Consider the rental car.

Not happy to take just any car the rental agents at the airport would give us, my husband wanted a BMW. OK. I can live with that. No, no. He wanted a particular BMW. Anyone who has ever rented a car anywhere knows that you take what they give you when you get there, hoping it will at least be the size of the car you are paying to get. To insure he got the BMW he wanted, he made multiple reservations with multiple car rental companies. While my daughter, her friend and I waited, my husband ran from counter to counter seeing who would come through with the winning ticket in the BMW lottery. In the process he discovered he had rented a car from EuroCar, which sounds like a company. Translation: you have rented a CAR in EUROPE from some rental car company – you have to find out which one. More running from counter to counter.

After an hour of this (it’s now 4:30 a.m. for us) I see my husband’s arm raised in a victory salute to let us know he has found the right counter, the right company and the right car. In my excitement about the perfect car I almost raise my head from the suitcase I am using as a pillow.

It takes a while for my husband to find his perfect driving machine in the huge dungeon of a garage under Munich international airport, but we finally close in on it after listening to my husband’s usual rantings about the damned Germans, their attitude, their demeanor, their accent, the way they stand, walk, look, act, sound, dress – you name it, he hates it about them. We find the car and he waxes poetic about its every feature.

Please note: This car that he is at this point seriously romantically involved with was conceived, designed, manufactured, improved and marketed by these same arrogant, obnoxious, rigid, offensive Germans he was a moment before denigrating. But men are the logical ones? I rest my case, your honor.

What you have to understand is this: When a person from Salzburg speaks disparagingly of a “German” he is really speaking of a Prussian. German-speaking peoples are not grouped, as Americans or Brits might be, by common language. More precisely they are a regional, tribal lot. My husband’s tribe has more in common with folks from Munich than with those from Berlin, or (God forbid) Hamburg. He is, in fact, a Salzburger. Not one of those backwoods Tyroleans. Nor one of those hoity-toity decadent Viennese. Of course in Vienna when you say you are from Salzburg, you just might see a smirk cross the face of your Viennese companion as he (or she) quickly equates “Salzburg” with “Country rube of the first order.” Suffice it to say that the initials BMW stand for Bavarian Motor Works. And it is a purely designed hunk of car fit for anyone who hankers after a sublime driving experience. Personally I was hankering after a bed and pillow.

But the single thing I pick up on right away about this perfection of a car is, we can’t fit all the luggage into it. So the girls and I end up sitting on or with a good portion of our bags. We leave Munich behind and whiz onto the Auotbahn, the world’s scariest highway, particularly with my husband at the wheel. After being cooped up in speed limit limbo in America, he lets loose with a vengeance. There is no car in all of Germany he can bear to let pass us. The countryside becomes a blur as we shoot past what I think were cows, trees, barns, houses, villages, I really can’t say for sure. After 20 minutes or so, terror has made me forget how tired I was, what time it was, how hungry I was. All I could do was grip the door and plead between clenched teeth for my husband to come to his senses and pull over to the middle lane. No dice. He was unstoppable. No matter. Forty kilometers of this and traffic ground to a halt. An accident somewhere ahead in Lithuania had closed the Autobahn.

For the next hour we crawled behind trucks from Poland, Romania, Latvia and Italy until we followed the rest of the traffic off the hallowed racing ground and onto a small country road which took us the rest of the way to Austria and Salzburg. By the time we arrived it must have been 8 or 9 a.m. for me. I had now been up over 24 hours. I was ready for the big suite with the double rooms, huge beds, giant terrace overlooking the mountains and the city, and the feather comforter and pillows that we had prearranged for at a wonderful hotel halfway up a mountain where clouds sweep through the rooms on days when the sun shines and the high clouds move swiftly across the low Alps.

We drove up the Geissberg (in Austria, anything with berg at the end of it is a mountain). Our hotel awaited us. So did Frau Herzog, the aforementioned she-witch-Nazi-dirndl-wearing prison matron. Since I last saw her, she had added a spa and tanning palace to the hotel. She seemed to be its best customer. I never saw such dark skin on such an otherwise obvious Aryan. Also her hair was now copper red. And, true to plan, she was wearing the traditional dirndl out of which her boobs protruded at the top of her chest.

“Oh, Missus Gschwandtner (she pronounces our name properly, although it is impossible to give you a phonetic spelling and even if I did you would not believe it), Zo gut to zee you. May I geef you a hug hello?”

I’m too exhausted to resist this treat.

She leads us into the lobby, which seems smaller than I remember. Then there is a lot of talking in German with Austrian accents. I see keys, I hear my husband’s voice raised, I see Frau H gesturing and off we go down various hallways towards what I assume will be number 35, the largest and best suite in the hotel, the one my husband arranged (along with three other hotel arrangements he made for the Austria leg of our trip) and that has been promised to us. Imagine my surprise when we stop outside number 18 and she proudly announces this is our suite, with the girls down the hall facing the parking lot. I see my husband’s back stiffen. I know what’s coming. I retreat to the lobby, sit down on the small couch and put my head back. Negotiations that make the Paris peace talks at the end of the Viet Nam war look like a board game commence.

Frau she-witch-Nazi-dirndl-wearing prison matron has given away suite number 35 and is trying to sell my husband on a lesser suite (all she has left) for the same price. Another hour slides by as it becomes clear that my European vacation is going to be neither peaceful nor stress free.

It occurs to me that shifting plans and changing arrangements may be an Austrian national custom, which would explain a lot of my husband’s behavior. I am too tired to think about it deeply.

We travel the halls of the hotel looking at every suite she has. We settle on one, but not until she has told us the history of everyone staying at the hotel, even to the point of trying to move a set of bodyguards who are assigned to some singer she keeps ranting about as if it is someone a) I have ever heard of and b) I would give a damn about if I had.

The final negotiation takes place over furniture (none of these suites has the beds we requested), they move things around (another characteristic of my husband’s when traveling – he always moves around the furniture in every hotel room I have ever been in with him) and we are set. Not exactly what we had expected. But we can finally go to sleep. It is lunchtime there. Our terrace overlooks the roof of the restaurant. No clouds sweep by. In fact it is raining and so cold you can see your breath.