Americans in Europe (Part One)

We’re back from Europe – my wife, Culley Jane, our oldest granddaughter, River, and me. Two and a half weeks there. Rented a car. I was nervous at first about driving in Europe. The streets in their cities are like paved alleyways in America, the motion like pinballs. But the main highways are better than they are here. You pay a lot in tolls, but the pavements are kept up like things there are built to last for thousands of years. All the houses are made out of stone. We walked on streets of medieval construction and watched tourists crossing and taking pictures from an aqueduct built by Romans two thousand years ago. We wandered around small towns clustered around stone cathedrals built in the early Middle Ages before Guttenberg invented an efficient printing press, which got the people to thinking and then going to war with armies with clubs and axes hurling boulders at stone castles along the Rhine over ontological obscurities like Transubstantiation. Significantly, we first landed where all that got started and during the coming century became the Thirty Years War in which half of Europe’s population died.

We first landed in Frankfurt, on the Rhine in Germany. For millions of years the river has foamed and flowed, carving out a long, winding, fertile valley that starts in the Swiss Alps and winds its way north to where it spreads out onto a delta called “the Netherlands” before returning to the sea. The German city of Worms is in that valley, where the Diet of Worms was held in 1521, when Luther was officially declared a heretic. Like the mountain waters at its source, ideas flowed along the path of the Rhine. The radical thoughts of Calvin and his co-thinkers in Geneva flowed downstream to co-mingle with the questions Luther was raising at the time, which many of the local inhabitants in the valley thought were reasonable, now that they had their own printed Bibles and could decide for themselves what had been said.

We spent the first three days and nights of our journey in Heidelberg, not too far from Worms.

Culley Jane had labored for months making all the bewildering lodging arrangements through a booking agency on the internet. Unlike me and our oldest granddaughter – who, if everything worked out as planned, would turn sixteen in Paris – my wife has been to Europe and speaks the languages and knows what can go wrong and what can go right if you’ve got a good plan worked out beforehand. So, right after landing at the big airport in Frankfort, we packed all our stuff into our rented mid-size VW Golf stick shift and took off for Heidelberg – an hour up the Rhenish Valley – and settled into a nice apartment with cooking facilities, comfortable beds and a great clean shower.

It was a good start.