(Thursday, Sept. 24) After a quick breakfast at Hotel Etol, we hauled our bags down to the lobby and jumped into a taxi for a fifteen minute ride to the Baden-Baden train station. We had learned that Mikel Gorbachev had purchased property in Baden-Baden and that many Russians lived and visited there. Our friendly cab driver told us he had lived in Russian, but (big surprise) liked living in Baden-Baden much better.
The trains of the Deutschebahn German National Railway generally run right on time and usually only spend two-five minutes at any stop along their routes. Train number 76 had left Zurich, Switzerland about 8:00 am, pulled into Baden-Baden at 10:31, left promptly at 10:33, and arrived in Frankfurt and hour and twenty minutes later.
We had an hour and half layover at Frankfurt’s busy main train station, giving us time to stow our luggage in a locker, wander around and check out the dining options (mostly fast food or cafeteria style dining), discover that our First Class Railpass didn’t entitle us to use the DB First Class passenger lounge, and then sit out in the station platform area with the hoipoloi and munch on curry wraps for lunch before boarding train 124 bound for Amsterdam.
After a brief stop at the Frankfurt airport, the train headed west through rolling farmland, at times hitting speeds of around 267 KPH (about 165 MPH), or just a little faster than the Porsches and Mercedes 500 class sedans rocketing down the Autobahn that paralleled the rail line. But we ran into some sort of snag at Koln, got stuck there for 19 minutes, and never made up the time, even though we still had around three hours left of rail travel left before reaching Amsterdam. I guess the train controllers wouldn’t let the engineer put the throttle all of the way down, because our average speed during the rest of the journey didn’t match that during the first hour of so after leaving Frankfurt.
The ride was originally quite smooth out of Frankfurt even though we were flying along the rails so fast that the train appeared to levitate, so I was able to type up some notes of our adventures over the past few days. But later the train swayed and lurched so much that the word-processing program would suddenly close, reformat the document, or cause typos. Finally about 4 pm I threw in the towel, and left it to Cindy try to figure out how to close the multiple copies of the document that somehow had been opened during the last frustrating over of pounding away on the netbook.
We arrived in Amsterdam at rush hour, discovered that the rather old and outdated station was a madhouse of commuters, and had to walk a long way to get around a barricade surrounding construction of a new subway north-south subway line in order to find the taxi queue. Our taxi driver wasn’t from Eastern Europe, but probably hailed instead from one of the areas in which the Dutch East Indies Company operated.
When we got to our hotel, he had to drag our bags up a short, steep set of steps, and repeatedly press the buzzer to be let into the lobby where no one was manning the desk. Finally, Hans, our landlord, came down to the lobby from some higher floor in the hotel, grousing about the damn demanding hotel guests. We quickly learned that his off-putting mannerisms was just part of the quirky sense of humor he’s developed over his forty-years in the hotel business to help him keep a sensible perspective on what is important in life while having to deal with the occasional total pain in the butt customer.
Hans showed us to our room, and then came back a few minutes later with a bowl of cashews and two glasses of delicious peach-flavored French sparkling wine to welcome us to Amsterdam and his hotel. After unpacking and showering, we walked a half-dozen blocks or so to a “restaurant row”, opted not to eat at the Hard Rock Café, and instead had a nice dinner of steak (and a hamburger for Cindy) and fries with great service at another place in the same general area. I preceded dinner with a shot of very smooth local Dutch gin, and had a warm class of French cognac as a digestive, all to celebrate having a five night and four day break from traveling.
