Our Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

Americans in Europe

(Part 4)

Loaded up with gas and Leibniz cookies we got back to Heidelberg no problem mid-afternoon. It was still our first day in Europe and we would be spending two more in Heidelberg, so there was no rush to see everything we wanted to see right away all at once.

We walked around, getting lost on purpose. Culley Jane is fluent in French and knows enough German to be understood and understand so she could get directions if it was important, like where’s a bathroom.

We were in the old section of the city where the streets were more for people on bikes and mopeds or on foot than for cars.

There were lots of small corner grocery stores like when I was a kid in the 50s growing up in a small town in America. We bought grapes and bread and cheese and wine, and Coke for River. The paper euros I handed to the lady at the cash register felt funny in my hands, not like dollars. The lady smiled. “Americans?” she asked in broken English.

“Colorado,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, handing me back an undecipherable sum of paper money that reminded me of Monopoly. “I know of Colorado, your mountains and horses like Texas.”

Back at our lodging, we broke off hunks of bread to eat with our cheese and grapes. They were the best grapes ever!  They came from the Netherlands, the rich delta of the Rhine where it branches and flows into the Atlantic. Like fresh off the vine. Probably trucked in overnight up the Rhine valley.

Then we took off again, walking the narrow streets of the old city, merging with streams of tourists speaking all the languages of the world and getting along, on vacation.

The tourist streets were lined with small shops stocked with things for tourists to buy, from t-shirts to gold. I was surprised by how many of the cafes advertised pizza and tacos. There was a Starbuck’s.

Looking up in one direction, the imposing stone towers of a medieval church gazed down upon the street scene below, passing judgement.

Looking up in another direction, there was the vigilant castle, scanning the landscape for approaching threats, looking down and out over the church and the town and the surrounding lands of the Rhenish Palatinate.

The girl in the story I wanted to tell was just 16 years old when she first saw the castle – River’s age… or that was not really true, at least not yet. We still had a couple of days left in Germany before heading south for two and a half weeks in our rented VW Golf, crossing over into the Rhone valley in Switzerland and following that to the south of France and then west along the Mediterranean in the direction of the Atlantic coast and then north to Paris, where River would officially turn 16.

After we decided what not to buy along the tourist streets and with the previous day's taste of octopus still fresh in my mind, I was in the mood for something familiar.

During my over-the-road trucking days I was always asked where in America you could find the best hamburger (or biscuits and gravy, or chicken fried steak). The best hamburger, I always said, was at an out of the way mom and pop café next to an old Citgo station with truck parking out back just off the I-95 exit for Fayetteville, South Carolina. But that was before I discovered the café in the Rhine Valley in Germany that served “The Heidelburger" with fries. You can’t get to the place by taking just one exit. It might take a lifetime, but believe me, it’s worth it.

Then, that night, as Culley Jane was falling asleep and River was on the phone to her parents and friends back in Colorado, telling them stories about her first full day in Europe, I was reading about a 16-year-old girl who first saw the castle in 1613. Four centuries later it was about to happen again. Tomorrow we would visit the castle and lucky me the reporter getting to be there on the scene in person to record the historic event.