Palmyface (plus Scottie, Steveo, and Kiff): The New England Flailing Posse Takes Europe

Hello America,

We're about a week and a half into this misguided excuse for a roadtrip, and so far we've somehow managed to deviate 100% away from our planned itinerary. We're actually still in Germany now, despite the fact that we had originally planned on spending maybe 3 days here. But it's all cool, because each one of us is fluent in German. Oh, wait...

As it turns out, none of us know a single German word beyond "danke" and "bitte." Fortunately though, Scottie and Steve's friend Peter Wurth ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5P1YO4PdlE ) taught us the expression "I'm sorry, I don't speak German" on the way from the airport back to his house, where we spent the next two days in search of a car whose tires weren't going to fall off after 20 miles. As it turns out though, Americans who have only spent 2 hours in Europe aren't very good at shopping for cars, so Peter did all the work while we all looked at climbing magazines with 3d glasses on. We managed to find one though, and Scottie had to become a resident of Stuttgart, get a bank account, and become a member of the German Auto Club before we could drive around legally. Peter did all of that too actually; Scottie just followed him around.

So we left Stuttgart, and within 5 minutes were hopelessly lost. Somehow (read: thanks to the GPS) we managed to find our way to Frankenjura, where we've been spending the last week or so. Steve's been doing laps on Action Directe (5.14d) and the rest of us have been doing nothing more than drinking some ridiculous German beer that's 1) cheaper than water and 2) legally considered a food product to be exempt from alcohol taxes. A few nights ago we went to a brewery, where we hung out and had a few drinks in a town that celebrated its 1000-year anniversary back in 2007. We drive through a few of those on the way to the crag, which is incredible.

The area around here is absolutely beautiful - every few kilometers there's a tiny little village that looks like it was taken out of the 1300s, and in between each one is fields and hills and dense green forests. And scattered throughout the forest are crazy limestone cliffs with creeks running between them. Most of the approaches to the cliffs are less than 2 minutes (sick!) and the climbing is really cool and pocketed and gymnastic. We've all been struggling to get used to it, but slowly we're getting some endurance that'll probably come in handy for the 35m routes in Ceuse. We're taking off for Ceuse tomorrow, possibly stopping in Magic Wood or Volarpse (Switzerland) before getting there. So that's kinda cool...

We've amazingly been pretty incident-free so far. The only issue we had was when our car window fell off its track and got stuck in the door, which had to be resolved by a mechanic who didn't speak a word of english. Right around the time we were getting ready to accidentally order a new window, some dude showed up who happened to speak french - he and I were able to figure out what the deal was, after which point he translated it into german and within 15 minutes our window was fixed.

So yeah, it's been a pretty cool trip, and once I have a computer that's not in German I'll try to upload some pictures. Keep the posts coming! It's been cool to hear what you all are up to.

Palmer