Gorman Stories

Somewhere en route to Krakow, Miss GPS sent us down a gloriously smooth road that took us directly into a barricade. We could go no further. When we turned around, she insisted we try again. From up in space, Miss GPS didn’t see what we saw. 

So we pulled into a small market for directions to Krakow.  I walked up to one of the clerks. “Hello, do you speak English? I am lost.”  She shook her head no. The woman she was helping started talking to me, though, and boy did she have a lot to say. It was Polish, and I did not understand a word.

When I expressed to her that I did not understand her, she slowed down but still spoke in Polish, using every muscle in her face to emote, like some Jim Carrey, thinking that would help me better understand her. She was furious, it seemed, at something.  When she paused, I used mime to show that I was driving down the street and bam! there was a barricade and I had to screech to a stop. She nodded yes and went into her Polish tirade again. I think she was sympathetic toward me and angry at the Polish Department of Highways.

About then, a man came forward and asked if he could help. He spoke broken English. I need to get to Krakow, I said. Could he help?   He backed away from me and spoke to the grocery clerk, and by now there were 8 people in line trying to buy groceries who were not being helped. And they were all yelping in Polish — either in anger at me for slowing their day or in giving my new friend their suggestions on how I should get to Krakow. Or at least how I should get out of their store.

The line grew longer. A second grocery line was opened and it filled, but even people in that line were motioning all sorts of ways at my friend, arms flailing about in different directions as if they were all giving him their best suggestions on how I could get to Krakow.  My helper looked flustered.

Finally, he said to me, “Just follow me.”  We walked into the parking lot, he got into his car, he waved for us to follow, and we did, and after about 4 miles, at a roundabout, he waved at the turnoff with the sign for Krakow. I tooted my horn and he waved and I waved and I bet we will never meet again. 

I was struck by the looks in their eyes, captured in the photographs of the men and women who were kidnapped and taken to the SS’s concentration camps to die or be worked to death.

Much can be written about Auschwitz and its sister — and larger — concentration camp at Birkenau, a couple of miles away. But it was the photos of the victims, taken just as they were being processed in, that may be the most haunting.

The tour of the two camps seemed surreal, because it is difficult to comprehend the enormity of the murders even after having been there. Maybe even harder, now that we have been there. The thousands of pairs of baby shoes. The rooms of women’s hair, sheared to make soldiers for blankets. The suitcases that bore the victims’ names so, if luggage and its owner was separated on their train ride to a new future, as they thought, they could be reunited. Now they read like tombstones without the interred bodies. A name, a birthdate, no death date.  

There is much to reflect but the photos were what I studied the longest. Some were the eyes of despair. Resignation. Some looked stunned, bewildered. Some looked defiant and angry. 

We were not allowed to take photos of these exhibits. I don’t know that I would have wanted to. The images will stay with me.

We began our Monday returning to one of the old districts of Prague, called “lesser town” because it is below “Castle Town.” We walked across the historic, 650-year-old St. Charles Bridge to reach this part of Prague, which now is very commercial.

Caricature artists, musicians, photographers and a few jewelry makers hawk their wares along the bridge, and the town is filled with little retail outlets — chief among them, jewelers selling all things garnet, plus the requisite crystal stores.

Daughter heard from travel writer Samantha Brown about a wonderful rooftop restaurant at the Aria Hotel that affords a beautiful view of parts of Prague. We found the hotel and went upstairs to the roof, and the view was quite special — not a sweeping vista of the entire city, but a stunning one of the neighborhood.

We were on the road for Poland, and for a campground outside the gates of Auschwitz, by 2 p.m. It took us about 6 hours, along major highways and through small towns where we had to slow for hay wagons and farmers returning home in their huge combines.

From the highway, it looked like several towns had clusters of huge apartment buildings, strung along in a line, and we’re not sure what to make of them.  Their equivalent to publich housing projects?

At one point, Miss GPS must have had a hangover from too much pilsner because she didn’t know where we were, and was directing us across open fields.

When we entered Poland, I assumed we would need to stop at some sort of border control so I pulled over at the first opportunity, into a parking lot filled with trucks.  Turns out there is no border crossing protocol and I was lost in a sea of trucks. We got some strange looks as we wormed our way out and back onto the highway.  Luckily our license plates say Belgium, not U.S., so I wasn’t the stupid American.

By dusk we were pulling up to our campground, one that we had chosen purposely for its proximity to Auschwitz. But we didn’t know the story behind the place, and are ever the more thankful that we came here.

The facility is a combination hotel/campground retreat center, operated by a Catholic organization dedicated to dialogue and prayer, focusing on what lessons can and should be learned from the genocide that played out here.

I am typing this story in the lobby of the hotel, where I met the night clerk, Gosia.  She’s 29, learned English while attending community college outside Washington, and started here, at the Centre for Dialogue and Prayer in Oswiecim, two months ago. She grew up in Oswiecim, where Auschwitz is, but has only visited Auschwitz three times. After each visit, she said, it takes her a month to recover.

“People need to come here, to see Auschwitz,” she said. “It cannot be explained, the same way you cannot explain a color or a taste. You need to touch it, to sense it. That is one reason I want to work here, to meet people and for the spirit of this place where we can talk about our feelings toward Auschwitz. We cannot change the past, but we can change the future.”

My last photo today was sunset over Auschwitz, from our campsite. We are at its threshold, and I look forward to tomorrow with dread, and with hope that in time, peace among men will prevail.

Prague may have been the single most important stop on our trip, because Czechoslovakia was home to one branch of her family. You could spend days visiting Prague and not tire of it, but given our ambitious itinerary to see as much of Europe as possible, we are not spending too much time at any one city. Imagine skipping a stone flint across a pond — skip skip skip skip before it slows down and sinks. We are skipping across Europe.

We decided, then, to take a walking/bus tour of Prague to see as much as we could. Our guide looked 40 but said he had been giving tours for 35 years, which puts him around my age, 57, I’d guess. I didn’t ask him because he was shy.

We were in a small tour van, about 15 of us. It had been billed as an English-speaking tour but there were French speakers on board, too, and our guide was trilingual — Czech, French and English.  We visited all the “towns” of Prague — New Town, Old Town, Lesser Town (on the way up to the castle) and the phenomenal Castle town, with the only functioning castle in Europe and perhaps the finest cathedral I have ever seen. I was more impressed by it than by Notre Dame, which we saw on our last trip to Europe to visit Daughter.  (Daughter is expanding our horizons, you see.)

While walking the castle grounds, I asked the guide what is the greatest frustration of his business. “It’s when I’m told I’ll have a van filled with English speakers but when I get in, I discover there’s not a single English speaker among them. They are Turkish, Chinese, Portuguese… and there is just nothing for me to do.”

I won’t go into a blow-by-blow description of our day, but rest assured we ate local food (for dinner, Jeanne had what she proclaimed as the best duck of her life, and Daughter and I had pork ribs; for lunch, the ladies had beef goulash and I had lamb). We ended the day at the ballet, “The Best of Swan Lake.” Because of ticket confusion — we wanted reserved seats and were sold general-admission seats — we were re-seated in the third row center. 

Back now at the campsite, I’ll see how many photos I can download into an album called “Prague” for you to click on if you want to see some of the sights. As time permits — maybe after we return home — I’ll add more. 

Prague is very photogenic.

It’s Sunday night, almost midnight after a full and wonderful day in Prague. It is a most amazing city, seeming much larger, more dynamic and more filled with energy, history, beauty and architectural wonder than its population of 1.5 million or so would warrant. We will spend part of Monday there revisiting one of the neighborhoods before moving on to Auschwitz and Krakow as we begin week 2 of our 3-week mad-cap RV trip through Europe.

If I sound in good spirits, it partly is because I’m finally moving in to Mobi. It is now a five-room house: the family room with its two chairs (when the driver’s and passenger’s seats swivel around), two couches and dining room table; the kitchen with its three-burner range, sink and ample-size refrigerator and freezer that is cold enough to make ice in ice-poor Europe; the full if tiny bathroom with its sink, cabinets, medicine chest, toilet with the swivel seat and shower stall (which we have yet to use because the campgrounds have had nice shower facilities); the master bedroom with overhanging cabinets and privacy curtain, and the basement. I’m guessing our house is about 140 square feet, not counting the basement.

Ah, the basement.

It is the storage locker that is accessible from the outside back of Mobi, and from inside Mobi by pulling up the master bed mattress (which sits on a wood frame on hinges). Imagine the Wizard of Oz, when the tornado is coming and Dorothy’s family is rushing to the storm shelter, and someone (not Dorothy) lifts the door to the storm shelter. That is how we lift the bed  to get into the basement. Except that there’s a mattress on top of the door, and sometimes a sleeping spouse.

When we picked up Mobi, the basement was stocked with toilet chemicals, the electrical cord, the water hose, the swivel do-hickey that opens the awning (which we have yet to do), and an emergency something-or-other.

I began referring to the storage locker as the basement, and it seemed the perfect place to store things like toilet paper and paper towels.

Now everything goes down there.  After Daughter found cabinets to put her clothes in, she put her empty duffel bag in the basement. When we stopped by a small grocery store in Germany that she knew had great prices, she bought 8 bottles of wine, so now the basement is our wine cooler.  We store the tabletop fan in the basement when we don’t need it, and the sling-canvas camping chairs). There are bottles of water and diet Pepsi down there too, and when I stepped in some dog poop the other day while walking along a river that cut through downtown Munich, I put those shoes in the basement (after cleaning them as best as I could). 

And I had been putting my duffel bag — filled with my clothes –in the basement, too.  And every time I needed something, I would have to lift the master bed frame to reach down into the basement to grab a fresh shirt, a pair of socks, whatever.  This could be problematic if Jeanne was in bed; she’d have to roll over to the far side of the bed so I could lift the hinge on her side. If this was in the morning and Jeanne was sleeping, this task would be too daunting. It would be like trying to roll over a sleeping bear that doesn’t like being awakened. I’d rather face the tornado and take my chances with the mean witch.

So tonight, after my shower, I finally emptied my duffel bag, claiming two cupboard spaces above the bed that have been empty. I am now moved in, with my duffel in the basement now empty. The bear can sleep without my bothering her.

I’m celebrating by indulging in a chocolate-covered banana cream cake pastry that I bought a country ago. It may not be healthy but, by God, it is local food and everyone says I should try the local food.

Life is good.

We arrived in Prague Saturday evening after a thankfully uneventful day — in fact, a good day, considering how it started.

We had filled our water tank in Munich and, in the course of trying to figure out our hot-water problem, we ran the tank dry. So we had refilled it on Friday, and this morning we were going to run the hot water to wash the morning dishes. Not only was there no hot water, there was no water, period.

This was the last straw! The Gormans have turned into magicians!  We can fill a 100-liter water tank and make it disappear a day later without even turning on a spigot!!

For the third day in a row, we called the dealership in Belgium. This time, a real person answered. And he apparently was a mechanic, because when I told him there was no way a water tank could end up empty in a day without even using it, he said yes, there was one way.  He instructed me to look beneath our bed, through a tiny door, where the boiler mechanism for the hot water is.  “It is possible that the water boiler bled the tank empty without you knowing it,” he said. “It would have pulled the water in, and then drained it beneath your Mobi. You wouldn’t know.”

And the solution? “Do you see a red button?” Yes. “Push it. If it releases and goes higher, that is good.” I pushed it. It shot up higher, like an old-fashion car lock. Bingo. “You will be fine now. Fill your tank again. Everything should be fine.”

Since he was helpful, I mentioned that the valve to our wastewater tank could not be closed. I told him that the handle for the open-close valve just turned and turned and turned and never seemed to lock in an open or closed position, and that every time we run water in the Mobi, it pees on the ground. “Next time,” he said, “press the handle toward the plate right in front of it. Squeeze it. That will engage the valve.”  Oh, squeeze the handle while turning it? The snot-nosed kid at the dealership who taught me how to use the Mobi a week ago never mentioned that.

I went outside, knelt on the ground, reached under, grabbed the handle, pressed it and — bingo! again — the handle this time engaged with tension and I definitely could feel it opening and closing, not unlike a fireplace flu. So I think our watewater tank will now hold water.

So, with hot water (we assume — we won’t be trying until after dinner tonight), and a functioning wastewater tank, we set off for Prague. The German countryside was beautiful  — rolling fields of tall corn and other crops, with a backdrop of lush forests, and we drove through small villages with beautiful homes. We wondered what the Czech Republic would be like. It’s not like the countrywide would suddenly change…

We entered the Czech Republic, paid about $20 for a motorways windshield sticker at the border (no need to see  passports or proof of car insurance or anything, just the money, please) and discovered we were entering some knock-off version of the United States. More specifically, Nevada, if not for the trees.

The first billboard we saw was for a poker tournament. The next, for a casino. It was called “American Chance Casino”  but before we could react, we already were past the off-ramp. Then we saw a McDonald’s billboard. And a topless joint called Pamela’s. And another McDonald’s.  In fact, in the next 45 minutes we would pass no less than 10 McDonald’s restaurants. And McDonald’s wasn’t the only English we saw. About a third of the billboards — actually, they were signs hanging across the freeway, attached to overpasses — were in English, which confuses me.

The other remarkable first-hour discovery about Prague, as we drove through town, was the amount of graffiti. It was bad, with only one or two displays of graffiti art, and the rest mish-mash.

We found our campsite for the evening without too much trouble (the address didn’t show up on our GPS but when we pulled to the side of a road near the Prague Zoo to figure things out, a passing motorist pulled over, too, and asked if we needed assistance, and then pointed us in the right direction.)

The campground is one of maybe 10 along a street of what was once, apparently, a very fancy neighborhood with larger  homes and larger back yards.The homes have been turned into B&Bs or hostels, and the back yards converted into campgrounds.  Interesting. We are parked next to a mom and daughter from Switzerland; the other mobis around us are empty, suggesting that their occupants are still walking around the city and haven’t returned yet.

There is only one computer here, in the reception office, so there will be no photos with this post. I’m hoping to grab some time on it when the line thins.  I told the young man operating the office that the owner should invest in wireless. He said the owner has balked, due to cost.  I told him I would pay $10 a night for wireless. He said he gets lots of offers like that.

At this moment, we are sitting outside, 8:15 Saturday night. I’m sipping my rusty nail (scotch and Drambuie), Daughter has her wine (she bought 8 bottles in Germany today because the prices were incredibly cheap), Jeanne her diet Pepsi. We’re in our sling camp chairs, at a burgundy, round plastic table that was sitting nearby that Jeanne grabbed. It’s maybe 65 degrees, beneath an early-evening blue sky.

People all around us are talking. We don’t understand a word. Daughter is getting ready to cook dinner. Later we’ll see if the hot water works.

Tomorrow, Sunday, we will go into historic Prague.  Life is good.

We spent the day Friday in Munich. We left behind our frustrations with Mobi. Hey, this is how memories are made: renting motorhomes that fall apart on you. In Munich, we had an awesome time and met some wonderful people. And you know how that feeling when you think you’ve met someone before? Wait for this story.

Downtown Munich is the perfect definition of a city that has a “there” there, with a marvelous beer garden/outdoor plaza/farmer’s market (every possible meat, fish, vegetable, fruit, herb and flower) and thousands of people in a good mood. And why not? They’re all drinking beer, even the musicians!

To be sure, Munich has its grand government buildings, spectacular cathedrals and museums, and a chic retail district. In the course of two or three blocks, we passed stores for Versace, Louis Vuitton, Jimmy Choo, Dior, Chanel, Georgio Armani, Hermes, Ralph Lauren and Valentino. (No Costco, but maybe out in the suburbs…)

We started our walking tour in the beer gardens, and ended there. Seating was congested, but two other couples invited us to join them. Dominique and Jean, from Lyon, France, and Theo and Gudrun, from Solingen, Germany, were friends through the marriage of their two children, and were anxious to give us advice on which cities to visit in Switzerland.

When they left, another couple took their seats: Deon and Elsie, from South Africa, who  had just spent two weeks in Prague. They were especially happy to speak with Americans and after 30 minutes we had exchanged e-mails and promises (that we hope to keep) to visit them in their country. “We love American people,” Elsie said. “We are Obama fans,” Deon said, commenting specifically on how he admires our president’s efforts to tackle the economic nightmares. “It’s hitting everyone, everywhere,” he said. (And he should know; he is an investments advisor.) “Obama, he’s something special. His heart and soul is there.”

They each remarked how the world seemed to be getting smaller, what with technology and the growing adventurous spirit of people to travel.

As we all stood up to leave, and they made the first move to hug us, I heard a voice that seemed amazingly familiar. “Tom!”

It was a coworker, Ulf, a researcher for In Business Las Vegas, the leading business publication in Las Vegas (and a sister publication to the Las Vegas Sun, where I work). Ulf was visiting his parents, Gerda and Arno, who live in Klais, about 90 minutes outside of Munich.  He arrived a few days ago for a week’s stay. He had been hiking and today came into Munich. And there he was, sitting five feet from us! Weird. Really really weird.

Meanwhile, an Australian friend of Daughter (they connected in Dutch language classes; in Antwerp) who knew we were going to be in Munich today text-messaged her, suggesting we eat at the restaurant her aunt and uncle, Rosemary and Volker, operate a few miles from downtown Munich. What the heck, so we took the underground to the neighborhood, found the restaurant — it specializes in meals featuring potatoes as the entree — and had a wonderful dinner.

Today was a good day, enjoying a beautiful city filled with wonderful people, making new friends and finding a coworker  in a crowd of happy beer drinkers thousands of miles from home! Did I say it was weird? In a very very good way.

Tomorrow, on to Prague….

Here in Munich, it is 8 a.m. Friday, and I’m hoping today goes better than yesterday. I’m sitting in the little internet room alongside the reception desk of Munich’s big, semi-urban campground. Hundreds and hundreds of camping vehicles are here, separated by class: cars with tents, vans and small motorhomes (that’s us), pull-trailers and large motorhomes.

Outside, it’s maybe 65 degrees, drizzly, grey sky. It reminds me of June gloom along the California coast.

An amazing assortment of people are walking past my window, from their camping units to the bus stop outside the gate where they can grab a bus to the underground to take them to the heart of the city. (We are about 2 blocks from the city’s zoo, on the edge of downtown.)

The people walking by are mostly casually dressed, carrying backpacks for a day of adventure in the city. But a surprising number of people men are in coats and ties, with nametags and carrying briefcases, as if they are going to work or to a convention.  I suppose it is possible that in Europe, to save money, men go to conventions and rather than stay at a hotel — say, the Bellagio or Venetian or Mandalay Bay — they travel by motor home.  I doubt these finely-dressed men crawled out of a sleeping bag in a tent, though.

So this is the morning after yesterday’s series of small disasters that just took the spirit out of us by last night, when I posted the long story about all that went wrong.  I’ll recap:

* The side door cannot be locked from inside because when we do, the key cylinder thingy twists on the outside and a key won’t go in, and it freezes until you manhandle it loose.

* The wastewater tank valve is broken, so when we use sink water, it immediately spills onto the ground, rather than collecting in a tank for proper disposal at a dump station. (This is not the toilet, which has its own tank and is working fine.)

* We finally figured out why our hot water wasn’t working: the plumbing was reversed on the sink, and “cold” was really hot and “hot” was cold. For the gallons of water we wasted waiting for the hot water to pour out, we were draining our tank. And last night, when we finally realized that we should have turned the spigot to “cold” to get hot water, we got maybe 30 seconds of hot water before we drained our 100-liter holding tank. So this morning, we have no water.

* Putting more water in the tank should not be a problem, except that we have to disconnect our electricity line and drive into the heart of the campground where the “water house” is, to hook up our hose. And that gets us to the other problem from yesterday: the cap for the inlet pipe is frozen to the inlet pipe, and so when we turn the cap, we are turning the entire pipe. That means the only way to put water into the tank is to access the water tank from inside (beneath a seat cushion) and drag a hose inside Mobi. That’s a pain in the rump.

All of this follows our most costly incident, which also occurred yesterday:  Making a turn too tightly, and rubbing the side of the Mobi against a gate pipe, gouging the right side of the Mobi for about five feet, and tearing off a piece of plastic molding around the back right tire. I’m distressed now that the dealership will argue that they should keep our entire security deposit to cover the repair. This puts me in a bad mood.

These events all occurred yesterday. Not a good day. But we can focus on the good times, too: the great dinner Daughter cooked last night — steaks with mushroom sauce, fresh French-cut green beans, risotto. Walking the streets of small German towns and watching children play in school yards.  Meeting the cousins of my health coach, the Traub family that owns two bakeries in the Black Forest region of Germany. And meeting Mia and Adelin, the Belgian couple who helped us with our water problems yesterday morning, and Ute and Ernst, from Hanover, who helped us figure out the hot-water problem last night.

Funny how people can make international connections, and become instant friends. We exchanged e-mail addresses and who knows if we will run into each other again. But now we can say we have friends in Europe, people who will help us out when they see our distress.

As I sit here, more people are streaming out to catch the morning buses. Here comes a family — mom, dad, two young kids, all dressed very nicely, he in a suit. And another couple holding a basket between them. I can’t tell if it is a picnic basket or a small basinet. I wonder where they’re going. And what’s it like waking up in a campground and putting on a coat-and-tie?

Me, I haven’t worn a tie now for a week. And I’ve only shaved once. Now, that is camping. 

The drivers most in peril when driving along Germany’s infamous autobahn are not the ones who travel the fastest, nor the ones who drive the slowest. It’s the ones who travel at speeds in-between the fastest and slowest (like us), and here is why:

Slow traffic always stays in the far right-hand lane. If you’re on a two-lane highway, but are driving faster than the slow traffic, you are constantly turning on your left blinker to slide into the fast lane, in order to pass the slow vehicles. Then you quickly return to the slow lane.

It is this constant changing of lanes that is fraught with danger. You peek into your rear-view mirror before shifting to  the fast lane. Is that a speck of a vehicle way back there in the fast lane, quickly approaching? Maybe. So you stay put, and you brake so you don’t drive into the backside of the slow vehicle. Indeed, some fancy-pants sample of German engineering blows past you at twice the speed and you say a prayer of thanks that you didn’t pull in front of it. You watch your rear-view mirror for a break, and there’s one! Quick! Turn on your blinker, change lanes, accelerate your Mobi as quickly as possible, overtake the slower vehicle, and get your fat bumper back into the slow lane before that Audi or BMW or Mercedes-Benz or Volvo run up your backside.

The flip side to high-speed travel on the autobahn is when construction or repairs close lanes, and for a few miles, traffic crawls along at only, say, 60 mph.  At one point, the lanes were so narrow that Mobi was rubbing up against the one-inch rubber warning tabs on the side of the wall-of-death to warn motorists that they were within an inch of getting a concrete burn. That was unnerving.

You may recall from an earlier story that Monica, my company health insurance’s “health coach” whose mission in life is to help me lose weight and lower my cholesterol, learned that we were going on vacation to Europe. She wondered if we were going to travel through Germany and, if so, would we go to Uttenweiler?

Why?  Because, she said, that’s where the family bakery, Traub Bakery, is! And if we went to Uttenweiler, we could say hi to her cousins Gertrude and Paul.

So we added Uttenweiler to our itinerary and today we found the family bakery and met her cousin, Paul.  He was very nice (and Monica, he says to tell you hello!). But more importantly, we found wonderful pastries and baked goods that filled up our bag: a cinnamon-and-nut pastry, a cheese pastry, a cinnamon roll, cinnamon-streudal loaf and a raspberry streudel cake, plus a pretzel for the road.  I don’t think any of these items are on our low-cholesterol, low-calorie diet, but Monica will have to deal with that in her own good time.

Paul said Gertrude was at the other Traub bakery, in nearby Biberach.  He got her on the phone and she was so excited to hear about us that she insisted we visit her as well. She offered to feed us lunch. That settled it. To travel from Las Vegas to Germany to send best wishes to my health coach’s cousins was worth a free lunch!

Gertrude was as warm and delightful as Paul, and spoke better English, and she fed us well with cold-cut sandwiches. We also bought more goodies from her: three chocolate pastries (their names I can’t pronounce, but “chocolate” being the operative word).

Gertrude asked us to tell cousin Monica that Paul got married last summer, and for her to please show up at the family  reunion this Christmas season in Florida. She missed the last one, you know, and she really should be there this time.

So Monica, don’t let us down. Please travel to Florida for the family reunion! And tell Gertrude and Paul, thanks for the great baked goods!