Ramstein

Working 12 hour shifts doesnt make for too many opportunities to get off base to see things. So I told DL that on Saturday, our day off, we were driving to Ramstein, which is about 2 hours awayin theory.

Saturday morning I got up and got my hair cut. We ended up hitting the road about 10 AM. We stopped by the car rental place. Let me bring you up to speed. Im renting this butt-kicking Audi. Its about a $35,000 car. Yup, our tax dollars are paying for that.

It has a GPS navigation system in it and I wasnt sure how it worked and the car manual was in German. Since there were too many hot girls in my German class in high school (thank you Samantha Wrobel), the manual was useless. We dropped by the rental place and the guy showed us (though it took him 10 minutes to figure out, too).

Ramstein had been preprogrammed so we chose it and started off. The nav system spoke with a semi-pleasant British accent. It sounded forced and faked so maybe Ill name it Gwyneth.

Anyway, wed been driving for about 90 minutes when we noticed we were still well out in the country. Gwyneth tells us to get off the highway and proceeds, over the next 20 minutes to take us higher in the hills. We ended up driving past a quarry and up a narrow mountain road wide enough for 1.5 cars. For some reason, we were scaling Everest.

Gwyneth has a visual countdown of the number of km left until we reached our destination. DL and I noticed that it was down below 10 and we knew air bases were not built up in mountains like this. We kept driving, just curious to see where it would end up taking us. Some of our thoughts:

-This was programmed incorrectly on purpose, the rental guy was a Nazi and mistook us for Jews and sent us up here for cleansing.

-It was programmed incorrectly on purpose because they use it to trap stupid Americans (I tend to match the description), beat the crap out of them and take their money.

Anyway, we stopped where Gwyneth told us to and this is where we were...



Without a doubt, this was probably the worst base in the entire Air Force or best depending on your perspective, I suppose.

We got a chuckle out of it, got out of the car and marked the territory so animals would know we'd been there.

We got back in the car and DL found a town, programmed in Gwyneth, right outside of Ramstein so we figured wed drive there and that would be good enough. After about 20 minutes we found ourselves back on the interstate and driving. Then Gwyneth proceeded to have us get off at *every* exit and rest stop on the way. I felt like my nav system was a girlfriend who was passive-aggressively getting back at me for something Id said.

At this point, I hadnt eaten in a while and a girlfriend from last year had figured out I get moody when my blood sugar gets low so we gave up and headed back to Stuttgart. Id had fun with the whole adventure to this point. But now I was just getting hungry and grumpy. Along the way, we found a McDonalds and I gorged myself on Americana. Well, just a burger and fries, actually.

All told, we spent 5 hours in the car driving the German countryside. It wasnt that bad. The scenery is great. Everything is green.

Oh yeah, on an unrelated note, friggin Europeans need to get their electrical systems fixed. They suck (yes, its their fault, not mine Ive ruined 2 transformers already).