Weekend Roadtrip – Part One
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008
So a couple of the fellow USACers and I decided to take a road trip this past weekend. The plan was to take our test on Thursday, instead of Friday, then…..1.) Hit Belgium for beers around 10-11pm, 2.) Drive through to Reims and get there early in the morning, check out the cathedral and a champagne tour, 3.) Head to the D-Day beaches Friday night, 4.) Check out Mont St. Michele early Saturday, 5.) Then head to Amsterdam for Saturday night and Sunday morning/afternoon before returning to Hamburg to drop off our car by 6pm.
As with most things in my life, I had it planned out rather well. Unfortunately, as with most things in my life, the plans never turn out right, and this was no exception. It all started with missing our train after our test. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except we just BARELY missed it. By like 5 seconds. Julian and Keith made it on the train, but Keri, Theresa, and I didn’t. Not wanting to wait for the next train (leaving in a half hour), we checked out our options and saw that there was another train leaving for the station across the street in 2 minutes, so we raced over there. Theresa and I made it on with some time to spare, but Keri was a little farther behind. Thank God for the nice train lady, she held the train up until Keri could get on. I don’t know if Keri could have handled missing two trains, especially since she ran all the way to both of them.
Anyways, we ended up in Hamburg several minutes after Julian and Keith, so we met them at the Avis office. We ended up with an Audi A3 Sportback, which had more room than we thought. Thank God, because the rest of the trip wouldn’t have gone very well. After loading up the car, Julian tried getting out of the parking lot, but was unable to get the car into reverse. So after having Keith change gears from the backseat, we were off. We had surprisingly little trouble getting out of Hamburg, but as soon as we got out, we found ourselves stuck in traffic. We ended up taking stupid pics because we stopped in the same spot for about 10 minutes. Keith, being as impatient as he is, wanted desperately to get off at the exit that we had been sitting about 100 feet away from for the last 15 minutes. Everyone agreed, not knowing how badly my plans tend to get fucked up. All types of weird scenarios were going through my head of what was going to happen, but that’s the fun of road trips, right? We ended up driving around the back roads for a while, but thankfully, due to my awesome navigating skills, we ended up back on the highways, going the right direction, on the other side of the traffic jam. That would be the only good news for the rest of the night….
Around midnight, we found ourselves in Luxembourg City, with everything closed, and no one around. It kind of looked like what I’d think the city post-apocalypse would look like. Foggy, empty, run down… We ended up seeing 5 people in the 2 hours we were lost in the city. We had fun pretending they were zombies in our post-apocalypse scenarios. We stopped for gas, since it was only 99 cents/L for diesel, and got off the main highway. I don’t know how, but I think Luxembourg City has it’s own gravitational pull. No matter how much we tried getting away, we found ourselves right back in the city center. I think the population of Luxembourg City is just people who driving through and weren’t as lucky as us in finding a way out. They probably gave up and just decided to stay. After hours of trying, we somehow made our way out of the city center, but still found ourselves unable to find a main highway and leave the country. Every time we got away, we came upon a fork in the road, both ways leading to Luxembourg City (were we just came from) and both ways had different km distances. We finally made it out, without driving straight through fields like I had wanted to. I didn’t trust the highways. It reminded me of the movie Labyrinth. And Belgium wouldn’t be any better.
There is a lot more, so I’m going to break it up into 2 or 3 posts….
mrnational
