Cold War Memoir Completed on Wattpad

A complete version of my Cold War memoir TALES OF AN AMERICAN OCCUPYING GERMANY is now available on Wattpad at http://budurl.com/TAintro

Of course, I may be adding and deleting information from this version of when my husband and I were stationed with the U.S. army in Munich, Germany. Yet I’m thrilled to have gotten to the end for now of these tales from September 1970 to May 1972.

And how appropriate that I finished writing this memoir the same week in May that 42 years ago my husband was honorably discharged from active duty with the U.S. Army.

If you have not already read TALES chapter by chapter as I posted on Wattpad, I hope you’ll read the memoir now.

As it turned out, I did not always include material I had originally planned to include. Below is one such adventure that did not make it into the edited version:

We had been bemoaning the lack of snow in southern Germany for weeks.

Thus it was with some trepidation that on February 19, 1972, we headed south for a week of skiing at Monte Bondone, Italy, in the Dolomites on an economically priced trip we had arranged through the Munich International Ski Club.

We went through Garmisch and on to Innsbruck, Austria, and the traffic jams were terrible.

In Italy it began raining, then pouring.

When we got to Trento, we started climbing the mountain. No snow, just pouring rain.

Partway up we were stopped by police who said we needed chains to get up the mountain. We called the hotel and the woman said that, if the snow plows came down, we could come up.

When the snow plows came down, we started going up.

Suddenly we turned a corner and it was snowing. Pretty soon the snow was rather deep. Every time a car in front of us was stalled, we got stalled. With help from others we kept pushing the car up the mountain.

Finally we had to give up. We left the car in a parking lot of some place and walked to the nearest hotel, where the proprietors only spoke Italian, no English, French or German. We called the Sport Hotel where we had reservations, but they wouldn’t come get us. (We found out later the Sport Hotel was only four kilometers further.)

We stayed at that hotel to which we had walked for the night and were saved at dinner time by a couple from Rome on their honeymoon who translated the menu for us.

The next morning the man at this hotel drove us to our hotel. But it was snowing so hard and the visibility was so low that, after going out for one run, we gave up for the day.

Now on Monday, the first day of our ski lessons for two hours a day, we had skied down to the place where we left our car. An American army couple stationed in Nuremburg skied down with us.

With Mitch driving and the other three of us in the back seat to weigh down our car, we were able to drive it up to the Sport Hotel.

And at the end of our ski week, when we drove down the mountain in clear weather and could see the hairpin turns that our car had been pushed around, we were very thankful that we did eventually get safely to our destination.

Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks, including TOP TIPS FOR HOW TO PUBLISH AND MARKET YOUR BOOK IN THE AGE OF AMAZON and the romantic suspense spy thriller CIA FALL GUY.