In 1975 I bought two round trip tickets on Condor Airlines to Frankfort through the German/American Club. A round trip ticket through the club only cost $379 back then. I told Brigetta, my German girlfriend, that I was somewhat leery of flying on some airline that I never heard of. She said if they can afford 747s they can't be that bad. I also bought two Eurail Passes. I received the passes in the mail and there was a little window cut out of the lamination where they would write in the date that we started using the passes which were only good for five weeks.
Brigetta flied to Frankfort a week before me and so I went to the Imperial Terminal at LAX at 2 o'clock in the morning. There out on the tarmac sat this 747 which had the same type fonts as Lufthansa on it's side and the bird on it's tail had it's wings extended up as opposed to Lufthansa's bird with downward wings. It turned out that Condor was Lufthansa's charter subsidiary. Most everyone on the flight were German nationals and spoke little English which was OK with me because I got to practice my newly learned German. Actually my German was actually Swabish a dialect from the Schwarzwald, Black Forest. The flight was very nice considering the airplane was tourist class configured.
When the plane touched down in Frankfort, practically everyone on the plane applauded and broke out singing German songs. I got goosebumps on my arms. It was so moving being on the soil of my fatherland. I picked up my bags at the carousel and went through a set of double doord and was outside. No customs or immigration. I really wasn't used to that.
Brigetta and Helmut her brother-in-law picked met me outside and we climbed into his BMW and got on the Autobahn. We drove about an hour and a half and ended up at Bad Wimpfen, Brigetta's home town. Bad Wimpfen is a picture postcard kind of town with a very old wall running through the town separating the five hundred year old section from the two hundred year old "new section". Brigita's mother had a three story house that was broken up into three, or four, apartments. We ended up sleeping on the second floor.
The next morning I woke up to some clanking outside our window. When I looked out I saw some guy unloading a plastic crate off of a flat bed truck. I asked Brigetta what was going on. She told me that she had told her mother that I was fond of my beer so while we were staying there she was having "the beer man" making deliveries. "Beer man? " I asked. You mean like a milk man? I was starting to really like this place. I would go to the bakery and pickup fresh bread and try out my German speaking skills. I didn't speak high school German like the typical tourist. I actually spoke Swabish like they did only I got looks like maybe I was a bit retarded. I really liked it there.
Finally after a week, or so, we went down to the train station and boarded a train to Koln, Cologne in English. The train conductor filled in the date in the little cut out window and we were on our way. For the next three weeks we roamed all around Europe. After a day's sight seeing, we'd go down to the train station and scan the big board and say things like "If we take the train to Venice we can get a full night's sleep on the train and not have to pay for a hotel room and be ready to play tourist the next day". Which we did most of the time. In the next three weeks we only stayed overnight in Rome, Paris, Barcelona and Amsterdam. These were places that merited more than a superficial stay. All in all we were in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Monaco, Spain, France, Belgium, Holland and maybe a few more countries that I forget right now.
We ended up back in Bad Wimpfen and spending more than a few nights drinking bier with Helmut at the local gasthauses, or taverns. Germany will ruin a poor boy from Cleveland. The good news is it's delicious. The bad news is you can't get it in the USA. The Becks and Lowenbraus you get here aren't even close to the real things. I think it's due to the alcohol level. The bier in Germany is 14% alcohol which must rum some Sunday School teachers the wrong way.
When we were to return to the USA, we didn't have contiguous seats on the airplane. Brigetta told the flight attendant, in German, that we wanted to set together on the flight home. The flight attendant took both of our tickets and said "stand over there". As people boarded the airplane she scanned tickets for where they were sitting. All of a sudden she snatched a ticket out of this guy's hand and said "sit here" and handed him one of our tickets. The guy said OK and went back too his new seat. She handed us our tickets and we flew back to LAX up in the dome of the 747.
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