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A small German town near Frankfurt.
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May 2003, Andernach Germany: Well, moving out of our apartment in SLC and almost missing our plane to NYC nearly killed us, but we survived so it must have made us stronger-right? In any case, we made it to Germany with all nine pieces of luggage, even though we missed our scheduled connecting flight from Paris to Frankfurt because Air France had arrived an hour late. Before we left Paris, we tried using Danielle's old French phone card to tell the limo driver picking us up in Frankfurt about our delayed arrival, but the card was either out of time or had expired. Since we didn't have any Euros yet, we had to charge our call to a credit card, which ended up costing $35 for a 1-minute call. Ouch!
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Hotel Alte Kanzlei.
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Once in Germany, we didn't even go through customs--no one was there. We quickly found our driver, and managed to squeeze all of the luggage into his car. We were so exhausted from our moving ordeal and the long trans-Atlantic flight that we both struggled to remain conscious during the drive from the airport to Andernach. Intermittent glances at the speedometer during our brief moments of consciousness told us that our driver liked to fly down the autobahn in his Mercedes Benz station wagon at speeds of up to 185 kph (~115 mph), whenever there was enough open road. After exchanging only a handful of words with us, he dropped us off at our hotel in Andernach-The Alte Kanzelei. Of course there wasn't an elevator in the +300 year old building, so Danielle and I lugged all of our very heavy bags (still had all 9 of them!) up the creaky old stairs to the 3rd floor of the hotel, at the very end of the hall to our room (the nicest in the hotel--a two-room, recently-remodeled suite).
Mostly for simplicity, we decided to eat dinner in the hotel restaurant, which was in the hotel's basement. The restaurant was as full of character as the hotel was. Like all of the hotel's interior, it is mostly wood (rare for Germany), with low indirect lighting, antique décor, and pewter plates-rustic, yet very nice. The meals were fairly pricey, but the picture-perfect presentation of the food alone was worth half of the cost. I had an excellent roasted duck (house specialty) and Danielle had a very good Red Snapper filet. Unfortunately, the dessert looked much better than it tasted. The only unpleasant part of the meal (check excluded) was the smoking couple next to us-we're not in Utah anymore!!
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Alte Kanzlei restaurant.
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Even though it was approaching 10:00pm by the time we finished our meal, it was still fairly light outside so we took a quick walk around a nearby square. Exhausted, we soon returned to our room to sleep, since I had to be to work the next day at about 8:30 am.
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