PCS’s Marketing Officer Matt Cole recalls an epic road trip with some unexpected hospitality...
Dettelbach. I imagine there aren't many people who have heard of this place, let alone know where it is or even visited! Well, I certainly fell into that category, and would still be in there had it not been for IFRA Expo 2011 in Vienna.
As you will now know, we made our first return to IFRA Expo in 6 years in October, and I am delighted to say it was a great success for us. It seems such a distant memory now, but let me take you back to October 5th at 06:00 in the Express & Star garage. Myself, Martin Rees (one of our Editorial Application Specialists) and James Birch (one of our IT Support Technicians) were about to embark on an approximate 2,136 mile round trip to not only get ourselves to the Reed Messe in Vienna for the show, but to get the PCS stand there too and back again, all in one piece! No pressure then...
Some of you will have seen our Twitter feed around the time of the show, which provided updates of our journey via pictures of the different countries and places we were heading through, albeit it with some poor camera work from yours truly. Go and take a look at www.twitter.com/pcsltd1
On that very same Thursday, around 10pm and approximately 683 miles into the journey which now saw us well into Germany, and after our first experiences of the Eurotunnel, steak and chips at a Belgian service station, and listening to arguably one of Europe’s greatest radio stations in Nostalgie, we decided it was time to find a bed for the night.
Jane, our trusty sat-nav and hotel spotter, did not disappoint, in the end anyway. We headed for the nearest hotel she could locate, so off the autobahn we went (which was an experience in itself when its dark and raining), which suddenly put us in German ‘niemandsland’. We weren’t convinced we were being taken to the right place; it certainly didn’t look like it anyway. No street lighting anywhere, the odd row of houses here and there, strange road layouts, fields upon fields in the distance layered with mist… we knew Halloween was on its way but surely it hadn’t arrived yet?
However we did literally see light at the end of the tunnel – bright lights coming from what the sat-nav informed was our destination. Who were we to doubt modern day technology; it was in fact a hotel.
We were doing so well, right up until the point where we were told there were no rooms. But it was very convenient that not only were we were speaking with the hotel manager, he actually owned another hotel in the nearest town five minutes away and it actually had a room to accommodate all three of us! Better yet, he even offered to drive us there because our van was too big to fit down the side streets and leave the van at the hotel’s secure car park (the story of how we nearly gave the team back home heart attacks can be saved for another time), and pick us up in the morning.
To this day, we still aren’t sure exactly what the name of the hotel manager was, in fact we still didn’t know exactly what the area was which we drive through to reach this point, but it wasn’t long into our very short journey to hotel number two where we had to ask the inevitable of “where are we?”. Of which came the response, “Dettelbach”.
It was clear that the scenery of the journey from hotel A to B certainly differed to what we experienced whilst trying to find what was our first port of call; tight narrow streets (our taxi man wasn’t lying), compacted buildings with incredible architecture, certainly looked a lot more like civilisation.
It’s a shame we didn’t get to stay longer, especially after we were able to see Dettelbach in all its glory in the daylight the following morning, the hotel even had its own cake shop; it really was a true taste of Germany. If memory serves me correctly, Martin described it as being like the village from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, if that at all helps paint a picture for you.
If you happen to be trekking across Germany and need to place to stay for the night, go and head for Dettelbach and the am Bach hotel, and tell the manager that the three Brits with the van say Guten Tag and Danke Schöne…