First Day

Day 1:

We’re here!

When Charlemagne and the Franks fled from the Saxons in the 8th century, a white deer led them to a place to cross the Main, in other words where the Franks could ford the river.

After endless chatter about how to find each other in Europe’s largest airport, we practically fell across each other retrieving our luggage at adjacent carousels! Despite just a few hours of sleep on our overnight flights, we put in full eight hours of walking and discovery. We are on our way to becoming Frankfurters…give us a bun and we’re done!

Because the annual book fair filled the city’s hotels, we are in a suburb about 12 minutes from Frankfurt by train. So our first task was to conquer the underground. The ticket machines were daunting at first; it took a while to find English instructions. Then there were the usual challenges of unfamiliar destinations and counter-intuitive directionality. If we had read Rick Steve more carefully we would have saved ourselves some grief. But by 2 pm we were in Frankfurt.

Hunger drew us south of the river Main to Sachsenhausen, a cute, woodsy area that managed to escape WW II damage. It is full of restaurants and pubs. At Adolph Wagner’s we drank traditional apple wine (dry), and ate pickled cabbage, sausage, meatloaf and something called a “beef olive.” (Beef wrapped around mustard and onion, doused in delicious gravy.) Lynn even liked the sauerkraut.

After lunch we walked north, crossed the Main river (again) and found Romerberg, the old city center that goes back to Roman times. After WW II, German cities voted whether to bulldoze and rebuild or restore the damaged buildings. Frankfurt voted to do the former, but kept a few buildings in the city center. A short distance away is St Bartholomew’s Cathedral, where 10 Holy Roman Emperors were elected and crowned. Most of that building was also destroyed by Allied attacks in 1944, but the townspeople had moved the valued pieces to safekeeping. They rebuilt the cathedral in 1955.

After coffee in a cute little shop in Romerberg, we found our way back by yet another station. Returned to the Ibis Hotel with confidence for the morrow.