We drove from Stuttgart to Frankfurt today in our rental car, a Prius.  Somewhat different than a 911!  When other drivers see a 911 in their review mirror, especially one screaming up on them in the left lane, they, for the most part move.  Not always, we had one guy in an ancient Mitsubishi hold us up for quite a while.  Let’s just say the Prius doesn’t invoke the same response.  Interesting car with a somewhat bizarre start-up and shut-down procedure.  My hybrid at home works like a car.  Put the key in, turn it, press the gas.  With the Prius you have buttons to push, levels to pull, etc.  The first time or two we were just plain stumped about how to get it to move.  Once it does move, it doesn’t move all that quickly.   People fly on the autobahn here.  The Prius lives in the right lane… Just the same, it got us here and hardly used any gas in the process.

We’re in a small hotel next to a very loud public market.  We finally closed the windows and lowered the steel (yes steel) outer curtains to shut out the noise.  Now we’re sort-of trapped in a small room using an electric fan to move the air.  As we intend to just camp here at night, it should work out.   And if it becomes to confining, we’ll move.

At the recommendation of the hotel owner we ate at Gasthof Steiner or something like that.  A few hundred years ago it was the first stone building in the area.  Stein is German for stone.  I think.  Anyway, we had pork schnitzel mit pommes frites and salat.   See, you can read German already.  All those who thought french fries and salad, move to the head of the class.  Anyway, we each got about a third or so of the way through the meal and just… stopped.  Could not eat another bite.  We are officially schnitzeled out.

Counting the dinner on the plane over, we’ve had 20 dinners.  We’ve been to two restaurants twice, an Italian place in Vienna and another Italian in Stuttgart.  Plus three other Italian places, one in Munich, another in Vienna and one in Reutte, Austria.  Seven times we’ve been to ‘authentic’ German places like tonight.  I could eat spaghetti the rest of this trip, but if I see one more Schnitzel…