Our trip on the Holland-America Line had put us all in a happy mood as we approached the port of Rotterdam. Our sea voyage with all that good food came to an end, but the Dutch terrain in front of us seemed filled with neat possibilities.
Upon our departure from the train that had taken us from Rotterdam to Frankfurt am Main, the pages of our Teutonic travel experience began to fill up with pleasant surprises. First, we needed to pick up our new Volkswagen station wagon at the factory there. Payment arrangements had already been made through legal correspondence and bank exchanges.
The” “Fahrtkarte”, or road map, which the fine folks in Frankfurt had provided for us was really all that we needed to maneuver the Autobahn, even at night. We were only stopped once on the road for driving too slowly, but the friendly highway patrolman only gave me a warning to drive with more vehicular enthusiasm. Slowly, we were getting with the correct etiquette required for safety on the road.
Once we arrived at the large city of Munich, Muenchen, the 1000-year-old capital of Bavaria, our status needed to quickly change from visitor to that of inhabitant since we were planning to live there, perhaps for several years, depending strongly on the Fates, as the ancient Greeks and Romans might have surmised.