Being on the road was and is her life. This year, Hermi Kürner once again sat behind the wheel of her Mercedes Benz W15 Type 170, built in 1931, for 6,000 kilometers. As one of the first female bus drivers in Austria, the woman from Wels has been driving coaches across Europe since the 1980s, always with a smile on her face and a sure hand at the wheel. After more than five decades and 2.5 million kilometers driven, Hermi Kürner looks back on her eventful life and recorded her experiences in her book “Always on Vacation”.
“Actually, I’ve been saying again and again for ten years that my book will come out next year, and now the time has actually come,” says Kürner, who has written down formative, funny and extraordinary events on 300 pages.
Exposed the son
She describes how she “forgot” the eldest of her three sons, then 14 years old, on the highway on the way to Naples. This happened when she replaced her husband Gerhard at the wheel of the coach, but she didn’t know that he had sent his son to the back to turn off the power generator in the ski rack. “About 15 kilometers later, a motorcyclist signaled to us that we should stop. A short time later, our son drove up in a full Fiat 500 that had not followed us,” Hermi Kürner still has to smile today.
Things once got tricky in Algeria when, out of curiosity, they followed an oil drilling train and ended up in a restricted military area. They were stopped by soldiers with machine guns at the ready. Since neither of them spoke French, they tried to explain in English where they came from. “Austria, Salzburg, Vienna, Mozart,” – no reaction. “Then my husband came across Kreisky. The officer threw his arms around Gerhard and kept shouting, ‘Kreisky, Kreisky, good man, good man.’ They were finally led back to the main road in the military convoy.
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Source: Nachrichten
