, and poor ol’ Louise had to come over the next day, after begging the passport office for a hasty reissue. Her passport photo is the saddest I have yet seen. She looks like she feels personally responsible for the Black Death.

Anyway, despite her crushing sense of guilt, me and the kids actually had a great flight, and spent quite a pleasant day in Frankfurt overcoming jetlag and waiting for her to show up. They even chased rabbits and made a daisy chain.

I take great pride in the fact that my children are capable of pulling together with enormous patience and fortitude when thing like this happen. I think they might actually like it. It’s times of peace and quiet (read: boredom) when they give me hell. Ah, me.

Frankfurt basically looks like this:

Except for the bits that look like ugly office blocks or tenements but we won’t show those.

Anyway we were only there a day. Louise showed up and it was onward to Eisenach, where the beech trees grow and Bach’s ghost composes sonatas amid the sylvan glades…

Ahem: the view from our hotel. I may have forgotten to mention that in moving the short distance north from Frankfurt to Eisenach, we had moved from West to East. Despite the superficial gloss of unification, everything here was subtly different; cars were slower; rust was redder; weeds grew faster; people were shorter; and pagan beliefs still lurked in the wooded hillsides. One place even still had dial telephones and prices in eastern marks.

But on the plus side, everything was cheaper.  My measly Frankfurt breakfast of ham, bread and bad coffee cost me about 20 dollars. Here, it was more like 15.

Eisenach looks like this:

Similar to Frankfurt, no? Except you probabaly wouldn’t see abandoned car factories in Frankfurt.

But back to the first of the two Eisenach photos. The building Louise and the kids are going into is a place in which Luther once lived and studied as a boy. We gave it a good going over until it was due to close, before poor Louise had to return in haste to the hotel with Erin, after coming down with a wave of fever. She’d been getting them since a few days before we left.

I had no idea they had gone, so Cody and I spent a further half hour waiting for her to come out, and even going back into the closed museum to find her. I was scared she might have fainted in one of the historic rooms, and that Erin was waiting quietly by her side, like the dog on the tuckerbox. In reality, Erin would have been wailing like a banshee if this had happened, but in my mind, she was just sitting there quietly beside her stricken mother.

Eventally, after having scoured the closed museum twice, the staff told me to piss off assured me she was definitely not in there, and we returned to the apartment to find her collapsed on the bed, with Erin watching unintelligible German cartoons in the living room.

Turned out Louise had Fifth Disease (or something very much like it) which knocked her about sporadically for the first two weeks of the trip, and led eventually to us going to the hospital in Dresden to get her sussed out.

So, for quite a few days on the early part of the trip, it was just me and the kids out and about, with poor Louise sleeping it off back at the hotel.

Notable things to do in Eisenach (i.e., the things we did):

- Go the Bachhaus, and learn many things about the life of that famous poet, becoming temporarily knowledgeable, until beer o’clock, when you forget it all. (Louise present).

- Visit the old VW factory, one of the largest in the east (just me and Cody).

- Go to the Wartburg castle, and see the room in which Luther studied and translated the Bible. I already posted about that at the time. (Louise present).

- Walk the narrow Drachenschclucht and get excited about the prospect of seeing a real live salamander (me and the kids).

- Walk some of the Rennsteig, Germany’s longest forest trail, and fantasize about walking more of it when the kids are older (me and the kids).

- Get lost in the ancient Beechwoods that surround the town (Louise present).

Thuringia is great, and there was lots more to do, but too little time. Five days after getting there we were on the train to Dresden.

There are more Eisenach shots on Louise’s facebook page.

Steve.