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Published: September 16th 2010
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As Riley on The Life of Riley used to say, "What a revoltin' development." Things don't always go as planned. Our plan for today was to drive to Rumbach, Germany, where Jan's family originated and then drive on to Stuttgart. Each leg of this trip was supposed to be about 2 hours driving time. We figured we'd get on the road about 10:00 AM and arrive in Stuttgart in the late afternoon.
This was really the only day we had a deadline to meet. I had put Stuttgart on our itinerary months ago in order to meet a young person I met on my Alaska trip, Isabel, who lives near Stuttgart. The plan was to meet her at the hotel at 6:00 and go to dinner with her at 7:00.
Dan and I hopped a taxi to the car rental office, which was about 10 minutes away. Reserved there for us was a Mercedes C class wagon, which was supposed to meet our only criteria, a car big enough for 4 people and 4 big suitcases, automatic transmission and GPS. We looked at it and thought it would be tight for the bags, but we thought we could make
Resort in Rumbach
Translation of this pamphlet is it's a special tip to go to Rumbach it work.
You can already guess what happened when we got back to the hotel. Yep, we could barely get 2 of our bags in the rear of the car. So off we go back to the rental place. After a long search through the computer, we were told that all the bigger vehicles were reserved. The only thing they had was an Opel wagon which didn't look much bigger, but when we folded down the 3rd row seats, did the job. It wasn't an automatic, but we could live with that. They gave us a portable GPS unit and we went back to pick up the girls. Everything fit in and we were off to drive to Rumbach.
Between not trusting the GPS 100% and a lot of road construction in town, we made more than a few wrong turns and it took us about 45 minutes to get out of Koblenz. We felt like we were going in circles for a while. So, we probably didn't get out of town until about 12:30. Once we got on the highway, it got a lot better navigating.
Getting off the autobahn and on to the smaller roads
near Rumbach, the scenery was very pretty with rolling hills and very wooded. It is a very small rural town in the Southwest of Germany. Jan had tried to phone the 2 relatives still living in Rumbach from America a couple times, but had no luck speaking with them and we decided to go to the address she had and take our chances finding someone. We also tried at a small inn that she thought a relative worked at. Unfortunately, not a soul in this small town spoke a word of English, so we couldn't find out much more. Marilyn suggested we try the town cemetery for old Brubach headstones. We found a couple in the church graveyard, but they were fairly recent. We learned later from Isabel that it is common practice to stop maintaining gravesites after about 30 years and therefore, no real old ones around.
In the next little town over, we stopped in another graveyard to check for more Brubachs and ended up finding several Krebs headstones. Kribs and Krebs are basically from the same family tree. My first immigrant to the US was from Frankfurt, but obviously this area had some Krebs. Marilyn said
that in a previous life Jan and I were residents of these tiny towns and were married, setting into motion our future and current marriage.....who knows?
At least Jan got to see her family's ancestral town and it was very lovely village in a beautiful part of Germany.
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HeatherLauren
Heather Lauren
Wow-- I can't believe they don't take care of their older gravestones and cemeteries!! But, pretty cool view- I'm happy to see where we came from :)