Hamburg, or Hell?
Ok, let’s just get this over with. I’ll start with the worst part of the trip and then we can move on.
Hamburg, Germany. There’s a specific street in it that only appears every 100 years. It was hidden the night we got there.
Part One of the day from and to hell started with a doubly long drive. We traveled from Malmo, Sweden to Hamburg on New Year’s Day. A stop in Copenhagen allowed us to briefly see a couple highlights of that city – including the changing of the guard at the palace – grab a slice of pizza (I know, don’t say anything) and figure out how to get to our next stop. GoogleMaps showed us 4+ hours to Hamburg that included putting the car on a ferry. Experiencing the steep cost of crossing bridges, we searched for the land option. Google told us it too was about 4 hours so that’s what we chose.
HUGE mistake. It wasn’t 4 hours, it was 8 hours. And a $30 fare to cross a bridge mid-Denmark. Plus gas which, in Europe is like $10 a gallon.
We rolled into Hamburg about 9:30 at night. This wouldn’t have been so bad if we could have driven right to the hotel. Which we could have done if the road the hotel was on existed. Which it didn’t. So no directions or maps would have helped.
We searched for (are you ready?) 5 HOURS looking for the hotel. No we didn’t have GPS, but we did have a detailed city map, highlighted maps from at least 3 gas stations or hotels, written driving directions with street names, spoken directions from Germans who spoke 5 words of English but tried very hard, two adults with 100 years of finding places, and an 18 year old… asleep in the back. It was just incredible. We followed everything closely, followed signs, turned where we (thought we) were supposed to, read street numbers… and still nothing.
Making it worse was that we were looking for a pretty obvious place – a Holiday Inn Express. So you’d think there’d be a commercial green and white sign out front to let us know we’d found it. (see picture)
Which we did see on two other places – a Holiday Inn and another Holiday Inn Express. Finding them, we sought first information then in desperation at 1 and 2 in the morning, a room, hoping they’d honor the reservation at a sister hotel in the chain. In both cases, they were happy to give us a room (for 20 euro or about $30 more) BUT said that we’d also have to pay for the room at the hotel we were booked in, based on the way the reservation was made (I’m looking into it).
I am WAY too cheap and too stubborn to pay for two hotel rooms in two establishments when i can’t find one of them (and lose $100) and demanded that we keep looking. After now, nearly 13 hours in the car, and seriously strained marital relations, it was tough. Patrick was ready to sleep in the car. I would have kept driving all night. We compromised to try one more time even though, even hotel clerks were no longer staffing front desks so we could ask if we were close.
The trick was to find a hotel that directed us a different way. A wonderful, kind, English-speaking and very well attired clerk at the Crowne Plaza (part of the chain that owns Holiday Inn) knew right where it was. He pulled out a map with the hotel identified and showed us the driving route. Getting to the street from a different way, we found it.
At that point I didn’t even want to think whether the street was obvious or not. It was 3 fricken o’clock in the morning. We’d found the place that had our reservation and could collapse.
Except that I needed to find the credit card that I lost… but that’s another circle of this hell.
All in all though, we were safe, dry, and had excellent transportation. With a clearer and well rested mind, I realized that we should have just hailed a cab and then followed it to the hotel.
Oh well. Oh, Hell.
