On a Cold Dark Dreary Night....

I thought we were going to die! :) Yes, it's true. It happened like this:

We planned a trip to Garmisch to stay at the Edelweiss Lodge and Resort over Labor Day weekend.

It was a four day weekend so the plan was to leave at 3:30 on Friday, right after the kids got home from school. Well, we left about an hour late so we thought that would put us in Garmisch at about 9:30 p.m. We didn't want to drive in the dark but that's just the way it worked out

Around dinner time, about 2 hours into the drive I just casually told Dave that I thought the brakes sounded bad. Dave said," That noise is the brakes?", looking a little alarmed and concerned.
"Yes, I'm pretty sure it is," I said.

Then it starts to rain....rain hard....like down pour... you can barely see out your windshield kind of rain.

We stop 1 1/2 hours later to get gas and as we were slowing down the brakes made a terrible grinding noise, like the brake pads were gone kind of noise. Every time we put on the brakes it was loud and terrible sounding.

And it was still raining HARD.

Then our GPS continually tries to take us down a closed road....how annoying is that??? Oh, and it is DARK. I think we are going to die or get in a serious car accident so we say a prayer. Everything will be fine.

And the brakes sounded terrible and it was raining cats and dogs and we didn't know where we were and we didn't have a phone number to the lodge or a confirmation # or anything. We just had a broken car and a GPS that was annoying us... and a prayer.

We finally get back on the autobahn but we don't drive fast because we don't want to use our brakes very much if possible. (they still slowed the car down but they sounded terrible, definitely metal on metal) It is dark and rainy and our GPS tells us to get off on an exit that doesn't exist. Then it tells us to make a U-turn on the autobahn for quite a few miles. Yeah, OK. Let's just make a U-turn.

Dave wonders if we should just go back home after traveling for 5 or so hours. So, we regroup and check out the GPS and make sure our new route ends in Garmisch. It does. So, we head on to the autobahn.

We go into Austria not knowing we were going into Austria because you need an international driver's license to drive in Austria and we only have our German ones and our WA ones. Well, lucky for us, noone stopped us to ask about our licenses and we made it to Edelweiss at about 11:30 pm!! Thank goodness. Our prayers were answered.

Even better, there is a Mercedes/Dodge dealership only 3 miles from Edelweiss and they were able to repair the brakes for only $800 on Monday morning! We weren't able to go to any tourist sites because of the car but we rented bikes and went on a few bike rides. It actually turned out to be a very fun and even relaxing vacation!!

We took a 14 mile round trip bike ride one day and it was beautiful!!

Here is a natural spring that was on the trail where we could fill up our water bottles. The water was very tasty!

We biked up to a lake and the water was so beautiful. Look at that BLUE! It looked so pure and clean. We loved it!

One night there were fireworks, we were there over Labor Day weekend so there was a big celebration and boy were the fireworkds great although, Dave slept right thru them!

The moon looked really cool that night!!

Here we are exploring around downtown Garmisch. It was fun but I must say it was a little unnerving riding on the streets with cars zooming by.

And here is the view from our hotel suite! Pretty nice eh?