(Wednesday, Sept. 16). After having a final breakfast at our usual café, “robbing” the “Geldbankomat’ (ATM) of yet more Euros, finishing packing our suitcases, and checking out of our hotel a little after 10 am, we took at taxi to the Munich train station where we had arranged to pick up the rental car we’ll be driving for the next eight days. Once again, we went round and round the streets of Munich, dodging traffic and construction zones. If we had little or no luggage we probably could have walked to the station faster than the cabbie drove us there.
Avis handed over the keys to a big BMW “5 Series” station wagon to us. After spending a while figuring out how to start it (it has an ignition system with a “Start/Stop” engine button similar to the one on the Toyota Prius) and operate the turn signals, seat controls, and other gizmos, Cindy drove us out of Munich while I navigated.
A half hour or so later we pulled off at a “Rasthaus” (rest stop) that had a small restaurant. Our meager German failed us: We ended up with bockwurst instead of bratwurst ---- basically a hot dog with a different weiner in the bun.
I took over the driving after lunch after programming our talking (in a females voice speaking “English UK”) GPS to lead us to our next stop in Reutte, Austria. We continued down the Autobahn A95 southbound at about 130-140 kph until we were approaching Garmisch-Partenkirchen and our English electronic navigator directed us on to a scenic, but very narrow road for the last 40 or so kilometers of the journey. (Several years ago we had one of the first generation talking GPS units in a car we rented in New Mexico. After it directed us to turn off a main highway on to a jeep road ---- the shortest, but hardly the safest route ---- we turned it off). Soon we were driving through lush green valley surrounded by high, alpine peaks with relatively little traffic going either with us or in the opposite direction.
The GPS got a little confused toward the end of the trip (probably because we didn’t enter the correct street address for the hotel), but we still managed to arrive about two and half hours after we set off from Munich. Our innkeeper suggested that we take an hour’s drive up the valley, then loop back over the mountains to Reutte, and then stop and check out the local church and its cemetery.
By 3:15 pm, the gray clouds that had hung over the mountains began dropping a steady, light rain. Villages and farm sheds are scattered across the meadows which descend from the Alps. Some of the communities have fair sized hotels, built in the Swiss-chalet style, while in other places there are merely “Zimmer Frei” (room available) signs hanging on posts near the road. Although the roads wind and twist their way up the glaciated valleys, we saw several large tour buses on the road or pulled off next to hotels.
Around 4:30 pm we were back in Reutte and had reached the rather plain looking Catholic church our host had told us to visit. Inside is a Baroque-era creation, a sort of “mini-cathedral” with paintings and other décor rivaling that of much larger churches in Munich to the north. More remarkable yet is the cemetery. Each and every plot is like a small garden with a small “lantern” containing a lit candle. Our innkeeper said that descendents either maintain the graves themselves or pay for a gardener to do so. Many plots have marble headstones similar to those found in American cemeteries, but others have wrought-iron and gilded markers instead
