Dad's January business trip

I mentioned a while ago that my dad was coming, but I never posted about it. Unfortunately I was fighting a sinus infection during the whole visit, but we still had fun. Dad spent Saturday night with us after we all visited Stefan's mom in Giessen for cake and coffee. Sunday morning we went to church and then dad was off to Koblenz for meetings. Monday afternoon he stopped through Marburg and I loaded up my stuff and we went to Noerten Hardenberg, just north of Göttingen. We stayed at a schmancy hotel that was REALLY into the boar's head.

There were boar's heads everywhere, from the towels to the table tops, to the menus, to the napkins, to the bathrobes. Good grief. At the breakfast buffet every morning there was boar sausage and smoked boar ham available. A little overkill... We were pretty much in the middle of nowhere, so although it was a pretty outdoor area to walk around, having a sinus infection and fighting the frigid weather kept me mainly indoors...reading some of the books mom had sent along! I had more fun that dad, who had to deal with a lactose factory and 3 Spanish colleagues.
Dad had a free day before flying to his next location on the trip (England) so although we had planned a few other things, we ended up taking the Spaniards to Göttingen for 2 hrs to show them around before they had to go back - get this - they took a taxi essentially from Göttingen to the Hannover airport. Mind boggling. No train, no rental car, a TAXI. Anyhow... I wish I had known we were going to do Göttingen because Stefan and I have a friend who lives there and I would have wanted to say even a brief hello, but it wasn't to be. We walked around town with the Spaniards who had never been to Germany. I don't think it was the greatest impression, but oh well. The highlights were seeing the Gänseliesel statue at just the moment a recent doctoral student, wearing his newly aquired robes and hat and followed by a slew of cheering friends, arrived to commence with tradition - he gave her flowers and kissed her cheek. Cool.

We walked around town and went into a cafe for a cake and coffee warm up before dropping the Spaniards back off at the hotel.
Then dad and I had to address a weird light that was going off in the rental car. For some reason his rental car was a Skoda Octavia wagon, which isn't what you usually think of for a business trip, but it accommodated shuttling everybody around. We went to the nearest Europecar to have it looked at since the oil light was going off and the hood refused to open. Gosh, all I have to say is it's a good thing I was along on this trip - most of the time nobody we were around spoke any English! But then here I am trying to explain a defunct car with terms I don't know in German (hood, latch, etc). Regardless, they were very accommodating and worried that they didn't have another wagon to give us, and would we mind terribly if we had a 4 door car? No. Well, we only have a Mercedes C class, is that OK??? um. let me think about that one....it'll do. thanks.

We drove off - but not before I was given a lesson on how to drive an automatic, despite my saying that's basically what every American car is and we both knew how to drive an automatic. Needless to say, the car was like buttuh (min 3:58 and 7:15). We were on a stretch of new autobahn going into the former eastern Germany on a weekday in the early afternoon - nobody was on the road. Dad was cruising steady at 200 km/hr (125 mph) and it didn't even feel fast it was so smooth. Lovely.

We reached our destination of Mittelbau-Dora, a concentration camp that had been used to build V-2 rockets during the war. We had a 3+ hr tour outside, in the cold, and in German (dad had a plugged in English thing). The only way to see inside the tunnels was to go on the German tour, so we did. It was SO COLD! The tunnels were super creepy, and after the first 10 minutes I was ready to get out of there, but we ended up being in there for over an hour. Very dank, dark, and only our tiny group and the tour guide. I just can't imagine being imprisoned there and how the inmates had to sleep in the tunnels and work in them when the camp first opened. Oh it was just horrible! So many people from the town would come up to the camp to work on during the war, so that was also weird and awful. Especially when you read about the Holocaust deniers in the media, just ridiculous.

Anyhow, on that happy note, we drove off and flew, and I mean FLEW down the autobahn and back to Marburg. Dinner with Stefan and then dad was off. We had fun and Stefan and I really enjoyed the bag of late Christmas presents sent along: Season 4 of LOST (oh yeah!), stacks of English language books, queen sized duvet covers (phew! we only had 1), and other miscellany.