Although Austria was lovely, Sarah and I had to move on in order to hit all of our Eurail countries. So after packing up and checking out of the hostel, we enquired at the train station of the next departure to Heidelberg, Germany! We decided against Berlin because it was way too far away and both agreed being on a train for 24 hours or something was not a whole lot of fun. So, Heidelberg and Frankfurt were our choices for mid-way-thru-Germany cities that we had actually heard of, and Heidelberg won. The next train was noontime, so we had breakfast and for our few spare hours, basked in the sun in the Mirabellgarten.This, I learned from our Sound of Music crash course, was ripe full of movie locations. So after my breakfast had digested, I left Sarah to get a sunburn (she wanted it!) and found not only the little greens covered tunnel where the kids frolic thru, but also the statue that all the kids tap on the head. I especially wanted to find this statue, since in one of our 60 photo albums, there's a picture of Dad posing with it/ like it. This one:
like father, like daughter?I collected Sarah and we paused and did a photo shoot at the frolic-thru-the-garden area. It was hilarious. Thankfully, the greens were grown in, so not too many people watched us do this:
After we took our pictures, it was about time to get to the train, so we grabbed our stuff and got right onto our waiting train. About an hour into our ride, a group of about 8 old ladies got on and shamelessly kicked us out of our seats! We were outraged. They, however, had reserved the seats, so we grudgingly moved. We had to switch trains one stop from Heidelberg, and the ride was only like 10 minutes, but I enjoyed it because I finally got to ride on the top level of a double decker!! There weren't any overhead racks, so Sarah and I took up 2 seats each- one for us and one for our enormous backpacks.We got out at our destination, and it was sprinkling. We shrugged it off and wolfed down some pizza in the station for dinner (since we weren't very smart and hadn't packed lunch. oops) Since we hadn't picked Heidelberg until the day or 2 before, we had no hostel picks from online. My big guidebook, however, had a few so we picked one close to the castle and headed to the info booth. We asked for a map and the lady was like, "sure! it's 2 euros." Sarah and I were like "WHAT?" and decided amongst ourselves that she was being outrageous- all of our other maps had been free! There was a big map right there on the counter, so we checked it out real quick then whipped out our rain gear and headed out.
I was pretty confident in my sense of direction/ map reading skillz, so I picked the likely direction towards the castle and we busted out. In the rain. With our huge backpacks. I was using my guide book's map, but it didn't have the train station on it, so we were basically guessing which way to go. We walked. And then, bad news: we hit the river, which meant we were going in NOT the right direction. So we turned right, crossed the street and walked in some neighborhood. The road we were on kind of ended in the direction we were going, but there was a parallel road. We were standing on that corner when a very nice man (pushing a stroller) asked us if we needed directions. I guess we looked a little confused! We showed him the dinky map in the guide book and he pointed which direction to go as well what to do to get to the hostel (it involved either walking or taking the public transportation). We felt a lot better to have someone orient us and found the plaza the guy pointed us towards. We did a little dance when we got there, but after trying to figure out which bus we were supposed to take, we kind of stopped being so happy. The guy had told us it would be about 30 minutes to walk to the hostel from the plaza, and since it was raining and our pants and socks were getting soaked, we thought taking the bus would be a good investment and a good idea. The problem was how confusing the bus map thing was. There were about 10 lines, 3 different types of buses/ tram things and everything was going in opposite directions. We wanted to go towards the castle, so we narrowed it down to 3 lines that seemed like they were going near our hostel.
We eventually just sat in a little shelter thing and debated if we should sneak onto a bus (we picked #39) and attempt to find the hostel or just get a hotel and save Heidelberg for the next time. We spent probably 30 minutes just resting and debating. Eventually, we decided- yes, hotel tonight, let's go. Then bus #39 pulled up- the one that only came every hour. We looked at each other, then Sarah was like, "Let's get on! Why not?!" so we scrambled on with about 10 other people and a dude with a bike.
It turns out that bus #39 was not the right bus at all- so we had a nice hour long tour of the woods around Heidelberg! At one point, we were the only people left on the bus, and the bus driver just stopped! We were scared (maybe just a little) but Sarah asked him what the deal was and he told her the route was a giant loop- and this was the midway. We jumped off #39 back at the main plaza and decided no more buses, get a hotel!So that's what we did. We picked up dinner on the way (it included chips, cherry coke and candy) and went to the hotel practically on top of the train station. Sarah's Mom offered to pay for it, so I would like to thank her again right now for sponsoring us: THANK YOU!!
