No kidding lost in Bavaria

I enjoy walks in the evening and took one just now. It is a pleasant evening; unusual for Germany at this time of year it is also clear and starry, making it all the more enjoyable. Over the years I’ve been asked by passing drivers for directions more times than I could ever count, usually to someplace in town. Generally I can give an intelligent enough answer, which I always find amusing given the fact that I am indeed a “foreigner”. So when a small, battered Renault pulled over just past the train station I was not terribly surprised when a woman came out asking for directions.

Perhaps 25, she was relatively well dressed, perhaps for a party, but the streetlight reflected on tears clearly rolling down her face. Her license plate indicated she was from Regensberg (a large city an hour drive away) and that is exactly where she asked directions to, adding that she’d been driving around for three hours completely lost.

I’ve got to say that staying “lost” three hours in Germany is something I would have considered completely impossible prior to this, villages and towns pop up constantly even on country roads and there is always going to be a gas station or passing pedestrian to query. But she seemed perfectly sincere so I took some time mentally formulating a simple version for a rather complex answer. For one thing Germany doesn’t use highway numbers and cardinal directions, rather city names as the means of identifying the direction for a road (not better or worse, just different) and first I had to get her out of town. I told her to take a right at the next light which was just visible at the end of the street, less than a kilometer down that road take the highway to Amberg, follow it through towards Schwandorf and then pick up the Autobahn.

She thanked me as she drove off and I spent the fifteen minutes walking home wondering what she’d been doing for three hours, what her chances of getting home in a reasonable time were, or if I should have directed her the very long but perhaps idiot-proof way via the Nürnberg Autobahn. Thinking it would be terrible if she spent another 3 hours aimlessly driving around, I even wondered if I shouldn’t have offered to ride far enough to get her out of town. Of course, I also wondered if it was her car I saw turn left at the light … rather than right.