Weekend In Üttingen

I had a great time in Üttingen this weekend. It was an absolute blast. I arrived Friday afternoon and spent the evening walking around and enjoying being in the town. I also did a fair bit of writing on my book while we sat down and watched some TV (that was the first time in almost nine weeks, it was kind of weird).

The train itself was a bit of an adventure. I left the apartment more than an hour early for a trip to the train station that normally takes only twenty minutes or so by street-car. But half-way to the train station I realized that I didn't have my passport (my railpass is no good without the passport), so I got off the street-car and went back the other direction. But because of a large amount of construction work, the street-cars aren't running as frequent as they always do. So long story short, I made it to the train with approximately 30 seconds to spare. No sooner was I on board than the doors shut and the train chugged off. I was doing my fair-share of panicking to say the least.

Most of the day Saturday was spent helping Jens and his wife move into their new house. It's huge, and I'm pretty sure that everything in it / about it was selected from a "Everything Awesome That You Can Do With Your House" catalogue. It's pretty sweet and I am more than a little jealous of the shower system that simply rains down on you from the ceiling... shower heads were so last century....

I then spent most of the day on Sunday with a friend of my dad's named Peter. It's always nice to see him and his wife, and one of the coolest things of my entire trip this summer happened during that visit. You see, Peter has this friend who buys and restores old WWII-era equipment, and one of those pieces of equipment is a fully-restored 1943 US Army Willys Jeep. Apparently the guy bought it and then spent four years restoring it and I'm pretty sure that the guy said that the jeep actually saw combat in WWII. The only thing that isn't original, or as original as can be, is the ultra-high performance Mercedes-Benz engine that he installed due to emissions and fuel-economy requirements. And that makes for a pretty powerful jeep. We spent about 40 minutes barrelling through the Bavarian country-side at 60 miles-per-hour or so in this open-air jeep. It had a really smooth ride, too; I could hardly tell when we left the road to hit the fields for a while. It was pretty cool knowing that the car I was riding in was not only 60 years old, but also played a very important role in modern European history. It was way too easy to imagine being a US soldier or a general cruising around during the war scouting out the front. Yeah, that's right, history nerd alert.

So with that said, "I hope the train ride back to Karlsruhe goes well.... oh wait...".