Europe on 5-10 Nervous Breakdowns a Day (26)
DAY 25 – MONDAY, MAY 20, 1974 – A DIET OF WORMS??
We arrived in Frankfurt a little before 9:00 a.m. We breakfasted on chocolate milk and bananas from a stand. Then I changed some money into German marks.
A Christian woman working in Frankfurt, Irene Johnson, had offered to have the girls stay with her while Jo and I could stay with a couple who lived outside town. But that sounded too complicated since we would have to make our own way to both locales and we had to leave early the next morning. So I rang her and thanked her but said we would try to make our own arrangements. She said fine, but if the cost proved prohibitive to call her back. (Later note: I think that, after Otis Gatewood’s first wife died, he married Irene Johnson.)
Our Eurail Passes entitled us to a free Rhine cruise. I checked on that. We would take a train from Frankfurt to Mainz and get tickets here. I then started calling places to spend the night mentioned in the book. Frankfurt still has U.S. soldiers stationed there. We saw two MPs and several soldiers, and the upstairs of the train station had facilities for them. As a result, many in Frankfurt speak English so I had no trouble calling the hotels. The train station had a big map of the town with a street directory so I could check out where the hotels were. All seemed close to the station.
The first hotel was full and the second wanted 104 marks (about $41.50) for our family. The third sound a bit more reasonable, but wanted me to come see what they had. The girls and I went while Jo stayed with the luggage. The room was about three–four blocks away and apparently in a sex-and-sin section of town (catering to U.S. servicemen?); there were pictures of naked women everywhere. The hotel had two rooms that would accommodate us for 80 marks (approximately $32.00). I said we would take it. No breakfast but a shower just down the hall at no extra charge.
On the way back to the station, we passed a guy who apparently was exercising a pet chimp. The chimp was dressed up and the guy had him climbing up and down a sign. He finally put the chimp in a fancy car and drove off.
We again lugged our luggage to the room. It was 11:30 by then, so we went out to buy groceries. A store was nearby and we bought food for the rest of that day and some for the next day on the boat.
I had a day trip planned to Worms (pronounced “Vorms”), where the infamous “Diet of Worms” took place. No, this was not a meal of squirmy little creatures. A “diet” (pronounced “deet”) was a formal assembly of “the Holy Roman Empire.” The most famous was the Diet of Worms in 1521 where Martin Luther was indicted for his “heretical” views. Jo and Angie decided to stay in Frankfurt while Debbie and Cindy wanted to go with me. We threw snack food in a sack and took off.
The trip to Worms took an hour and a half.
When we got there we had about two hours before we had to start back. I knew there was a statue of Luther there so I thought that would be a starting place, but how to find it? A map of Worms had “Lutherplatz” on it so I thought that we would try there first. We walked around an hour with no success. I finally communicated a bit with a man at the train station and he said we should just keep going the way we had gone, that we had just not gone far enough.
We finally found the statue. Luther’s statue is surrounded by other statues of individuals associated with the Reformation Movement. (In case you ask: There is no statue of Calvin.)
On the base of Luther’s statue are depictions of various stages of his trial.
I wanted to find where the Diet of Worms took place, but couldn’t find anyone else to communicate with. Our time was up by then, so we made our way back to the train station—as usual with mixed emotions. One needs to take a full set of encyclopedias in English on a trip like this. (Later: Today one could take a full set of encyclopedias on his Kindle plus look up anything on his Smart Phone, but we are talking Dark Ages, kids.)
It was past 6:00 when we got back to our room. We ate and I feel asleep. Later I woke up, took a bath, and went to bed.
