Ignoring These 5 Travel Tips Left Me (Nearly) Stranded In Germany
Assumptions, oversights and American-bred naivety that led to me nearly spending the night at a German train station.
Sprinting into a boutique German hotel to plead for 100 Euros, cash, is the closest I’ve come to robbing anyone.
It was well after dark and my wife and I had just endured eight hours on southbound trains out of Munich. She was currently sitting in a car with our cab driver whose only English word, we recently learned, was “cash.”
At first the hotel front desk refused my request (rightly so) and directed me to an ATM, which, while functional, was buried in a snow bank knee-deep.
After a bit of back and forth in which the hostess decided I was more sympathetic (pathetic) than threatening, I got the cash on the condition I bring back a receipt so she could explain the situation to her boss.
As my wife and I trudged through the picturesque (even after dark) town of Schwangau, Germany, I realized that based on the amount and variety of mistakes we made from the moment we began our European vacation in Paris, days earlier, we were lucky we weren’t sleeping in a train station.
