2005 Letter about a visit to Aachen, Germany: The next day we left for a campground in Vaal, The Netherlands, which is just outside the German city of Aachen. As those of you who have read our book know, we had no luck finding a campground in Aachen on our last trip. This time we do have better information, and the English Caravan Club book suggested the Vaal campground as the most convenient to Aachen. The drive from Tilburg via Eindhoven was about 110 miles in all. We arrived before noon. As we neared Germany the land got a little more hilly and forested than most of the Netherlands.
Nice campground, as usual. Clean and well cared for. The bus stop was a bit far for us to walk – but we drove into town and found a perfect place to park the RV. It was very near the supermarket and only a few yards from the bus stop. The supermarket was a puzzle. We always go to supermarkets – and we’ve never been in one that had such ultra long displays of coffee. In fact, three types of items made up about half the inventory of that store: coffee, sweets—candy, cake and cookies--and cigarettes. We saw shoppers with twenty or more packages of coffee in their carts! Obviously, coffee, sweets and cigarettes are more expensive in Germany than in the Netherlands. This also led us to speculate about how much Germans drink coffee and eat candy. How much they smoke is immediately apparent wherever you go. The new form of German invasion uses Mercedes and money – they come and they buy!
Aachen, like many other German cities, was almost completely destroyed by Allied bombing during WWII. Indeed, the fact that so many cities here were destroyed was one of the reasons that we were sort of reluctant to come here. Almost nothing of the old architecture remains and that does affect the feel of these cities. Most of what you see is from the 50’s and 60’s. But the Germans did rebuild a lot in the old style.
The bus ride to Aachen took only about 15 minutes. We had a lovely day – shopping for groceries, joining the throngs walking around, having lunch at an outdoor café with totally gorgeous pastries (Yes, we did try them!). We visited the Cathedral – which has the largest, tallest stained glass windows we have ever seen– and the remaining remnants of Charlemagne and other Holy Roman Emperors. Charlemagne is as looming a figure in Europe as G.Washington is in the US and was associated with this Cathedral, as well as the nearby State House that we also visited. Then we took a bus "home".
Aacheners don’t seem too different from the Netherlanders. Perhaps the population is weighted a bit more toward whites than the population in Holland – but there are some black people and middle eastern as well as oriental faces in the crowds. And there were crowds. Everyone was out in the city – walking their dogs, pushing baby carriages, sitting in the cafes. The interesting thing is that we are much more at home with the language than we have any right to be, and we are feeling considerably more comfortable than we expected to feel. So far the people with whom we interacted were easy to be with. We went about our business, gawking at things, trying to figure out what things were and how things worked and asked people whenever we had difficulty. As in Holland, almost everyone we approached knew how to speak English. And everyone so far has been cooperative and helpful without being condescending. We both began to feel that coming here was no mistake and that we would enjoy our visit.
We’ve had our problems of course. This time, they are all American problems. Verizon has decided it doesn’t like us. It won’t let us retrieve our e-mails via their internet server. My brand-new T-Mobile phone, purchased just for the purpose of being used in Europe, doesn’t work. The T-Mobile store in Aachen couldn’t fix it even though they tried very hard to and spent a great deal of time with us. But this too will pass – and so will we.