Now that we have a map of Germany, let's look at the problems of driving around in Germany. First, none of the following remarks apply to a large city. There is a choice of many types of roads that one could encounter and none of them are bad. The drivers are generally courteous and before long one will begin to believe it is much like driving here. Watch out for the triangular signs. It is generally a warning of potential danger. It is best not to assume that you have the right of way.
Since you are probably interested in the villages of your ancestors, you will be driving over some of the smaller, two-lane roads. It is best to divide the driving and the navigating between two people. On our first trip, Eleanor insisted on doing all of the driving and I did the navigating. This was for two reasons. She is not the best map reader and she believed that I would spend too much time looking around at the scenery (true).
When one is on the smaller roads, going from village to village, the navigator will probably select a road that looks like the direct way. He expects the road will take him to village X next. But as one leaves the present village, one comes to signs at a fork in the road and none of the destinations on the signs are the ones that the navigator has in mind. Now, many of the roads in Germany do not have a convenient place to pull off the road and examine the map. So more than once we made an arbitrary choice and then the navigator went to work seeing what the implications of this would be. Thus, we sometimes took an alternative route to our destination. Our attitude was not that we had made a mistake but that we were given an opportunity to see something that we had not expected.
Traveling on the Autobahns is different from the local roads. First, on weekdays with trucks on the road, travel on the Autobahns is much like the Interstates here. Speeds are limited by the flow of traffic and the best thing to do is to go with it. On Sundays, the trucks are not allowed on the Autobahns and the average speed (the flow of the traffic) is higher. Once, Eleanor was doing 160 km/hr and by the 5/8 rule I converted this to miles per hour. In this case is very easy to do, so the result was 100 miles per hour. As she said, "I was only going with the traffic flow," which was true.
The 5/8 rule is a good approximation to convert kilometers to miles. To go from kilometers to miles multiply by 5 and divide by 8 (or divide by 8 and multiply by 5). One can go the other direction by multiplying by 8 and dividing by 5.
I do not recommend driving in the larger cities. Decisions must be reached too quickly. On our visit to Heidelberg, we drove into the town, parked in the hotel, which was located close to the points that we wanted to visit, and left the car there until we left the town.
(15 Nov 05)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.