I don’t think it was weak lugnuts. Just one of those things! When you mentioned Mercedes, it made me think of my first trip as an adult to Germany (except for a port call we made at Wilhelmshaven, where I went with ten guys to a real live beer hall, and we all enthusiastically and drunkenly banged our mugs on the long, narrow table, singing in a language none of us knew, until mine broke in my hand!)
When I was in the Navy, two years after my liberty in Wilhelmshaven, I took my skis on the carrier with me when we left Pier 12 in Norfolk (people thought I was a whack-job...I have no doubt I was the only man on that ship with snow skis!) to go skiing when we were over in the Med.
I bought a train ticket from Naples to Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria, and when the train left Naples, I was in a total panic because the train I was on was heading South, not North (the coast of Italy was on my right) and I was sure I had gotten on the wrong train! I didn’t speak Italian, and nobody seemed inclined to help me anyway, so I was miserable for about a half hour until I realized the train had made a big loop and was heading North.
I fell asleep, and woke up as the train stopped at a station in the Italian Alps after midnight. My eyes, stiff and blurry with sleep watched the platform as we pulled in, and they had vendors selling little cups of expresso from trays to the people on the trains, exchanging money and tiny white ceramic expresso cups through the open windows.
In my naïveté, I ws sure there would be snow everywhere at the end of November (this was in 1978) but...there was none. I grew increasingly concerned when instead of being white, the mountains we went through were largely green.
I was quite deflated, and stood in that train station in Munich, not really knowing what to do.
Then, a young, shapely woman with long blond hair walked by carrying a pair of ballet skis. I ran over to ask her where there was snow, and she said the only place anywhere was glacier skiing on the Zugspitze...so...that was where I went!
But the thing that blew my mind was, all the taxis were Mercedes! I couldn’t wrap my head around that...I thought “How do Lederhosen-wearing taxi drivers afford Mercedes?”
I had a great time, even though I barely knew how to ski. (I had gone skiing once the year before, and found it so insanely fun I immediately went out and purchased ski gear!) While I was skiing on that nasty glacier ice on a t-bar ski lift, no less, a helicopter landed on the glacier, guys with machine guns got out, and some guy went down the glacier, they picked him up, and took him back up to the top!
I had zero experience with any kind of lift other than a tow rope, and I fell down after going about 20 feet, and the free end of the t-bar came around and whacked me in the face nearly taking my eye out, but...I held on grimly for dear life, and that t-bar dragged me all the way up to the top. I wasn’t letting go!
After skiing each day, I simply went back to the little monk-sized room with white walls and nothing else, and slept after eating something for dinner.
That sure was a fun trip...so long ago.
Fascinating to read, sir, and I‘m glad you had such a swell time in Germany then - and you got out of your endeavors unharmed. 😀
And about the Mercedes taxis: in those days, almost all West German taxidrivers used 200 Ds from the firm with the three-pointed star. They were not cheap to buy and slow as molasses (it was said that to measure their acceleration, you needed absolutely no stopwatch, a calendar would more than suffice), but they were almost unbreakable. They ran and ran.
So I wouldn‘t be amazed that, in the long run, using a Merc 200 D as a taxi was cheaper than anything else on the car market.