Don’t count on it – lost in Frankfurt

© 2017 Peter Free

 

19 June 2017

 

 

A PCS wish

 

This story starts with me wanting to make a last mountain bike ride before PSCing from Germany to Stateside.

 

The often muddy forest near our rented German house is filled with logging roads, impressive gullies and some moderately steep hills. For two and a half years it had been my refuge.

 

I figured that I could make a last ride the day before the movers came. And still have plenty of time to wash and properly pack the bike myself.

 

 

Easy, no?

 

Maybe. But a tumultuous childhood taught me not to count on anything.

 

 

Cascading glitches

 

My wife wanted to send her European bought car back to the States. She drove it to a truck-to-port service in Frankfurt. Armed with an unreliable Garmin car GPS and a OneSimCard burner phone (which has never been able to text properly), I followed her in a rental car.

 

Ominously, the Garmin had no idea where the shipper’s street was. I would have to keep my wife’s car in sight in order for me to get to wherever she was going.

 

 

Omens chuckled at this audacity

 

The rental unit wheezed just to keep up with my wife's zoom machine. The diminutive Opel’s front end twitched back and forth, as if it had automotive palsy. After a couple of irritating hours, I was ready for the chase to be over. Happily, Frankfurt’s perennial traffic jam loomed into view.

 

Release would soon be at hand, wouldn’t it?

 

 

Maybe not

 

Summertime Germany always has an overflow of road construction. The two combined to see my wife suddenly dart rightward, into a lane of impenetrable bumper to bumper off-ramp traffic. She explained later that her iPhone had changed its route mind at the last second.

 

Caught in no-exit land, I made an uncharacteristic obstacle of myself as I flashed by and slowed to a stop to signal my way into the exiting steel stream. After an embarrassing number of horn-honking minutes, a kindly soul let me in.

 

Twenty minutes flashed by. We began perceptibly moving. I had no idea whether my wife was still in this exit line.

 

After some fruitlessly no parking downtown blocks, I pulled off into a gas station and parked the rental car diagonally (side-on) to passing street traffic, so that she would be sure to see it.

 

After an interminable period, I saw a zoom machine like hers turn right about half a block upstream. But now on foot (so that I could see in all directions), I couldn’t keep up enough to spot where it went.

 

I consulted the iPhone directions she had given me before departing on this unwelcomely tedious adventure. Hugo-Junkers Strasse (where she supposedly was going) should show up on a street sign, shouldn’t it?

 

Well no. Germans don’t believe in letting people know where they are. This appears to be some kind of Middle Ages hangover. Street signs never reliably mark anything. ("You live here and you don't know where you are? Shame.")

 

Divided Hanauer Landstrasse (the street I was on) would have an opposite component going back from whence I had come, wouldn’t it?

 

It did. But separated by a busy rail trolley line and construction-slowed traffic so heavy that a pre-toddling baby could have crawled faster.

 

It was hot, and the car’s air conditioning didn’t work. I was beginning to curse.

 

Being in Frankfurt’s industrial core, roads went every which-way. With a plethora of elevated, circling spirals of on and off ramps. Bodies of water and innumerable rail lines added to the complexity.

 

In European style, many of the streets went illogically nowhere that Americans would consider a reasonable and efficiently achieved destination.

 

And naturally, this being Western Europe downtown, there were frequently no places to pull over and ponder. My phantom pre-toddlers crawled zippily past, as I stewed repeatedly in unmoving traffic.

 

 

Note

 

In looking at Google Maps later, I recognized that I had been trapped in a maze explicitly designed to trick intelligent rats and stupid humans into thinking that they knew where they were going, when they didn’t have a clue.

 

And in America-like fashion, someone had decided that it would be a good idea to tear up virtually the entirety of the place, so that absolutely no one could go anywhere without perceptibly aging in the process.

 

 

The phone

 

I called my wife when I finally managed to find a place to pull over. She could hear me. I couldn’t hear her. I relocated. I could hear her. She couldn’t hear me.

 

This went on, with variations and misunderstood addresses for several stops. Seeming hours passed. Eventually, snippets of conversation made it clear that she had finished dropping off the car and had walked (carrying two heavy bags) back to a main street in hopes of locating me.

 

 

The Garmin

 

The Garmin couldn't find anything. Not even the specific addresses my wife kept providing. It couldn't even find street corners. Evidently in the map-maker's mind, this heavily used part of Frankfurt doesn't exist.

 

Annoyingly, when the Garmin did have an address in its nasty little brain, it kept taking me to different places, despite ostensibly using the same ending point.

 

Using the "categories" list of destination types, the Garmin unhelpfully couldn’t even figure out which gas station was closest to me.

 

So, I picked one that I could see on the map. But instead of taking me to that one, the Garmin dumped me on a heavily traveled bike lane which ran through a restaurant-like parking lot. Which, no fault of the Garmin's, was uncomfortably adjacent to two or three confusingly laid out traffic circles, all clogged with maniacally dense traffic.

 

Exasperated by the Garmin’s seizure-prone antics, I punched in one of its few address-listed gas stations. Following the device's instructions to that address, I noted prominent landmarks along the way.

 

Throughout all this, it did not help knowing that my wife was apprehensive, carrying her unwieldy two bags and walking alone in a major city whose language she cannot not speak.

 

Finally parked at the gas station, the phone cooperated just enough to give her instructions. Go back to the car-shipping place. Have them call a cab. Give the driver this address. There's a McDonald's McCafe a half block away. If the driver can't find this station, he or she can find that.

 

After some more anxious waiting, my wife's cab pulled up.

 

The only favorable thing about the episode was that the gas station was conveniently just a few blocks from the on-ramp to the Autobahn that we had come in on.

 

 

Downstream effects

 

The three to four hours lost in Frankfurt flowed through the next two days, to be compounded by more bike ride-obliterating glitches. Including unnecessarily extended bouts of house-cleaning, irritating appointment no shows, missing tools, equipment malfunctions and aggravatingly more.

 

Two days of such saw me wash and box the bike, having abandoned all thought of a woods-farewell ride.

 

So much for the heart's forest-based parting ceremony.

 

 

The moral – Born under certain stars, the Universe will play with you

 

Best laugh. Situations can always get worse.

 

My sense of humor, however, does not extend to the Garmin or phone. I'm going to sledge-hammer those long-unreliable devices with spiritually immature pleasure.