Thursday May 14 is a German holiday for Jesus’ ascension into heaven (which is kind of odd given the low percentage of Christian believers in Germany) and many schools including Carter and Haley’s have Friday as a holiday as well. I wanted to take advantage of the holidays to take a short trip, but Dan had to work on Friday so we decided that just the kids and I would go. I decided on a short trip to the north of Germany on the coast of the Baltic Sea. I booked this just a week before, and it was hard to find a place to stay that wasn’t either already booked or too expensive. There are hundreds of little sea towns on several large islands, and it was time-consuming and tedious to try to look from town to town at the 10 or 12 hotels in each town in search of one that was available and in our price range. Finally I settled on the island of Rugen because it is home to one of Germany’s national parks, Jasmund National Park. I booked a hotel one town over and a regional train to get there. I did it all in a bit of a hurry and didn’t really realize my logistical challenges until the trip drew near.
Challenge number one was that we would have to change trains twice en route to our destination, Sassnitz. The connections were relatively tight, but in theory we would have plenty of time to change. However, I typically rely heavily on Dan when we travel because of his far superior sense of direction and navigational abilities, so I wasn’t totally confident in my ability to get us where we were going.
Challenge number two was that while our train would get us to Sassnitz, our hotel was actually 7km away from the train station. We would be arriving around 10 at night and would need to get a taxi to the hotel. This wouldn’t be a big deal in a larger metropolis, but these are small towns without a line of standing taxis. In a long German conversation with the owner of the hotel, the best I could understand was that she suggested I call the taxi company when we were about 30 minutes from the train station and have one there waiting for us. I was nervous about this task; outside of the larger cities in Germany very few people speak English, so I knew any business would need to be conducted in German, and I wasn’t confident that I could instruct the taxi of the right time and place to wait for us and also the right place to take us.
Finally, I wasn’t crazy about the idea of arriving so late in the evening. At best we would get a short night of sleep, and if anything went wrong it would give us few options to recover. But if we had waited until the morning to travel it really would have been too short of a trip. We needed to be back in Berlin by 1 on Saturday for Carter’s baseball game. We have always found train travel to be very reliable (unless the bahn is on strike, which it was last week), so I decided to hope for the best.
Part 1 of the journey on Wednesday went just fine. I got to school via bus on time, and the kids and I made our way via bus and S-bahn to the Hauptbahnhof without issues. The Berlin Hauptbahnof is a huge multi-story structure, but I had allowed us plenty of time to buy some dinner to take on the train (even making a stop at a second store to get cookies for dessert) and to find our platform. The only thing I didn’t have time to do was find an ATM and get cash, which I knew I would need for the trip. But I figured there would be another chance. At the appointed time, we crammed onto our very crowded commuter train for a short one-hopper to our first connection.
We and our luggage got safely off at the first stop, and then settled into our reserved cabin on the second train for the longest segment of the trip. So far, so good. We ate our greasy fried seafood dinners and everyone pulled out their chosen form of entertainment.
And that’s when things started to go wrong. It turns out that this was one of those trips that is the reason why a lot of people don’t travel, or are afraid to travel. Here’s what happened.
We came to a routine stop at an intermediate station along the way. We stayed in our seats. A voice came over the loudspeaker, in German, saying some stuff. We ignored it and stayed in our seats. The man in the compartment with us got up and collected his belongings. He started to leave and then turned back to us. “Did you understand that?” he asked in English. “No, “ I said. He explained that for some reason only people with bikes were going to continue on our train, and everyone else needed to get off and board the train that was sitting on the tracks right next to us. Huh. Weird. We quickly gathered our stuff but before we could even exit our compartment the train next to us took off. What??? Most people hadn’t gotten to the other train, including the man from our compartment. I didn’t know what to do. We returned to our seats and waited. Another announcement came over the speakers in German. This time I understood enough to know that our train wouldn’t continue and they were sending buses for us. The man in our compartment confirmed this, and said that apparently there was a problem with the train track ahead of us. We were in the middle of nowhere, so he thought it would take an hour for the buses to reach us.
We exited the train and went outside to wait.
I tried to think what I needed to do in this situation. First, I found a Deutsche Bahn employee and brought my ticket to him. In past experience DB employees are either unable or unwilling to speak English, so I asked in German how I was going to get from the bus destination to my final destination. I’m not really sure what he said, but the gist was that the bus would take me to Straslund and then we’d figure it out from there. I assumed that at the Straslund train station we would be able to catch a later train and resume our original travel plan, as long as there were trains running that late. Or else we’d have to spend the night there and catch a morning train the rest of the way? Next I called the very nice but only German-speaking lady at our guesthouse and managed to communicate that our train wasn’t going and that DB was sending buses for us. I told her I wasn’t sure if we would be able to get all the way there that night, and that we might not arrive until the following day. She suggested that if possible we should deviate from our train ticket and go to an alternate destination that would get us close enough to the guesthouse to be able to take a taxi from there. She also said they would leave the key to our apartment under the mat, and that we were to use apartment number 1. After hanging up, I found another DB employee and tried to ask if we could go to Binz instead of Straslund, like the lady suggested. I figured that since people were going all different places, maybe the bus would go all the way to Binz and instead of taking a train I could just stay on the bus longer. No, he said, the bus ends at Straslund. So much for that plan.
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| Waiting for the buses in front of the bahnhof at Pasewalk |
After a shorter amount of time than expected, maybe 30 minutes, 2 huge buses pulled up. The crowd swamped the first bus, so we made a beeline for the second bus. As we were getting on, word began spreading that this bus was going to a different destination. One teenager in our vicinity heard us speaking English and told us to move to the first bus, and he and his companions moved with us. The first bus was packed, but we all managed to find separate seats, stacking our luggage on top of other people’s luggage, sitting sideways on a fraction of a seat. Just as we had settled ourselves, someone from the front of the bus yelled something in German that was barely audible and, in my case, incomprehensible. Immediately people jumped up and started gathering their bags. Sorry, the boy told us, this bus isn’t going to Rugen after all! Confused, we gathered our stuff and switched back to the first bus. This time the bus was stuffed so full that we could barely even get on with room for the doors to close. Somehow Carter wormed his way into a seat in the back by asking a lady to move her luggage, but Haley and I were stuck right in front of the door. She sat on the floor and I stood for the long ride to Straslund. (It was 1 ½ hours? 2? I lost track.)
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| Every square inch of the bus filled |
At some point my phone rang, which I always dread because it’s usually someone speaking to me in very fast German. As an aside, I also don’t like answering the phone because the German convention feels very strange to me. Instead of answering with “Hello?” they answer with their last name. It’s actually more efficient because it dispenses with the wasted time of both parties greeting each other and finding out who is speaking, but it just rubs me wrong to pick up the phone and say “Cripe.” So I made up my own convention, “Hallo, Jennifer Cripe.” Germans probably think I’m weird for answering the phone this way.
Anyway, this time I was lucky that there was English on the other end of the line. The nice lady from the guesthouse must have recruited an English speaker to call me and try to help me come up with a travel plan. He asked where we were and I really didn’t know. I hadn’t seen any signs or identifying markers, it just seemed we were miles from nowhere. He asked me to ask the people around me, so I did, in German. Turns out someone knew we were 10 miles from Anklam. Oh good, he said, then you will be here in 1 or 2 hours and can catch a late train to Sassnitz and a taxi from there, no problem. At this point we had already been driving for what I thought was a long time, so I was surprised that there we were still 1-2 hours away! But I was encouraged that he seemed sure that the trains would run late and get us where we needed to go.
The train stopped in Anklam and someone got off. Later it stopped again. Some people got off to smoke and others went to pee in the grass. We didn’t dare move – there were no announcements as to where we were and how long we would be there. Thank goodness we had all used the bathroom before we got off our train earlier. I could imagine this trip being such a disaster if someone needed to go to the bathroom, if we hadn’t had an early dinner at 5:00 on the train and had been counting on getting food from the dining car at normal dinnertime, if I were traveling with a baby or toddler instead of school-age children. As it was, the kids entertained themselves with books or electronics and miraculously there was no complaining. At one point Haley put her book down and began looking a little green. She is prone to carsickness and is supposed to stop reading or looking at a screen at the first sign of feeling bad, but of course she isn’t always good at knowing when to stop. Surrounded by luggage and people, with barely enough space to sit down with her knees tucked up to her chin, I told her “Haley – you can NOT throw up on this bus.” I could only imagine the horror of her throwing up and either having to stop the bus and delay everyone’s journey while we somehow cleaned it up, or, worse, everyone having to continue the journey with no way to clean it up. I handed her a Tupperware container from her backpack that had held Wednesday’s snack, and told her to use it if worse came to worse. She sat for a while with the Tupperware in front of her and her head in her hands, but – praise the Lord – she didn’t need to use it.
At some point we made another stop and a few more people got off. This gave Haley the chance to have a seat. She had been slumped on the floor asleep, and she now moved into the seat and went back to sleep more comfortably. I remained standing. There was another announcement. I caught the words “taxi” and “gift card”. There was some clapping. It sounded like they were going to send us all on from Straslund in complementary taxis.
We eventually arrived in Straslund and made our way to the DB employee. He was calling out city names and people were raising their hands to indicate that that was their destination. He handed each group a taxi voucher. He finally called Sassnitz, but unfortunately by this time all the standing taxis in front of the station had been taken. We took our place in line in front of the station, behind about 4 other parties. Thankfully DB seemed to have notified the taxi service that lots of taxis were needed, so every few minutes a new one was pulling up. Also thankfully a German and English-speaking woman was also traveling not to Sassnitz but nearby and had volunteered to ride with us in the taxi, so she explained the situation to the taxi driver and gave directions to him. I figured out that the voucher was good for travel only to the train station in Sassnitz and we would still need to travel that 7 km to our guesthouse, but since no one in the car needed to go to the train station, the lady helped arrange it with the driver to take us to our guesthouse.
I knew the guesthouse was a little off the beaten path, but I was a little concerned when the taxi, following the map, turned onto a dirt road that was dark and wooded on both sides. He found “30a”, which was the address on the website, and stopped in front. It didn’t look like the picture I had seen on the internet, but the address matched and I knew we were on the right road because I had seen a sign pointing to another guest house that I knew was on the same road. So we got out with our luggage, gave the driver 10 extra euros for taking us directly to our destination, and told him we would find our apartment. Since it was the right address I was confident that apartment number 1 must be around there somewhere.
The taxi drove off and left us in the dark. We rolled our luggage from door to door in the little group of houses, but quickly grew worried because all the house numbers were in the thirties. Moreover, they were all vacation houses, not apartments. At this point Haley began to freak out. She was afraid of the dark, afraid of the woods, afraid that we were lost. We needed to walk further up the dark road in search of the right spot, and she was panicking. I could see light just a little ways down the street and was hoping that was our guesthouse. I called Dan and he tried to calm her down while we made our way down the street. Yes, there was the familiar looking building. Now where was apartment 1? It was too dark to see the numbers. I took a chance and peeked under the mat of the first door we saw, but no key. Shoot, maybe around the back? We walked around the back of the building. No, that’s number 6. What about upstairs? We walked down the length of the building and climbed the stairs. Nope, blocked off. Then it must be around front. We walked back around the front but no! That was numbers 2, 3, etc. Ugh! Finally I returned to the very first spot I checked and it turns out I had looked under the wrong mat. There were two doors and there was the key, under the one I hadn’t looked at first. We were in.
The kids had held up marvelously under all the stress of the day but once we were safely in our room they fell apart. There was much yelling and pushing and whining and fighting over bed positions before everyone finally fell exhausted into bed. I was so grateful to have reached our destination!
The next morning we slept in until around 9 and woke up starving, since we hadn’t eaten since our dinner at 5 p.m. the day before. I had read online that breakfast was an option, so we walked out to some outdoor tables we had seen the night before. But it turns out those were just the little patios of some of the apartments. I went to the door marked “Rezeption” and met the lady who had been so nice on the phone. We officially checked in and I asked her about breakfast. She told me (I think) that there were only a few guests in the hotel so she wasn’t sure if there was food for us, but she would ask. She came back shortly and said they could feed us, and before long she led us to the cozy breakfast room. There another super nice lady sat us down at our family table and set about replenishing the buffet as best she could with the food she still had. We pigged out on bread and jam, meat and cheese, coffee and tea, fruit with Nutella, yogurt and juice. Much better!
My trip plan was to spend the first day in the national park and the second day, which was supposed to be super sunny, at the beach. The hotel owner gave us directions to the bus stop where we could catch a bus to the park and we found it without much trouble. Alas, when we checked the schedule we found that the bus only comes once an hour and we had missed it 15 minutes ago! No problem; we weren’t in a hurry and we had all brought our books in case we found a nice spot to read. And, we were just 50 meters away from the Baltic Sea! We walked over to the water and settled ourselves on some rocks to wait for the bus.
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| Waiting for the bus |
When it came I was very proud of myself for accomplishing the task of purchasing tickets that would take us all the way to the park, in German, because it had originally seemed that the bus was only going so far as Sassnitz. I was worried, though, that I was running out of cash. After giving 10 Euros to the taxi driver and 7.30 to the bus driver, we would have to have a very thrifty lunch if we were to have enough money to get the bus back.
When we got to the station in Sassnitz the bus stopped and everyone got off. But our ticket was to the park, beyond Sassnitz - what were we supposed to do next? It seems that my experience of living in a foreign country is to be in a continual state of confusion and uncertainty. Something happens and everyone else seems to know what to do, but I am continually left behind wondering what is going on and trying to figure out who to ask to understand what to do next. In this case, it was the bus driver. He told me to get off the bus, walk to the other side of the bus stop and wait for another bus there. He told me it was about a 10-minute wait. I had a thought – the hotel owner had told me I could get money in Sassnitz. “I need money – is there an ATM nearby?” I asked in German. (Hooray for my Rosetta Stone studies!) He said there was one around the other side of the shopping center next to the bus station. I glanced at my watch and made a quick calculation; I was going to go for it. “Wait for me” I told the kids. “Don’t get on the bus without me!” And I started sprinting. I found the bank, waited nervously while someone else who had arrived just before me got her money, and then sprinted back with cash in hand. Whew, I made it! The bus pulled up a minute or two later. And thank goodness I had gotten money because I had completely forgotten that there might be an entrance fee to the park. Germany is a real cash economy and many many places don’t accept a card of any kind as payment. So running out of cash literally means you have no money, even if you have credit cards in your wallet. So as it turns out, it cost us almost 20 Euros to get into the park. If I hadn’t made that stop, we would have taken the bus all the way to the park and had to return without entering because I didn’t have enough money for entrance fees AND return bus fare.
Truly I was flying by the seat of my pants because, in another twist that I later discovered, the entrance fees were for the visitor center. We could have hiked around in the park for free; you only had to pay for the visitor center. Perpetual state of confusion, I tell you.
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| Jasmund is part of a UNESCO World Heritage site. |
But we got our money’s worth out of the visitor center. We watched a really interesting film with English subtitles about the ancient beech forests that used to cover much of Germany. There are only little pockets of them left, and Jasmund National Park is one of them.
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| The ancient beech forest |
We also took an interesting and very extensive audio tour where we learned how the chalk cliffs that the area is famous for were formed (from the skeletons of small marine creatures when the area was covered with sea water in prehistoric times; then the movement of the glaciers carved out the cliffs) and how they have evolved and eroded over the centuries. They used to be really cool with crazy shapes and spires and they inspired artists throughout the ages, but now they are fairly flat and unexceptional.
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| The famous Königsstuhl, the King's Chair |
We learned more about all the creatures that live in the beech forest (did you know that some centipedes can live for 12 years??? I thought bugs lived for days, weeks, or months at most. And did you know that one square meter of earth contains billions of bacteria and fungi and a million tapeworms? Yuck.)
And finally we walked down to the beach to view the cliffs from below. The kids were thrilled by the huge pieces of chalk lying around everywhere and they spent time happily collecting it into big piles and drawing on rocks with it.
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| Gathering piles of chalk |
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| Drawing with chalk from the cliffs! |
Another success for me: I had the foresight to check the bus schedule before we headed down to the beach. I knew when the last bus left the park and made sure we returned in time to catch it. Good thing, because the bus came right on time and certainly didn’t make sure it wasn’t leaving anyone behind.
This bus driver was less helpful than the first and he didn’t allow me to buy a ticket through to our final destination. No problem, this time we knew the drill. We got off the bus at the changeover spot and checked the schedule – 10 minutes until the connecting bus. We settled down to wait but there was a guy already there waiting who was playing loud obnoxious German rap music and he wasn’t using headphones. Our bus driver parked his bus at the curb and got off with his lunchbox, presumably done for the day. He looked over in our direction with an annoyed expression and I thought he was going to tell the boy to turn off his music, but instead he informed us unsympathetically that there was no bus coming. I checked the schedule again – shoot! The bus was running on a holiday schedule, so we had missed the last bus of the day. Time for improvisation again! Luckily there was a taxi waiting in front of the train station next door and he even had booster seats for the kids. He took us to the hotel and this time I knew where to tell him to drop us off! It cost 20 Euros for the short drive though – that seemed like way too much to me. So it had cost a little over 7 Euros to get to the park and more than 25 to get home!
Aside from the fact that it was inexpensive and available, one of the reasons I chose this particular guesthouse was because it was on park-like grounds. It had a trampoline, a swingset and a ping-pong table. After we returned from the park we went out to the yard to play, and this was some of our most fun time together. We played “Cat” on the trampoline, a game Carter made up where one person, the cat, tries to tackle the other players through a series of stages going from rolling to crawling to frog leaps to all-out berserk maneuvers. We played lots of ping-pong, and then it morphed into a paddle battle game, where we each took two paddles and chased each other around the yard trying to smack each other on the butt with the paddle while avoiding being smacked. I'm so glad I left some slack in our schedule so we could play around in this space.
Friday morning we had another lovely breakfast. This time, since our hostess knew we were coming, there was even more food: scrambled eggs and sausages, lots of bread, and a fresh pot of coffee at my place. I think breakfast is one of my favorite things about travel in Europe. While I’m partial to an American breakfast of pancakes and sausage or something like that (which of course you won’t find here), the little inns of Europe offer a higher quality of fare than you would find at your standard continental breakfast in an American Holiday Inn or Marriott. I made a mental note to seek out a bed and breakfast in the US instead of a hotel whenever possible.
After breakfast we played a bit more ping-pong and paddle battle, and then rented bikes from the guesthouse with a plan to bike a little ways down the coast on a dedicated bike path, stop at a deli to pick up a picnic lunch, and then find a nice spot on the beach to spend the day.
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| Quiet beach at Prora |
Eventually we continued on in search of food, and ended up biking all the way to Binz before we found any. I was secretly glad, because I had wanted to check out Binz, but I was worried that the kids wouldn’t be able to ride back the whole way, about 11.5 km. Binz was a totally different world from Prora or Neu Mukran (where we were staying). It was comparatively busy and crowded and commercial although - don't get me wrong - not a bad spot to hang out for the day.
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| From the Pier at Binz, looking back towards the shore |
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| The beach in Binz was crowded with food stands and chairs set up by nearby hotels |
We ate some not so great food from food trucks on the promenade and then hung out on the beach while a man and woman performed German tunes on an outdoor stage near us. To me this was annoying and I would have preferred to go back to the quiet Prora beach, but the kids were happy. Carter read and read and Haley played in the sand and practiced her cartwheels.
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| Carter reads, unconcerned that half his body is missing, while Haley digs in the sand |
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| Food trucks line the promenade in Binz |
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| Mostly older folks enjoyed the music emanating from the gazebo |
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| A sculptor works on his entry for the upcoming Sand Sculpture Festival |
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| A clock tower, a fountain, and an old fashioned train which is used instead of buses are all part of the main strip in Binz |
At some point we packed up to head back. I had planned to stop along the way at yet a third beach to split up the journey but, as tends to happen in our family, one child or the other decides to misbehave and then everyone ends up angry. In this case it was Carter whose behavior, and my less than perfect reaction to it, ruined our trip home and we rode straight through alternating between shouting and angry silence. Sigh. Maybe it is typical that families can only have fun for so long before they begin to shout at each other – is it?
Back at the guesthouse, I let everyone do their own thing to calm down while I packed us up. We arose at 6 the next morning to catch our return train. Our wonderful hostess gave us a ride to the train station, rather than us having to call a cab. She was such a nice lady; I would return to that part of Germany just to enjoy her hospitality again.
Our journey home was uneventful until we reached the same station where our problems occurred on the way there. I thought, ‘Oh good, we’ve made it this far so we’ve covered the distance that had the problem with the track on the way here.’ Then I thought ‘We’ve been sitting here a long time…’. And then the announcement came. Inexplicably the train was stopping here and wouldn’t carry us any farther. This time the alternative transportation plan was simpler though: we would just have to wait 45 minutes for the next train. It was mostly just a minor inconvenience, although it did make us a little late for Carter’s baseball game which we were rushing back for.
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| We passed so many of these beautiful fields of yellow flowers. I later read that they are Rapeseed fields, primarily grown to make canola oil. They bloom in May and are quite stunning. |
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| A sea of yellow out the window |
I didn’t really realize prior to taking this trip what an ambitious undertaking it actually was to travel without Dan. In addition to being my general wingman and a second brain to come up with a course of action, Dan is our trip navigator and our primary German speaker. Without him, I was the navigator (scary!), I was the German speaker (scary!). I had to solve every problem we ran into. And I did it! We reached our destination, found food, traveled around Rugen, and made it back to Berlin. In worrying prior to the trip, I had imagined some other things going wrong but I had never considered the scenario that actually happened. Had I considered it, I likely may have decided it wasn’t worth the risk to be traveling by myself with the kids. But I'm so glad that I did take this trip. It gave me a huge boost in confidence in my own capabilities. It was empowering, even though I felt completely powerless much of the time. I never could have managed this 6 months ago, but my German has improved enough that I can manage some basic conversations and transactions, and I have a general understanding of how transport works in this country. We seem to have been provided for at all points in our journey with just enough information to get by to the next step - someone spoke just a little bit of English, or I knew just enough German. I will be taking the kids to Austria by myself towards the end of the summer, and if I survived this trip, I think I can do that one too!
P.S. I can't resist one last photo:
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| Man: "Let's go to the beach to take some photos." Woman: "Great idea, just let me grab my scarf!" |
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