Nate and the Tale of the Taggs - Part 2

The Conclusion...

(read Part 1 if you haven't yet.)

The Map (again):

View Directions to Zentrumstrasse 1, Fischbach-Göslikon, Schweiz in a larger map

The shrill ringing of a mobile phone alarm pulled me out of a deep and dark sleep. It took me a few moments to remember where I was: a small Austrian village nestled at the foot of the Alps at the home of the Stubbe family whom I didn't know from Adam twelve hours previous. I opened the window and looked across a wide green valley with high Swiss mountains in the distance and a bright blue sky overhead.

Sister Stubbe was getting ready to leave for work and led Joseph and me downstairs to a table spread with bread, jams, butter, müsli, milk, juices, and fruit for breakfast. She hastily explained how to lock up when we leave and after trying our darndest to express our great thanks we said goodbye to our host and heartily attacked our breakfast.

After cleaning up a bit we went out to the driveway to our old friend the rental Sprinter van. I helped Joseph back out of the narrow driveway into the petite lane while trying not to be distracted by the gorgeous waterfall above.

My mind reflected again and again on the mass of items we had unloaded at the church in Austria the day before. How much did our current load weigh? Would it still be too much for the customs? It was impossible to know until we got to customs, and this provided a nice little knot in the stomach to go with breakfast.

Twenty minutes after leaving the Stubbes' we approached the Austrian checkpoint. No one was there and so Joseph, wanting to play things as safely and by-the-book as possible, pulled over and went dutifully, as the guard yesterday told him he should have done, to the small office nestled between the in-going and out-going lanes. Seconds later he returned to the van shaking his head, "They looked at me like I was stupid and said they didn't care." Yes, the Austrian border guards are lovely.

We crossed the Rhein again and pulled up to the dreaded Swiss customs building. Joseph went inside and found people in somewhat better spirits than the day before. He came back out and pulled the van onto the scale. Now was the moment of truth. Would we be allowed to finally enter Switzerland or would we be sent back to Austria with another 30 franc plus €50 fine?

We both stood on the scale next to the van (I was careful not to eat too much that morning so that we could keep our weight down). Joseph went inside and reemerged moments later triumphantly. We were two hundred kilos under the weight limit. We could now enter Switzerland!

We started the van with celebration and with great relief we turned onto the highway that would take us to the Taggs' new home. Suddenly the sky seemed bluer, the sun shinier, and the grass greener as we passed into the gorgeous Swiss countryside.

From the cows on the lush hillside meadows carved from deep green forests, to the storybook farmhouses, to the flagrantly modern structures of the cities, everything was meticulous, clean, and proudly Swiss. Colorful hot air balloons floating above the idyllic landscape added that final touch that had me convinced the Swiss were purposely daring us not to love their country despite their draconian customs agents.

Eventually we came to the series of villages outside Zürich where the Taggs' new home would be. It took a bit of searching and driving through colorful Swiss villages before we found the road that took us to Fischbach-Göslikon. Finally, in the early afternoon we arrived at the apartment building with a green field on one side and playground on the other.

Emily and Megan waved to us from the playground as we pulled the van up to the door. Luckily their new apartment was also on the ground floor, so we were able to unload the van relatively quickly.

After unloading we managed to find a few edibles from among the kitchen boxes and the ward had also donated some victuals. As we ate, Emily's parents arrived from France to help with the kids and the setting up. Joseph and I were only able to stay and chat for a short time before it was time for us to be on the road again. We still had an entire apartment in Munich to paint!

We said goodbye to Emily, parents, and the kids and we were once again on the road. The return journey was largely uneventful, we even whizzed through the border checkpoints, but when we came to the town of Bregenz in Austria (where the last James Bond movie was filmed, remember the opera scene?), we hit a massive traffic jam. Nearly an hour later we were through and crossing into Germany.



The shadows were long as we pulled into the driveway of the old apartment building in Munich. We still had a fair amount of stuff to load into the sprinter van before we could start painting. It was mostly odds and ends but it still ended up filling more than half the truck. We then began covering the floors with plastic, masking outlets, and preparing the apartment for a slick of white paint.

Joseph managed to paint the walls of one of the bedrooms before it was 8:30 and decided to call it quits for the day. We were exhausted and nearly fell asleep on the bus ride back to my apartment.

After a quick shower and some Vietnamese food from across the street, we were ready to hit the hay. I slept great.


It was Sunday morning, but the ox was in the mire and needed a fresh coat of paint, so we traveled back to the old apartment and started the rest of the paint job. It was moving along nicely and then I had to leave to get ready for 2pm church.

After church the young single adults in Munich always get together and cook a nice Sunday dinner in the church. Joseph was able to drop off the keys and papers to his former landlady and officially "move out" out of the place. He arrived at the church with the van just in time for dinner.

We left the van parked at the church since it was safer and since there is no parking for a sprinter van where I live, and we went back to my place. We had a big day ahead of us.



Throughout this whole ordeal I often felt like I was in the middle of that riddle with the hen, the fox, and the bag of grain, or at least an amusing mathematical story problem. The Taggs' belongings were now scattered across three countries, and we still couldn't get everything in one van load and still be underweight at the Swiss customs. We also didn't want to spend the time and gas money of driving superfluously from the Swiss apartment to Austria and back again. So we had to formulate a new Master Moving Plan, and this one had better work or else we would really be in trouble.

Here was new Master Moving Plan: We would drive from Munich to the Swiss border, cross at customs and then continue on for about a half an hour to the town of St. Gallen where there was another LDS church. We would then leave our load in the church parking lot and drive back to Dornbirn, Austria where the rest of the Tagg's belongings had been sitting since Friday, take them across the border to St. Gallen and then combine both loads and continue with everything to Fischbach-Göslikon. I would then drive the van back to Munich alone and drop it off. It was a daring plan, and it could easily come apart if something unexpected occurred. But move forward we must and move forward we did!

The first order of business on Monday morning was to go to the Europcar rental agency at the train station and register me as a second driver of the rental van. We arrived shortly after opening and I had my passport, driver's license, and proof of address all at the ready. The clerk asked me only for my driver's license. Great! Of course you will always have everything you need when they don't ask for it. But we couldn't complain too much, the result was still satisfactory.

We grabbed a quick pastry breakfast at the train station and took the U-bahn one stop to the church. One of the young single adults, Kay, had volunteered to come with us today to help us with all the loading and unloading. He is studying to be a fitness trainer and is like a German Arnold Schwarzenegger, just the kind of guy you need on a move. We met him on the steps of the church, backed the van out onto the street and the three of us were on our way.

The only stop we had to make was to the hardware store just outside of Munich to return the extra paint. We did so without a hitch. The manly feeling of manliness that comes from driving a big van, picking up heavy objects and putting them back down, and being in a hardware store was reduced considerably as we unloaded the paint from the van with "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" blaring from the speakers in the parking lot.

It was another beautiful day and the two and half hours to the Swiss border were a breeze. The tension returned, however, as we once again approached the Austrian border station. There was a steady stream of cars passing out of Austria and a lone guard standing watching the traffic with arms akimbo. Again, Joseph wanted to do as he was told by the first border guard and check with the guards before leaving Austria. There wasn't really a place to pull over and so Joseph simply stopped by the guard, lowered the passenger-side window, leaned over Kay and me, and uttered a clear, "Entschuldigung" (Excuse Me) to the guard. That didn't seem to get his attention and so Joseph naturally tried offering a friendly, attention-getting "hallo!" The guard snapped his head around and glared at us for a split second then growled and spat, "Ich heisse nicht 'hallo'!" (I am not called 'Hallo!').

Somehow I wasn't surprised but I still couldn't quite believe that things would start going bad before even getting to Switzerland. The guard went on in acidic rebuke, "Wir sagen Grüß Gott!!" (We say 'Grüß Gott'!! -the formal "Gutentag" of Bavarian and Austria).

With this cheery mood in place Joseph let out a spurt of apologies and proceeded to explain that we were moving and asked if we should stop. The guard seemed furious that we would even waste his time with such an unimportant question. He shook his head and waved us on towards Switzerland as violently as he could manage.

We laughed at him as we crossed the Rhein into Switzerland, but I had to admit a certain apprehension now as we approached the customs office. We were almost certainly underweight, but who knows what new shenanigans these bureaucrats might pull.

Joseph left Kay and me in the van and went inside. Only a few moments later he came out shaking his head with a wry grin and explained, "The man said we're free to go; he didn't even bother to weigh us!" Great! Except it chaffed just a little that that which caused us so much grief on Friday was completely disregarded on Monday.

So we entered Switzerland again I wondered at the fact that the whole landscape, the buildings, everything seems to become more colorful, more perfect as one enters Switzerland. How do they do it?

We drove for about 30 minutes until we came to our exit at St. Gallen. With only a few wrong turns we found the LDS church tucked away in a quiet neighborhood. No one was there and so we parked the van and started unloading everything in the corner of the spacious parking lot.

A few minutes later we were on our way to Austria with an empty van. We chose a different border to cross this time just to avoid the bad luck of the former checkpoint. Soon we were pulling into the parking lot of the church in Dornbirn, Austria where the rest of the Taggs' belongings had sat since Friday. Elders Byrne and Stringham were there in their P-day clothes (it was P-day after all) and helped us load the 960 kilos of boxes, beds, and couches into the van.

We said our last goodbyes and thanks to the elders and then got back on the road towards the border.

We'd had enough of Austrian border guard hospitality and so we drove past their little station with crossed fingers hoping they wouldn't stop us. We saw no one there and once again we were over the Rhein and into Switzerland.

By this time we knew the Swiss customs building as though it were our local hang-out. Joseph went in like one of the boys and came out a few moments later laughing. No weighing this time around either!

So it was back through the magical curtain of neutrality into the Swiss wonderland. 40 minutes later we were pulling into the St. Gallen church parking lot again hoping that all the stuff would still be there. It was there alright, and looking horribly out of place in the immaculate Swiss neighborhood like a junky suburban American garage sale. We were lucky no one called the police.

We realized however, that there was already a lot of stuff in the van from Austria and a lot of stuff sprawled across our corner of the parking lot. We weren't entirely sure it would all fit inside the sprinter.

Luckily, all three of us were skilled Tetris players and found slots, spaces, nooks, holes, places, and even a few crannies for every last box and Ikea board. The last to go in was Joseph's rusty old bike and it just barely fit smooshed at the rear of the load. The double doors shut gloriously tight and it was now time to deliver this last bit to Fischbach-Göslikon.

An hour and a half later we were there and unloading! The work went fast with Emily's dad in the van moving things to the edge for Kay, Joseph, and me to unload. Emily directed traffic inside. Within a short time the van was finally empty and the house was a chaos of boxes, boards, and random pieces of furniture--work for another day.

We ate some tasty tacos that Emily and her mom had prepared and had a few moments to rest on the couches. The afternoon was getting on, however, and Kay and I still had a long road back to Munich.

We said our goodbyes to the Taggs and got aboard the sprinter van once again, this time with me in the driver's seat. I pulled out onto the main road and we were off.

Everything went smoothly and I was careful to drive the speed limit in Switzerland so that I would avoid any Imperial entanglements. When we finally crossed into Germany I was happy to finally be on the German autobahn where, in many sections, there are no speed limits. I got up to 160 kph (100 mph) several times, though I didn't want to push it past that. It was actually a really great feeling, driving that fast without worrying about being pulled over. Even at that speed many smaller sportier vehicles overtook me at a whiz.

It was nearly 10pm as we gassed the van and returned her to the rental agency. Nary a ding nor a scratch was there to be found.

With the van returned, the Taggs and their belongings all where they should be, their old apartment squared away, and Kay and me safely back in Munich, the end of the Swiss Moving Adventure had come. I went to bed that night tired after a long and exhausting weekend, but feeling happy that I had been able to do a small bit of good, that I had had fun, and that I now had a good story to tell.


Driving through the town of Baden, near Fischbach-Göslikon...





The Taggs and I at their new home...

...

Nate and the Tale of the Taggs

This is the Tagg family. Joseph, Emily, their daughter Megan, (and the youngest, Isaac was asleep in his stroller when we took this photo). Their first Sunday in Munich was also my first Sunday in Munich two and a half years ago. They've been my good friends here in Munich ever since. Joseph and I served together in the young men's presidency up until last year and I was also their home teacher for a while. I even spent New Years 2009 with them and their families in France.

Well, last week the Tagg family moved from Munich to a little town outside of Zürich, Switzerland. Originally I offered to help them load the moving van. As it turns out, the saga of their move became much more than loading a vehicle.

Here is the tale...


My phone rang at 7:15AM on Friday morning and Joseph told me he was waiting on the street downstairs. I dashed through the rain from my door to the car and we drove to the Europcar rental agency. We went through all the necessary paperwork with the clerk and finally Joseph asked them to add me as an additional driver. I had dutifully brought my passport and driver's license and had them at the ready. The clerk asked for both and also proof of my current address. That was something I did not have. I would not have even thought to bring it. I mean, really, a passport isn't enough? But it was Germany after all, where order and bureaucracy are never to be underestimated. It was only a minor setback, however, since my portion of driving wouldn't occur until Monday according to our Master Moving Plan and we could come back and with the necessary paperwork then.

The Master Moving Plan went like this: The rental van was only so big (biggest we could get with our standard licenses) and Joseph decided if we packed carefully we could do the whole move in two trips between Friday and Monday. The trickiest part of the plan was going through customs at the Swiss border. Normal cars can usually zip right through, but moving vans need to stop and be accounted for. Swiss customs closes at 5:30pm on weekdays and 12pm on Saturdays (closed Sundays). So we decided to fit as much as we could in the van on Friday morning, drop everything off in Switzerland that afternoon, spend the night in the new apartment, drive back to Munich on Saturday morning, paint and clean the old apartment, Monday morning early drive the second load of stuff to Switzerland and then I would drive the rental van back to Munich alone on Monday. It was a lot of work and left little room for error if we wanted to keep spent time and costs to a minimum, but we were hopeful even with our backset at the rental agency.

I drove Joseph's Skoda and he drove the sprinter van to their Munich apartment. Emily was there packing last minute items and Megan was skipping around the house excited to move to their "new big house." Isaac was doing baby things. We parked the van right outside the front door to the apartment (luckily they lived on the main floor) and we got right to work moving furniture and boxes into the van. Soon Elder Brown and Elder Phelan arrived to help. It was Elder Phelan's first week in the mission field and so our van-loading became a German vocabulary lesson:

the box = die Kiste, the mirror = der Spiegel, the Couch = das Sofa, and so on.

The rain (der Regen) continued to wet our backs and sprinkle the Taggs' belongings as we worked to fill the van, but it kept us cool.

Before long the van was full and we were pleased with how efficiently we had packed so much inside. Joseph's first worry, if we could really fit everything in two trips, was laid to rest.

We thanked the missionaries as they left and then it was time to set off on our way. We drove through pouring rain on the Autobahn with Joseph and I in the sprinter van and Emily and the kids leading in the Skoda.




The drive was wet but uneventful and after a few hours of driving through Germany we passed into Austria. One six-kilometer tunnel and 40 minutes later we passed Austrian border control, crossed the Rhein River into Switzerland and approached the Swiss Customs area.

It was a mess of trucks and semis of all sizes parked willy-nilly around a spartan structure reeking of red tape. Emily parked with the kids as far out of the way as possible and Joseph went in with a stack of immigration papers carefully prepared and filled-out. While we waited, Megan and I went to a plot of grass to look for slugs, or as the Germans call them, "naked snails."

After a quarter of an hour, Joseph came out looking flustered. Apparently nobody was in a good mood inside that building. They wanted to weigh the van and they wanted Joseph and I to stand on the scale with the van. Seriously? They were going to be that nit-picky? But then it occurred to me what an American colleague of mine had told me in my early days here in Germany, that the Swiss make the Germans look like Jamaicans when it comes to order and by-the-bookedness.

So Joseph and I stood sheepishly on the scale and then we both went inside. The crusty woman behind the window informed us that we were overweight by 760 kilos and therefore MAY NOT enter Switzerland. Joseph stood there dumbfounded for a moment and then asked the woman what he should do. The tone of her voice made it clear it wasn't her problem as she explained we had to go back to Austria where we could rent another vehicle or a storage unit. It was also clear there would be no appeal with this woman, especially with a group of burly truckers loitering around, a sob story would do no good. But that wasn't all, since we were overweight we had to pay 30 Swiss francs for the weighing itself.

We payed the fee and went outside to tell Emily the bad news. She was as dumbstruck as we were and it began to sink in how our entire moving plan had just been shot. To make matters worse, Joseph and Emily needed to pick up the key to the Swiss apartment from the landlady before 5pm or else they would have no way to get in before Monday. Also, members of the Tagg's new ward in Switzerland had agreed to help unload at the new apartment and would have dinner ready for us when we got there.

Of course we couldn't stand around at customs all day, we had to go back to Austria. So we climbed into our respective vehicles and drove back across the Rhein. The Austrian border guard pulled us over to the side upon entry and asked what we had in back. Joseph explained the situation, and then we received our first lesson in the lack of compassion among Austrian border guards.

"Bad for you!" the guard said matter-of-factly. "If you're too heavy for Switzerland, you're too heavy for Austria. You'll have to pay a fine."

He then proceeded to lecture Joseph about what he should have done to be a perfect law-abiding mover, including checking in with the Austrians with our load before leaving their country. Joseph eventually couldn't take much more of it and just asked him how much the fine was and where to pay it.

€50 later we were finally back in Austria with tensions high and frustration reaching its limits. We pulled into an empty parking lot near the border where we could take a moment and figure out what we should do.




Renting a truck or a storage space, driving back to Munich, were all out of the question financially and time-wise. It was already nearly 4pm and the border would be closing in an hour and a half. Not to mention the landlady with the key at 5pm. It seemed like a hopeless situation, and to add to the stress the kids started to get cranky.

What could we do? Where could we go?

Luckily I had the number to the mission office elders in my phone. Also, luckily, this region of Austria had been combined with the Munich mission only a month and a half before. I called the office elders and asked them for the number to the missionaries in this region. I also got the name and number of the bishop of the local ward and the address to the church.

We started calling numbers and found them all to be either out of service or no answer on the other end. So we decided to at least try and find the church and figure things out from there.

Luckily, according to the GPS in the Skoda, the church was only about 8km away from our parking lot. So Emily drove ahead with the GPS and we followed behind in the van. As we drove, it seemed, to the bewilderment of the friendly voice in the GPS, that every road we needed was blocked off due to construction. Time was ticking as we fought our way through construction-snaggled Dornbirn and in the chaos we got separated from Emily. As we called her moments later, she herself was lost and it seemed our situation kept going from bad to worse.

Joseph and I pulled over and told her exactly where we were so she could find us with the GPS. Once we reconnected we realized that the church was now only 1km away. From there it was suddenly easy to find.

Finally we came to the familiar sight of an LDS church building and parked the van in the drive way. No one was there.

Meanwhile, during all the driving, the office elders had made contact with the elders in this region of Austria and they called Emily on her cell. She told them briefly of our situation and they agreed to come to the church, though it would take about 40 minutes.

Emily also called the landlady and arranged to pick up the keys a bit later in the evening. It seemed the best idea at this point was for Emily and the kids to continue on to Switzerland and at least get the keys to the apartment. They would then most likely have to continue driving across Switzerland to the French border where Emily's and Joseph's parents both live, since there would be no furniture in the new apartment.

Soon it was just Joseph and I with 760 kilos of stuff to unload somewhere and an hour to go before the customs office closed.

Just before 5pm a pair of white shirts and ties with black name tags rounded the bend and walked towards the church.

Now, try this one out for a bit of Church trivia: Which LDS missionary companionship in the entire world encompasses parts of four different countries, three of them landlocked, and yet the elders live on an island?

The answer: The Vorarlberg companionship. The church for that ward is in Austria, the elders live on the island city of Lindau, Germany on Lake Constance, and parts of Switzerland and Liechtenstein also make up part of their area.

We greeted the Vorarlberg elders, Elder Byrne and Elder Stringham, and explained our problem.

First we asked them if they knew of anyone in the ward who could store 760 kilos of stuff for a day or two, but the elders had a better idea. This church was unique in that it contained in the basement a huge storage room. The elders led us inside and we found a spacious room with some dusty couches, a ratty pool table, a random drum set, and a variety of other pieces of junk leaning against various walls. There was plenty of room for whatever we had to store temporarily and apparently this room was hardly ever used for anything else.

Finally a bit of good news! It was well after 5pm now and Joseph and I resigned ourselves to the fact that we would not make the customs border that day, which left us wondering where in the world we would sleep that night, but first things first: How much is 760 kilos?

We knew it was a little over 1/3 of the total weight of our load, and so we did our best to take stuff out until we felt like, between the four of us, we had moved 760 kilos to the basement of the church.

We secured the rest of the load in the van and closed the rear double doors. Now on to the next problem, where do Joseph and I sleep for the night?

The elders volunteered to start calling around to see where we could stay and told us where to get a hot bite to eat (we had eaten only snacks the entire day). So Joseph and I walked down the street to a Turkish döner shop and sat down and enjoyed a tasty meal.

Meanwhile, Emily called and said that she made it safely to the new apartment and got the keys. She also said that the bishop of their Swiss ward had a place for her and the kids to stay that night.

With half of our problems solved and food in our bellies, the grimness of past three hours began to lift rapidly from our souls, but we also realized how exhausted we were.

We got back to the church and the elders told us that the bishop would be able to put us up for the night. We thanked them for their help and set off to find the bishops house in the nearby town of Hohenems, Austria.

As the sun set and the rainclouds lifted from the surrounding mountains, we noticed what a beautiful part of the country we were in. When we came to Hohenems we found a small town at the foot of a very long series of cliffs. Out of these cliffs were grandiose waterfalls, fed by the day's rains, gushing wildly onto unseen rocks and pools below. It was idyllic.

We found the bishop's street, a narrow lane very near the cliffs; so narrow in fact, we were afraid we might not get the van out again. But we persevered and found the bishop's house at the foot of a mighty waterfall, hundreds of feet high. For us weary travelers it was better than Leprechaun's gold.

We squeezed the van narrowly into the driveway and went around to the front door. Bishop Stubbe greeted us quietly but warmly and invited us in. He led us upstairs to our room where we met his 20-something son (the last one still at home) and his wife who was making up the beds. They explained that the rest of the kids had flown the nest and so there were plenty of beds for spontaneous visitors.

We introduced ourselves and Joseph and Sister Stubbe played the "Mormon Game" figuring out which people they know in common.

After setting our stuff down we went downstairs and declined their invitations for food. We chatted briefly on the couches of the living room until the bishop recommended we watch a movie. Tonight's feature: the LDS film One Good Man, a cinematic portrait of a fictional bishop in Salt Lake City. As it turns out, the writer and director of this film, Christian Vuissa, is from this region of Austria and we were watching his movie about a bishop with his actual bishop.

It was a rather light-weight movie but a nice distraction from the day's toil.

After the movie I showered and went speedily to bed. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. But in that moment before touchdown I reflected on how I had no idea as I began the day that I would be sleeping in the house of strangers at the base of a fairytale waterfall in the Austrian Alps. I've always been grateful for the Church, but that night I was extra grateful. I think Joseph was too.


TO BE CONTINUED...


The bishop's street in Hohenems, Austria:

The bishop's house with waterfall:

Joseph and I with the Sprinter Van:

Here is the map of the route from Munich to Fischbach-Göslikon, Switzerland:




View Directions to Zentrumstrasse 1, Fischbach-Göslikon, Schweiz in a larger map

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