July 7

So what's our only picture of? The border crossing from France into Luxembourg, of course!  We've not mentioned border crossings much in this narrative.  That's because for first time travelers to Europe, like David and Paige, the lack of stopping at every border was a non-event.  Like the one pictured, all but one of the border crossing stations were empty, abandoned buildings that we just drove through.  The only one that wasn't was the Austrian station from Lichtenstein.  David thinks that crossing out of Switzerland into a European Union country is what demanded a serious border crossing station.  Regardless, the motorcycles were waived through it.

Luxembourg was only slightly more entertaining than Lichtenstein, primarily because we stopped for lunch, didn't have any Luxembourg currency and had no idea what the exchange rate was.  Thank goodness for Visa!  The cashier at lunch wanted to charge us 300 French francs if we wanted to pay in that currency (if we understood correctly), the equivalent of US $50 for what cost us $22 on Brian's credit-card.

We managed to find our way to Darmstadt, the city where Brian spent 3 months working in 1991(?) and to our hotel.  We then drove to the Institute where Brian worked in search of his buddy Jorge, only to find that Jorge had blown us off and was somewhere visiting his in-laws.  We got a quick tour of the Institue from the director of the institue, who remembered Brian.

After the Institute we did a quick driving tour on the ring strasse around downtown Darmstadt, then meandered our way back to the hotel.  Our plan for the evening is to walk back downtown and find Brian's favorite bar, so we set off and started looking.  We quickly found it and sat down for a pint of Brian's favorite beer.  The place was deserted and had no cook and Brian kept telling us what a rocking place it used to be, and how this and that had changed, and it seemed a bit strange, so perhaps we were off by a block and we better walk up to the next block to see, but it had to be the right place.  Of course when we walked up to the next block, the street looked identical to the street we'd just been on and Brian groaned with recognition as we walked up to an identical-looking bar that was *rocking*.  So we finally wandered into Brian's favorite bar in Darmstadt and had a great dinner of pizza.