Roadtrip - Cologne, Germany

Inspired by some of the recent comments to my blog, Dan and I decided to take advantage of Brussels' proximity to so many great European cities. We drove to Cologne, Germany on Sunday. Here's some of the highlights of the trip:

• We hit our first pedestrian. Fortunately, it was the hotel concierge doing the driving! (Thank God, because I would have never lived that one down.) Dan had gone into the hotel to ask the concierge where to park and Dan swore the concierge told him something about the "pedestrian plaza" and the "grand place". After several return trips, the concierge finally gave up on the direction-giving and offered to drive our car himself. Sure enough, we drove through the pedestrian plaza on the Grand Place in front of the cathedral. Miraculously, hit only one person. The pedestrian was ok; the car suffered its first scratch.
• We learned that the lo-jack security system in our car works like a charm. The valet forgot to disengage it and the car ended up dying on him, blocking all egress and ingress to the garage. For the record, the alarm is quite deafening, especially in an undeground concrete parking garage.
• Probably one of the most frightening things to hear a GPS system say is: "There is a driver headed in the wrong direction on your route of travel. Be alert."
• I've finally found my place in the world and it's in the left lane of the German autobahn. The great thing about having a car where the speed is measured only in kilometers is that Dan cannot compute, on the fly, how fast I am driving!
• Mexican food in Germany is slightly better than in Budapest, but still way better than it is in Brussels.