Travelling with the Ortegas

Well, a bit more excitement our way.

Jodi was kind enough to send me the remainder of the money from the house (YEAH!) so I have been able to pay up the car payments, get Nick’s bank account back into the black. Not sure if I told that story, but basically they took his pay check to start to pay off Jess’ overdrawn account, so he ends up minus $500 after fees!!!!! AUUGGHH.

Note: NEVER, I repeat NEVER open up a bank account at US Bank. NEVER!!!!!!!!!!!!

So that got paid up, now all he needs to remember to do is get MY name off his account or they will probably take his pay check for my overdrawn account. But hey, I’m betting he forgets to. GRRR……..

Also,(GOD forbid I ever have money for me) it turns out somehow I had missed a car insurance payment, which I need to check out, because I am not sure I did, but nick was driving with NO insurance. AAUUGGHHHHHH…………


Looking bank through my bank account, I remember one month the State Farm statement being like $18, which I thought was cool, did not question, and I though I paid, but maybe something was wrong with online payment or something, but I do remember that, so…. Anyway, there went another $300 of my newfound money to get it back on, WHICH Nick is supposed to do this morning by going down and giving them a check, cross your fingers he does this.. (HUGE SIGH)

So yesterday Jess and I took a train to the nearest fairly big town to go shopping.
We get to the station in Herzberg, which is basically a little platform next to the train tracks. We get our tickets, board the train, and then notice that the train is going the total opposite direction. (Welcome to the Ortega world of travel)

Our only guide up to this point has been this laminated train schedule in German that Mark has hung up at the house. (THAT should have warned us right away) It’s really odd, you would think in a normal world that one side of the schedule would be times the trains come and the other side would be times the trains leave. Well, we never really figured the damn thing out, and then later in the evening coming back, Jess decided that it wasn’t even the right schedule for where we needed to go…… yeah….

ANYWAY, we are heading in the wrong direction, and Jess deciphers that the train will go the same way about a ½ hour, and then it would start back the opposite direction to where we came from, and THEN go the right way…. We started out at 10:30 in the morning, expecting to get there by 11:30…. Read on! LOLOL

So the ticket lady comes by, she looks at my ticket and says it is no good. (FUCK, I think, it’s bad enough it is going to cost us something like $40 to take this trip, she’s now going to fine me…) Luckily she must have seen this happen before, because she sort of laughs, shakes her head like “more American idiots” and goes on…. SHEW!)

Off we go, back and forth along the same route for another hour, and instead of getting to the city by 11:30, it’s now 12:30. We head out of the train station and look for a bus that says Zentrum, meaning center, which we figure will take us to the shopping district. (Need I say more?)

We hop on the bus, and within a few minutes we are going through the shopping district. BUT, being who we are, we decided that in order to make sure we get the right bus back, we need to make sure we get off at the stop that actually says Zentrum. After a bit we leave the shopping area.. Now somewhere deep down inside we KNOW we should immediately get off, but again, somewhere in our pea brains we think, or at last I think, (who KNOWS what Jess was thinking) I think ok, no stop that says Zentrum, maybe there is a BIGGER shopping area in the mystical place called Zentrum.

So we hang on, and drive and drive through the university area, the low income area, and the start heading out of town. Ok, by now we are saying hmmmmmm… should we have gotten off at the shopping area? Do we want to get off and walk all that way? Do these busses make a circle back? Are we in fact going to France?

Back out into the countryside, we sit frozen in our seats, and then we start to laugh. Oh what the hell, our journeys are always an adventure, relax and enjoy.

We pick up a bunch of little 8 year olds coming home from school. That is one thing we have noticed in both Italy and Germany, school kids take trains and local busses to get to and from school. There are no “school busses”

The kids all have their backpacks on, dolphins and undersea creatures seem to be the craze with them this year. After about 5 minutes of mass chaos, the bus driver takes off, using the brakes just a bit to put them off balance and into hysterical and VERY cute peals of laughter.

By now Jess and I have moved ourselves into the fat person seat at the very front. We figure this because it’s bigger than one person, but certainly not big enough for two. We know this because half of my left leg is hanging off the side of the seat. We fight for space for a few minutes, pushing each other back and forth until I give up and balance precariously off the edge. I hang onto a pole for dear life and hope the bus driver doesn’t notice and decide to be a smart ass and turn a sharp right to make me hit the floor.

After we are settled, we ask the driver if he speaks English and then ask about Zentrum and shopping and he laughs and basically says relax and enjoy the ride, it’s going to be another ½ hour before we get back to town.

We sit back and enjoy the outskirts of town, the clean German streets, houses, yards, and finally head back to the shopping center. Not once have we noticed the elusive ZENTRUM stop.

We decide to be smart and get off the bus.

Now the trip that should have taken us a little over an hour has now taken over 3 hours. This, we decide, is typical for us, so we hake our heads and then go off to shop!
We go first to our favourite German store – CandA. I LOVE the clothes there. I head for the jeans. FINALLY I will be able to get a pair that fit, since mine have been hanging off me for months now.

I get into the dressing room and joy oh joy! I look THINNER! The stomach is still there unfortunately, MUCH smaller, but I decide I really need to start doing sit-ups to help that. My legs and hips however look great!

I try on the jeans, they looks great! I then have to put the old pants on… MY GOD, I look like a skateboarder gone bad. The crotch hangs down LOW, very sad looking. After we pay for everything, I make sure I go to a WC as soon as possible to change pants. I FEEL HUMAN again!

I also finally get a coat!!!!!! It is brushed leather, a camel color, shortish, with a lining, collar and cuffs made out of what I can only describe as shorthaired curly caramel colored cocker spaniel ears. I LOVE it and it is WARM. Now I just need a scarf, mittens and hat.. It has turned cold here and the wind is deadly.

Jess now needs a heavier coat, but she did get jeans and a sweater.

Anyway, we did our shopping we each bought a couple of books in ENGLISH! We also stopped in the town square where everyone was drinking glasses of warm punch and hot chocolate. There was a kinder (child) and adult version of the drink. I thought it meant size, but soon found out it meant with or without alcohol! Jess had the hot chocolate which had like coconut liquor in it, I had the punch, which I personally though sucked, but I am not much of an alcohol person. We both understood why everyone there was in such a good mood and not complaining about the cold!

I have not been very impressed with German Christmas so far, very limited I think. I like the lack of commercialism, no huge Christmas displays in the stores, etc, but there is a lack of variety as far as cookies, etc…..

We ended up eating at the same Chinese place we ate at the last time we came into town. Well actually we got it to go and ate it at the train station. It was NOT as good as last time. Of course last time we felt like we had come from the ends of the world for a decent meal, and now that I have been cooking decent food, I think we just realized it was always so-so Chinese food. LOL

We knew that the last train left about 19:46, 7:46, so we made sure we got to the train station on time, even managed to catch the right bus! Even though train stations have an indoor area underneath the rails, there are open stairwells that go up to each track, so finding a warm place to eat our food was not easy. We finally decided to go up to the track early and were lucky enough to see our train was waiting, so we were able to go in ½ hour before it left.

On our adventures in the morning we found out that Herzberg actually has two train stations. The little one we were at and a big one. We had no idea where this big one was located with perspective to the main town we knew, so we had bought tickets back to the little station.

All was well, the train stopped at the main station first, and then we assumed at the small train station…. Uh-huh, you guess it, back off in some other direction we went. Not even to the same place as in the morning, some really unknown town we had never heard of. This was the last train of the night and we again were heading off to France or some other strange place.

After some discussion, I went and asked a young girl if she spoke English.

Note: This may have been made before, but is an important note: Ask young people first if they speak English, as they now have to take English classes in school.

She was very nice and told us we could get off at the next town (thank god we asked when we did) and then wait and there would be one last train coming back to the main Herzberg rail station. We did as she told us and decided we would like to get home some time, and took a taxi from the main station in town. I decided to look on the bright side of things….. I thought the train fare was too expensive, so we certainly got our money’s worth of ride!!

Once again, a 1 hour trip took twice as long. We had decided to go into town and use the internet café, since they had screaming fast computers compared to the dial up at Mark’s. I am not complaining, thank god he has access, but screaming fast internet was nice for a change.


Well, that was our big trip to the city.

We got about 2 or 3 inches of snow today, very pretty to see the snow on the pine trees up on the mountain.

I took the dog for a walk the other evening, about 10 pm. It was so quiet, really nice. Chilly, and as we walked down the street the mountain went straight up along one side of us, and on the other I could hear the stream that runs through town. The sidewalk was cobblestone and there weren’t many cars going past. We walked and walked, and I just breathed in the air, listened to the water, and admired the Bavarian style houses along the way.

I was trying to figure out what was different and I suddenly realized…. I was not spending any energy listening to hear if anyone was following me… in America if I would walk at night I would be nervous, and listening to make sure no one was walking behind me, etc.


Here I was simply walking and enjoying myself. It was a nice feeling. I liked it a lot…………