Survived the Autobahn!

I still can't believe I'm really here in Germany. All of my flights actually arrived ahead of schedule. On my flight from Sacramento to DC, I sat next to a delightful couple from Carmichael that were on their way to Rome to celebrate their 25th anniversary. Susie's friends were waiting for me at the airport. Hans helped me get the car rental taken care of and then we drove to Ludwigsburg as planned.

We had lunch in a nice little restaurant near the palace. We all had this wonderful crepe-like dish that had white german asparagus wrapped in ham or canadian bacon inside the crepe. I don't recall what it was called but it sure tasted good.  After lunch, they took the train back to Heilbronn and I went on an English-speaking tour of Ludwigsburg Palace. What a beautiful place, and luckily it didn't get destroyed in WWII like many of Germany's historic buildings. I stood in a beautifully decorated hall where Napoleon Bonaparte had been.

Ludwigsburg Palace

King Friedrich reigned over the Kingdom of Württemberg from 1806 to 1816 

The King's bedroom

A view of part of the castle garden from inside the Palace

Then came the most dreaded part of my entire trip; the drive from Ludwigsburg to the town of my ancestors, by myself, on the infamous autobahn.  My rented GPS wasn't working because they gave me the wrong charger (I will take care of that tomorrow...) but luckily I had printed out driving directions just in case.  OMG cars were zooming past me!! Everything was going fine until we came upon a really bad accident that slowed traffic down to a crawl.  It took twice as long to get to my destination thanks to that accident.  By that time I had been awake for about 24 hours straight and as I sat there in bumper-to-bumper traffic I kept feeling my eyelids start to droop. I turned up the A/C and the radio to try and keep myself from falling asleep on the road.

I can't wait to get out and take some pictures of this place tomorrow! It is absolutely beautiful country! Aufhausen is a small village of 950 inhabitants nestled in the Schwabishe Alb and everything is so green and surrounded by beautiful hills.

For now I am safely curled up in my "hotel" for the evening.  I'm staying at a small "landgasthof" that is like a bed & breakfast inn, and only has about 6 or 7 guest rooms. This building was built in 1637 as part of an agricultural operation. Here is a link to the history http://roessle.wordpress.com/geschichte-3/. It's in German but at least you can see pictures!