“It occurs to me – sometimes whimsically,
sometimes with deep melancholy, and sometimes just 100-percent matter-of-factly
– that the Mother Ship may as well just drop us off over there and never come
back. By the time we even noticed, we’d be so ingrained there we’d probably
just shrug and continue whatever we were doing…”
--Post-Europe trip, October 2010
When
Jim and I are lucky enough to be across the pond, regardless of missions or
commitments, we soak up our surroundings to bring home with us, beginning with savoring
every best bite of each petit déjeuner or Frühstück, squirreling away the more
memorable ones to live on until “next time.” This tradition stretches back to
the spring of 2002 when I employed my first ever passport to join a World War
II tour group in South Kensington, London, journeying with my fellow American
guests to Portsmouth, and across the English Channel to France, Belgium,
the Netherlands, Luxembourg and West Germany.
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| The author in Ste.-Mère- Église (Normandy), France, 2002. (Kevin Walsh photo) |
English
breakfasts as a whole did not excite my appetite, although I did fall for those
deep-fried, sweet waffles. “I know they must be terrible for you,” I admitted
to my trip journal, “but they have probably ruined me for life.” An equally
important and more lasting discovery was made in Portsmouth: “Croissants with
chocolate strips baked inside.” I had tasted my inaugural pain au chocolat.
France,
however, began a continuing breakfast buffet love affair. In addition to pain
au chocolat, I fell for runny – cheesy, creamy, buttery – scrambled eggs (sadly,
a love/hate option among American travelers), and all forms of fresh, dried and
otherwise preserved apricots, so much more elusive and/or cost-prohibitive in
the United States. The Saint James Albany Hotel on the rue de Rivoli, Paris,
took its breakfast offerings to another level with endless ramekins of
individual-sized servings of Crème Brûlée. As for my other new favorite petit
déjeuner staple, “Won’t Jim be jealous to know I got to eat slices of
prosciutto ham for breakfast almost every day?”
I am
happy to say that from 2004 onward, Jim has been a part of all of my European
adventures, both with tour guide and without. Which also means that together we have experienced seeing the
fresh-baked pain au chocolat at our favorite Normandy hotel scaled back to the
pre-packaged, mass-produced grocery store variety, and the honey bee crisis causing
our beloved little jars of Lune de Miel, in such delectable varieties as
Lavender, Rosemary and Clover, disappear altogether.
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| With Jim above Omaha Beach, Normandy, France 2004. (Tony Cisneros/Alpventures photo) |
It
was Alpventures World War II tour guide Tony Cisneros who introduced us to a
hotel-oriented village near Charles de Gaulle Airport called Roissy-en-France.
On early trips across the pond, this was our starting point and over time
became our “soft place to fall” at many trip’s ends. At this springboard locale
on a Normandy-bound 2009 summer morning, I remarked to Jim my belief that our
initial French breakfast alone had been worth the trip!
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| Roissy-en-France, 2010. (Jim Koski photo) |
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| The Novotel Bayeux - our Normandy home base of choice, as seen from the adjacent soccer stadium. (Jim Koski photo) |
Several
European hotels have become mainstays for us, and in Normandy we favor the
Accor chain’s Novotel Bayeux, on the outskirts of the city and inland from the
British and Canadian D-Day landing beaches. The Novotel sees a lot of American
and British guests, meandering in by car or arriving by train from Paris, as
well as bus tour groups from across Europe. Our many mornings in the Novotel
Bayeux breakfast room have left us fervently wishing more Americans visiting
French soil would adopt our golden rule of behaving as guests in someone else’s
home. We are vexed by “outdoor voices” in the breakfast room decrying the very
French things we embrace.
Why
isn’t France like my town/city in the U.S.? French cheese is too stinky. The
scrambled eggs aren’t done. Etc. One 2012 summer morning, it wasn’t the many
British guests or the busload of Swedes to whom our attention was drawn. It was
“an older American couple who quickly became today’s entries on the buffoonery
list. He stuck to his 100-percent American English, which two different girls
from the hotel staff had to convince him they understood. He called the crêpes
‘pancakes’ and both he and his wife judgmentally agreed that the French eat too
much cheese.”
Meanwhile,
we heard John Mayer’s then-single “Shadow Days” and felt welcomed back. We were
also destined to enjoy the antics of a juvenile Novotel guest. “For the past
couple of days, there’s been this red-headed, early-teenage British kid running
around who looks like a younger Prince Harry. This morning, he was at breakfast
barefoot and kept teasing his much more dressed up little sister.” As for the
underappreciated scrambled eggs, far from not being “done,” they were likely
sporting ingredients from one of the finest dairies in France, the Isigny
Sainte-Mère Cooperative in nearby Isigny-sur-Mer. “We are both loving the
Isigny Sainte-Mère butter on the breakfast buffet—and the most delicious bacon
ever!”, I enthused in my trip journal.
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| Novotel Bayeux breakfast. (Jim Koski photo, 2012) |
While
part of me is still biting my tongue over the retired American Stepford Couple
outdoor-voice-questioning the worth of couples who choose life without
children, I prefer to remember the breakfast where “suddenly Al Stewart was
singing ‘Year of the Cat’ from the speakers over our heads. An unexpected
occurrence. Jim and I cast each other quizzical looks.” At the Mercure Roissy,
we were treated to that trip’s first prosciutto ham “AND those so-long-MIA,
heavenly little jars of floral honeys.” I was not ashamed to pick three
varieties and eat the honey right out of the jars with a spoon.
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| Best Western Hotel Melba window flower box, Bastogne, Belgium. (Jim Koski photo) |
Our
World War II-related travels have also found us in Bastogne, Belgium, multiple
times. Since our first Alpventures tour in 2004, our home away from home has
been the Best Western Hotel Melba, located on a quiet street just off Place
McAuliffe. Its breakfast room has a cheery, familiar yellow & blue color
scheme. The husband and wife proprietors run the hotel and in-house restaurant
while also raising two children, and regularly go above and beyond for their
guests. In 2011, Mr. Owner kindly had Saturday’s breakfast buffet laid out at 7
instead of 8 A.M. to accommodate our necessary early departure to meet friend Carl
Wouters across the border in Winterspelt, Germany. Three years later, when Jim
and I arrived luggage-less by rental car direct from the Luxembourg Airport,
Mrs. Owner immediately checked us into a room. Mr. Owner, on the lookout for
our suitcases, hand-delivered them to us before bedtime.
Our
several visits over the years have seen the Melba children grow into young
adults, who now assist their folks in the breakfast room, and during our 2011
stay, I experienced a mind-blowing, small-world moment when I stepped into the room to
find a Belgian World War II friend I had only met electronically seated at one
of the tables. “This familiar face looks up and the jaw drops in astonishment.”
Yes, Ivan Steenkiste, it’s me!
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| "Loraine, is that you?!" With Ivan Steenkiste outside the Hotel Melba breakfast room, 2011. (Jim Koski photo) |
In 2014,
when Jim and I made the Hotel Melba our home base for the several days we spent
in Belgium, “we made good time getting downstairs to breakfast” our first
morning, “taking the stairs from the fourth floor, room 316. Every bit as good
as we remembered, even competing with two kitted-out adult bicycling teams for
the vittles—delicious Alsace bacon, runny scrambled eggs, a yummy assortment of
fromages and hams, even my black-pepper-edged sliced salami; pain au chocolat
and other delicious, fresh breads; and the little packets of Nutella-type
spreads (Zentis “Nusspli,” anyone?), honey and jams…”
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| Belgian bicyclists enjoying a post-ride beverage outside the Hotel Melba, 2014. (Jim Koski photo) |
Another
morning, we partook within earshot of a truly International, tag-team-language table.
Nearby sat two Scotsmen and a Russian or Scandinavian, swapping
heavily-accented stories of their blue-collar work experiences. And not an American
Stepford Couple in sight.
In
2008, ready to expand our World War II and European horizons, Jim and I finally
set foot in Bavaria, Germany, in the company our Alps-loving Alpventures tour
guide, Tony, and, like him, we were suitably dazzled, particularly by a
photogenic mountain called Watzmann. (A Koski friend who played professional ice
hockey in Germany recalls a road game played outdoors at Berchtesgaden where a number
of puck-drops were lost by the visiting team due to the distraction of the
surrounding views.)
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| Jim & Watzmann from our Hotel Bavaria balcony, Berchtesgaden, Germany, 2008. (Author photo) |
Our
accommodations were at the Hotel Bavaria, set below and a short walk uphill to
the old town. 2011’s Alpventures travels brought a change in accommodations to the
more desirable old town level and the balconied, Watzmann-dominated panoramas
offered by the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten (Four Seasons). Morning patches of fog
that disguised and revealed Kehlstein and Watzmann floated by the breakfast
room windows as we dug into ham-chunked
scrambled eggs and I renewed my love of black-pepper-edged sliced salami. The Dirndl’d
breakfast room hostess wisely overrode my initial “nein” to a beverage and steered
me to a satisfying pot of hot chocolate. Frau Hostess also introduced us to this practical tradition: “To keep the
table linens tidy, delivery of hot drink orders is accompanied by the arrival
of a little plastic trash bucket placed in the middle of the table.”
The
boss frau of the breakfast room prided herself on remembering each guest’s
beverage order from the previous day so she was cheerily annoyed with herself on
morning number two for thinking my initial preference had been tea.
Frühstück
at the Vier Jahreszeiten found us mostly surrounded by older, outdoors-loving
German tourists, the occasional Russian couple, and on one occasion a pair of
Japanese women. “As neither they nor the boss-lady breakfast room attendant
spoke each other’s language, they resorted to conversing in English!”
Two
years later, “Everything was just as we remembered it—the plastic trash
receptacle arriving on the table, the same older female hostess inquiring as to
which hot drink we’d prefer (I went directly for the hot chocolate), mountain
views through the room-length row of picture windows, and a decent enough
breakfast buffet (Germans do enjoy their Bundt cake in the A.M.) with the yummy
surprise of a ‘stracciatella’ variety of that extra creamy Berchtesgadenerland
yogurt. Only one container of it, so it was MINE!”
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| Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten breakfast. (Jim Koski photo, 2015) |
We
were disappointed during our 2015 stay to find our favorite breakfast room lady
absent. Her presence was all the more missed when those serving in her stead
made a pale effort to keep the buffet spread properly replenished.
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| Geulzicht Castle Hotel, Berg en Terblijt, the Netherlands, 2008. (Tony Cisneros/Alpventures photo) |
Sprinkled
among all of the above have been one-off stays in a variety of places. We
fondly look back upon 2008’s first private Alpventures tour and our initial overnights
in the Netherlands at the Geulzicht Castle Hotel near Valkenberg, chosen by
Tony and where we really began to get to know him over a couple of wonderful
buffet breakfasts.
Normandy and Alsace would bring breakfast buffet crêpes into my
life. Whether served warm or cold, I found them “yummy with honey, and Nutella
spread!”
We
also credit Tony with introducing us to the Motel One chain, where lowering the
price tag does not mean sacrificing location, comfort or Frühstück. Besides
Motel One stays in Munich and Berlin, we also made the Motel One Leipzig (Nikolaistraße
23) our home base for three overnights in 2013. Located in the heart of the old
town, the facility is within easy walking distance of Leipzig’s massive Hauptbahnhof (the
world’s largest train station in terms of total floor area) and situated directly
opposite the Nikolaikirche (St. Nicolas Church), which is fronted by cobblestones
commemorating the peaceful and historic anti-East German protests of 1989.
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| From the window of our room at the Motel One Leipzig, 2013. (Jim Koski photo) |
Foregoing
an elevator wait in favor of hustling down the windowed stairwell each morning,
we glimpsed the same happy lingerie model, larger than life in a neighboring upper-floor
store window, and, in a slightly weird way, this image was a symbol of the optimism
that would bring us back to the former East Germany in a heartbeat.
 |
| From the Motel One Leipzig stairwell, 2013. (Jim Koski photo) |
2014
found Normandy unavailable to us due to something called the World Equestrian
Games, so we took a deep breath and left our solo-traveling comfort zone for
Belgium, Luxembourg and northeastern France, where we booked ourselves a
thumbs-up single-night’s stay at the Suite Novotel Nancy Centre. “While the
breakfast spread was not the Melba’s, it had a highlight in little glass jars
of rice pudding hiding liquid caramel at the bottom.”
Several
overnights at the Ibis Budget Colmar Centre Ville brought welcome mirth our
way, along with an opportunity for Jim to match wits for a few mornings. “The young
Frenchman working the front desk and also assisting with the breakfast buffet was
a MIKA-ish (tousled, curly dark hair; tall and trim) comedian who spoke four
languages – French, English, German, and Italian.” Among our amusements was his
initial belief that we were Deutsch.
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| The Ibis Budget Colmar Centre Ville's entertaining, multi-lingual front desk clerk, Colmar, France, 2014. (Jim Koski photo) |
Trip’s
end put us at the Suite Novotel Roissy Charles De Gaulle where Sunday’s
breakfast buffet was a cut above the budget hotels we’d employed in several
preceding cities: warm crêpes, super-fresh croissants, and more jars of
caramel-on-the bottom rice pudding. Hearing our one and only Robbie Williams
song of the trip in the breakfast room (his “Dream a Little Dream” duet with
Lily Allen) was a sweet capper for our most challenging solo adventures to
date.
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| Light parents, Floyd & Betsy; Koski parents, Chick & Darlene on left; Alpventures' Tony Cisneros & the author on right; joined by a pair of incognito Augsburg soccer fans at Munich's Hofbrau Haus, 2015. (Jim Koski photo) |
Europe
2015’s itinerary was designed to bring together three favorite things: our
parents, Tony and the Alps. As we made our way from Frankfurt across Southern
Germany, we spent a night on the outskirts of Kempten, Tony having booked us
into the newly discovered Gästehaus Sonja in Durach. His find introduced us to
a true host with more than the most. On that rainy Saturday evening, Gästehaus
Sonja proprietor Peter Raich first plied us with tasty pizzas approximating the
circumference of truck tires and schnitzels exceeding the size of an adult human
head at his nearby family-owned Grüner Baum Restaurant and Pizzeria. By meal’s
end, he was clearly very bothered by the idea that we would need to leave the Gästehaus
for King Ludwig II’s Linderhof Palace so early the next morning that we would miss
his buffet breakfast (not served on Sundays until 8:30AM due to a later bread
delivery time).
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| The Koski/Light/Cisneros group at the Grüner Baum Restaurant & Pizzeria, Durach, Germany, 2015. (Jim Koski photo) |
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| My Grüner Baum tractor-tire sized pizza! (Jim Koski photo) |
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| Jim's ginormous Grüner Baum schnitzel! (Jim Koski photo) |
When
we lugged our bags down to the Gästehaus Sonja lobby area around 7:50 A.M., the
breakfast spread, the FULL breakfast spread, awaited. “Sit,” Peter urged,
having arisen extremely early himself in order to personally fetch the fresh
bread. Our parents gladly accepted the offer. For those of us gripped by more
of a sense of urgency, Peter distributed plastic lunch bags, insisting we make
sandwiches and load up on to-go munchies. “We did our best to make Peter feel
appreciated and beyond generous.” I learned that he had hung out with my folks
and a bottle of Grappa in the Gästehaus lounge the previous evening, swapping
life stories, and discovering that he and my mom shared the experience of having
grown up on farms in their respective homelands.
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| Above & Below: The "above & beyond" Peter Raich & his Gästehaus Sonja breakfast spread. (Jim Koski photos) |
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| Peter bidding my dad, Floyd Light, farewell outside the Gästehaus Sonja, 9/6/2015. (Jim Koski photo) |
Despite
plummeted temperatures, we would regret only being able to squeeze one
overnight at Garmisch-Partenkirchen and its Hotel Edelweiss into our itinerary.
With our balconied room and its Paramount Pictures logo-like view of Zugspitze,
Jim and I were keen to be outside to see more; however, “breakfast was quite
the unique spread – I sampled a little summer sausage, and tiny dill pickles
that completely lived up to their name. My request for hot chocolate brought me
an entire pot! Good people there. Funny though how a couple of us almost left
without remembering to turn in our big, honkin’ room keys, which would have
carried a 60 Euro replacement fee.”
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| Zugspitze from our balconied Hotel Edelweiss room, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. (Author photo, 2015) |
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| The Hotel Edelweiss breakfast room, 2015. (Courtesy of Chick & Darlene Koski) |
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| Betsy & Floyd Light with Darlene Koski, foreground, outside the Hotel Edelweiss. (Chick Koski photo) |
Watzmann
refused to show its stunning face for the duration of our time in
Berchtesgaden. Nevertheless, the newbies among us loved their Four Seasons
balconies and the floating fog wisp morning-shows through the breakfast room
windows.
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| Jim & Darlene Koski in the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten breakfast room, 2015. (Chick Koski photo) |
For
me and Jim as Euro-travelers, sometimes we are just a room number; other times, not, but rare is
the hotel breakfast room that is not part of our European trip-journal love
letters. With Normandy awaiting us again later this year, we will resume our continuing
debate of whether mint tea’s aroma is an appropriate breakfast-time smell. But more
importantly, will there be cans of British Dr. Pepper and two-packs of
chocolate tarts at the Super U?
The Mother Ship, in the form of an enormous mish-mash of a list (Virgin Radio-France, William Leymergie,” 1664 bière, Isigny Sainte-Mère beurre…) is calling, calling us “home.”
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| From the Novotel Bayeux, Normandy, France. (Jim Koski photo, 2010) |
