By the end of the trip, we had hit the major sites we wanted to see in Germany, so we spent the last two days out in Eileen’s corner of the country because she’d wanted to show me her area. Since I’ve always been interested in the Holocaust, I asked if we could stop up in Dachau on the way out since it was only a half hour from Munich, then we spent the night at her apartment in Willstaat having a barbecue with her, her boyfriend Ben, and their friends, all hit up Europa Park in Rust the following day, and ended our last night over in France having a fantastic cheese dinner.
Last German road trip with Johannes the bear.
Dachau
After reading so many books and seeing so many movies and documentaries on the Holocaust, it was really impactful visiting a concentration camp in person. Dachau was one of the most infamous work camps of WWII, and it still stands today as a memorial and historical museum documenting the atrocities that took place there. It’s free to visit.
Once you pass through the Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Will Set You Free) door at the entrance, you’ll see the barracks to your left and the maintenance building (now a museum) to your right. The large, empty roll call space is in between. The door that now stands at the entrance is a replica. The original was stolen from the camp in 2014, but it was found in Norway and returned to Dachau two years later where it is now housed in the museum.
All of the original barracks have actually been torn down. There are dozens of rows on either side of the central path though where you can see the foundations they originally stood on. It kind of drives home just how many people were packed into the camp, especially when you go into the one recreated barrack and walk through the rooms.
The first room shows what the barracks were like during the early years of the camp. There were tall bunks taking up about half the space, but then there was an open area and an attached room with some extra space. The next room is from the late 30s to early 40s. The room is now crammed with bunks. Finally in the last couple years before liberation in 1945, the rooms became so cramped that really the only purpose they could serve was sleeping (if you could sleep packed so close to everyone else). In some blocks, they forced in 2000 people. There was a major typhoid epidemic in 1944 and the barracks were full of the sick and dying.
There is also an example of the bathrooms. One room has two fountain-like sinks for everyone to share, the other is just exposed toilets along either wall. No privacy.
Down past all the empty barrack spots, you’ll find some religious memorials. There’s a large stone column with the center cut out holding a large cross and altar…
…a very solemn Protestant church…
…a Catholic church built on the old recreational grounds of the guards…
…and a Jewish memorial.
Outside the barbed gates, you can visit both the old and new crematoriums. The newer one has multiple ovens, and you can walk through the room where prisoners were meant to disrobe and into the gas chamber itself which was a little surreal.
Outside the crematorium, there is a very pretty walk you can take through the woods, but as you go, you’ll pass mass graves and execution sites.
There’s also a Russian chapel built in this area.
We went into the museum last, and I wasn’t that impressed with it. It was packed full of informational banners, but they kept repeating themselves. I’m sure I read certain pieces of information three different times as I walked through the rooms. The bits that stood out to me were profiles of specific prisoners, summaries of all the various groups sentenced to the camp and the different badges they had to wear (gypsies wore black, homosexuals wore pink, Jews wore the Star of David, etc). There was also a really horrifying rundown of medical experiments on prisoners from injecting them with malaria to altitude survival tests to forcing subjects to drink only seawater for weeks.
It wasn’t an uplifting visit, but I’m glad we made the stop. Unlike the US with the Civil War, Germany doesn't glorify anything about WWII or the Holocaust.
Europa Park
On a completely different note, Europa Park the following day was nothing but uplifting. What a great amusement park! We all woke up after crashing at Eileen’s and took two cars down less than an hour south to reach it. We were even lucky enough to be in time for their Halloween season.
The whole park is themed after different European countries which reminded me of Busch Gardens in Virginia. We didn’t have time to properly explore them all since we had dinner reservations that night, but the Germans had all been there before and knew exactly what they wanted to ride.
You come into the park through the Germany section with cute shops on either side of the tree lined path.
We bypassed Italy with its arches and fountains…
…and went to France where we rode our first coaster, the Silver Star. It was a long-ish wait, but not bad compared to a lot of US parks. I’d say on average we waited 45 minutes for most rides. This one had some fancy cars to look at while we queued. The coaster was fun, it had a pretty steep hill to start.
Next we walked through Greece which had tight alleys past staggered white buildings like Santorini, and there was a water ride through the Parthenon.
Our second ride was in Russia, the Euro Mir. I loved this one! It had these cool mirrored cylinders like a factory, and the ride itself was like going through a machine. The cars had both backward and forward-facing seats, not that it mattered much because the cars spun as you went. Lewis and I were in the very back facing backwards. We went through a dark tunnel of lights and smoke and came out to a track spiraling upwards around this central spinning contraption. Once we reached the top, we came out through a door to the outside and spun around the cylinders we’d seen earlier. Finally, it dropped like a rollercoaster down some hills, and this was really fun for us at the back because we couldn’t see it coming.
After grabbing some surprisingly good tortellini from a stand near the Luxembourg plaza for lunch, we headed on through the Scandinavian street with its fish shops and wooden ship ride. We went straight on to Iceland (for some reason separate from Scandinavia) which had two of the best coasters.
The first was the Blue Fire coaster with an entrance modeled after the Blue Lagoon. It had lots of twists and loops, the only one we were on that went upside down.
The next one was the wooden coaster, Wodan, and I didn’t even mind the long queue because the waiting area was so cool! Outside, we passed by a huge Viking emerging from the water as well as Hela, the goddess of life and death.
We went through a long stretch indoors with rocky walls holding glowing ice on one side and lanterns on the other. There were blue Vikings looking down on pits of glowing cubes (obvious signs of an ice mage cave) and knights in armor glowing red. There were cool signs with Icelandic names and a dragon glowing with flashing purple dots. It was basically Skyrim. The rollercoaster was one of the best wooden ones I’ve ridden as well.
We unfortunately had to bypass Portugal and Spain to go straight to Grimm’s Enchanted Forest since we were short on time. This area was so magical though! The whole park was a bit Disney-ish, but especially this section. There were houses themed after different fairy tale stories (like a wolf sleeping in a bed inside the Little Red Riding Hood house), giants next to trees, unicorns, mushrooms, ivy-covered pillars with tiny doors. It was adorable!
We had a coffee there and walked back to the “Minimoy Land”, and although I don’t have a clue what a minimoy is, this was super cute too. It was a big indoor area with slides and rides including this one where people were carried through tunnels in the hill by a suspended cart. We were going to ride it, but we realized we probably only had time for one more thing and moved on.
We passed through England with its Globe Theater, pub, and rail station, then Lewis and I went to the Mine of Hephaestus haunted house in Greece while the others went back to Germany for a different ride. I just wanted to do at least one Halloween-themed thing, but I should have really chosen the indoor coaster in the giant pumpkin instead.
The haunted house wasn’t so great. It was sufficiently dark inside, but the actors were all in the same ghostly costumes, and there weren’t many scares. The only plus was that there was almost no line, so we were out quick enough to fit in the ride our friends had gone to.
We passed the lawn full of pumpkin art on the way back. People had painted and arranged pumpkins to look like all sorts of different animals from spiders to sheep.
The ride we went on in Germany was called the Voletarium and it was the best of the day. It was a long line and the queue area was adventure themed with a flying robot, owls, and travel posters. When we finally reached the front, there was an intro video that basically set up the concept. We were on this hang glider contraption, everyone seated in one long row with a huge movie screen in front of us. The ride moved as if we were flying through all of these beautiful places around the world over Florence, past the Eiffel Tower, above Neuschwanstein Castle, scaling Everest, and more. You could feel the wind on your face, and at some point swooping over a city we could actually smell the flowers. It ended by flying over Epcot and seeing the fireworks above the ball. It was so cool!
We had to rush after this and stopped back at Eileen’s house before crossing the border into France for the evening.
Strasbourg
I love France! I hadn’t been back since my first ever overseas trip when I was 18, and even just this one evening here reminded me why I adore it. We came up from the parking garage into a plaza with a carousel in the center, and just down the alley was the absolutely massive rust colored cathedral. It was incredible.
We walked down the narrow streets to the river which was just so picturesque lined with German/French hybrid houses, streetlamps along the banks, and bridges at intervals.
Our dinner reservation at 7:30 was at La Cloche a Fromage, or as Eileen called it, cheese paradise. Sure enough, the menu was all cheese AKA all perfection. Eileen and Flo got three different kinds of bottomless fondue which they shared with the whole table, Alisa got this giant block of cheese that was placed under a heat lamp where it just melted down onto a plate, we all ordered wine to share, and I got two starters- a “perfect egg” dish and this butternut squash with a hunk of mascarpone in the middle. It was so freaking good.
Afterwards we sat out front to have espresso which came with these soft melty chocolates, and we passed a clarinet player on the street while walking back to the car. France! I adore it!
Our trip was at its end though, and back at Eileen’s we packed our bags into Flo’s car and rode with him and Alisa up to Frankfurt. They dropped us off at Eileen’s brother Rico’s house. He was giving us a bed for the night, and their dad had paid for our train tickets to the airport the following morning which was all so nice of them. Rico rode us to the train station in the morning and we made it to the Frankfurt airport for my morning flight back to the US.
I had a busy and fun-filled week in Germany! I’m glad I got to see so many sights around the country and finally attend the famous Oktoberfest. Big thanks to both Eileen and Frank for their hospitality… your turn to come to the USA next (I can meet you somewhere that isn’t Ohio).
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