"A short visit on a business trip" Heilbronn by jss1018

I traveled to Heilbronn in 1993 with two other guys I worked with at the time on a business trip to a company that builds machinery for the plastics industry. Being a business trip, I didn't get to see all that much as you would as a tourist, but from what I did see it was a very nice town and surrounding area. All the people we met, including at the company we visited and at our hotel, restaurants, and other places were very nice and hospitable.

This was the first time I had traveled outside the U.S., and that being the case along with my being quite a bit younger at the time made it more than a little intimidating. Seems silly now after my wife and I have traveled overseas a bit, but it surely was at the time. Venturing to Europe for the first time if you've grown up in the U.S. is a major experience, and I would imagine quite different from those that live in Europe or other countries where you can drive a fairly short distance and cross a country border. Excluding Canada and Mexico, that's not the case in the U.S.

We flew from Atlanta, Georgia and landed in Stuttgart, Germany where we stayed on the plane along with some other passengers, while some disembarked and others boarded for a second quick flight into Heilbronn. After those getting off in Stuttgart had cleared the plane, we and the remaining passengers were instructed to remove any carry-on bags from the overhead compartments and have with us. Two police or military guys, not sure which, came on board with two German Shepherd dogs and walked through the plane checking the overheads and allowing the dogs to sniff. Talk about being freaked out! You have to picture a guy that grew up on a steady diet of WWII movies, with that forming a lot of my perceptions of Germany, and experiencing this on my first trip abroad. Wow. More of that when we flew into Heilbronn, having to pass police or military guys with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders when disembarking the plane. Thank God I wasn't by myself, as I probably would have crapped my pants. This was long before world events caused the much heightened security requirements and paranoia with U.S. flying, but looking back on it was a sample of what was to come from a part of the world already experienced with terrorism and those acts of violence.

We got a nice treat the second day there, when our sales rep guide from the company we were visiting took us for a drive into Switzerland to visit another company that operated their brand of machinery. I don't even remember the city we went to, but the experience was amazing for a first-time Europe visitor. Being in a car on the Autobahn that I had heard about all my life was wild, and I was very surprised that not all of it was unlimited speed areas. I had the misperception that you could drive any speed anywhere you got on it, but of course this is not the case. The unlimited-speed sections are posted with signs, and are in the areas between cities and less congested areas. Other areas had posted speed limits, with traffic cameras that could snap pics of license plates for the mailing of speeding tickets to a person's address, as our guide explained.

We got to see from a distance part of the Swiss Alps on the drive, utterly amazing and beautiful.

On our second night in Heilbronn, our guide took us to a restaurant that seemed to be a short drive outside the city in a somewhat remote and wooded area from what I remember (a lot of this trip went by in a blur to me). We parked in a parking area with other cars, and walked up many steps on what seemed to be a tall, terraced hill. It was quite dark except for some lights that illuminated the way, and was already starting to feel like an adventure. At the top of the hill we came upon the restaurant, with what you might picture as a German style architecture building basically in a forest. It was fairly large, and already quite a few diners there. There was a guy there as entertainment that was pretty much a one-man band, with from what I remember an electronic keyboard and drum machine. Once he was set up and started playing, he mostly played and sang American pop and light rock top-40 type stuff.

The amazing part of this story is that after we had ordered food and started to eat, and as the place started to fill up, people started looking out the restaurant windows with some commotion apparently happening outside. We could see what appeared to be lights twinkling and coming up the hill. As they got closer we could see that it was a sizable number of men and women carrying lighted torches and dressed in what you would picture to be very traditional old-world German outfits and hats. Now picture a dumb, young American guy in Germany for the first time thinking of the Frankenstein movies and you get the full effect.

As they approached the restaurant, they extinguished their torches and came inside. I would guess there were around fifty or sixty folks, maybe more, and then we noticed several large tables had apparently been reserved for them. From what we got when asking our waitress, it had something to do with a tradition or festival or something there, and quite an event. As the evening went on, and after getting quite a buzz from drinking the locally-produced wine with our meal, it turned into quite the party, with people getting up and dancing to the entertainer's music which had switched to what sounded like traditional German folk songs. An utterly amazing evening, and if anyone should read this and could e-mail me if they have knowledge of the name of this place from my vague description I would hugely appreciate it. I'll carry that memory always.

We were also taken on a side trip one day to a guy's home that worked for the company we were visiting. His English language abilities were fair, and we all made do with communication. He and his wife had a very nice house, and the home and neighborhood was immaculate and spotless. Along with every place we visited, including the factories, there seemed to be a very, very high level of organization and cleanliness and that perception stuck with me the entire trip. Comparing that to some of what I had experienced back home gave me a huge appreciation for the German people and culture, but bear in mind this was a "snapshot" impression based on a brief visit to limited areas. For me the highlight of our visit to the guy's home was when he proudly whipped out a David Hasselhoff record album to show us. It took a considerable amount of effort on my part at courtesy and consideration to keep from busting out laughing, as he was obviously proud to show us how much he liked this American "artist". Having grown up as a rock music boy all the way, I thought of Hasselhoff as a complete goober when it came to any musical abilities, and a pretty lame actor as well. I remembered reading somewhere a time or two that Hasselhoff was hugely popular in Germany, so I did my best with our limited verbal communication abilities to agree that he was top-notch!