Lis and Tyler in Germany

I guess I forgot to write about London. Not because it wasn’t worth writing about but because each time I sat down to do it I was overwhelmed by the task. How does one write a concise entry about such a place and such a trip?

First of all, I have to comment on how cool it is that we live just $75 and an hour and 15 minutes from London. We flew into London and spent part of the day there before taking the train to the English countryside. We had arranged to have a taxi meet us at the train station, which was in a town about 15-20 minutes from where we were staying. The taxi driver never showed, so at about 10pm, Tyler and I, with our packs, traipsed into town to try to find a cab. Everyone we asked just laughed at the thought of finding a taxi at that hour. Finally we ducked into the pub and asked around in there and the owner said he’d just run us. I loved this introduction into small-town life and couldn’t have planned a better way to start a stay in the Cotswolds. Thatched roofs, local pubs serving local brews, footpaths through private farms leading to neighboring towns and the BEST and cutest little shops and delis that I have ever seen. I heaven will include free access to these delis, from which I can build a picnic each day. This side trip was well worth it, even though it meant less time in London. I highly recommend it.

We saw all the major sights in London, including a Broadway show. We listened at speakers corner, picnicked in Hyde Park, ate fish and chips, saw a free concert in a church, went to as many free museums as humanly possible in 3 days, took pictures of Big Ben and double decker buses, window shopped on Oxford Street and fell in love (with each other, again, and with London).

In Germany, festivals abound. I cannot even tell you how many festivals we have happened upon in numerous cities. Even our small town of perhaps 200 people has had two or three festivals since we’ve been here. Festivals are held for all sorts of things, but my favorite are the celebrations of the season’s produce. Plum season brings several varieties of plum cakes, plum jam, plum juice and plum festivals. It’s wine season, I guess, and people are drinking “new wine” which tastes like fermented grape juice (not quite wine yet) and is sold in plastic jugs instead of bottles. And to celebrate wine, there are wine festivals. A few weeks ago we went to the biggest wine festival in the world (but really, where else do they have big wine festivals? California, but no. There’s wouldn’t be a festival. It’d be sophisticated. White table cloths, decanters, palate cleansers…). But the biggest festival of all is Oktoberfest.

Last weekend we embarked on an absolutely insane excursion. (Insane if you’re me and pretty much no part of the Oktoberfest is your cup of tea.) We left home at 5:45am to catch our 6:54 party train to Munich. The lobby of the still dark train station was full of an already drinking, mini-keg totting, rowdy crowd. The party train has three bar cars, one of which is fully equipped with a dance floor, DJ and flashing lights. (I am not kidding you. Die Bahn, the official German train company, has a party train. Sponsored by Bitburger.) So, six hours later an already drunk bunch of people stumble off the train and down the street to the fairgrounds. I’m proud to announce that while Tyler did indulge in the mandatory before-8am-Oktoberfest-kick-off-beer, we were sober and able to check our bag in the train station locker and enjoy the streets of Munich as we walked. For those of you who have never been to Oktoberfest, think Puyallup fair times 10, add 11 tents holding up to 8,000 people EACH, surround each tent by a beer garden holding at least that many more, take away drinking laws and inhibitions and you’ll have something close to what it looks like on a weekday morning. After standing for over an hour in a mob so tightly packed my feet weren’t always touching the ground, we made it into the beer garden. This was at about 1:30 or 2, which is apparently way too late to be getting started. It was already packed beyond capacity. We had our requisite liters of beer, a pretzel and a chicken, bought a t-shirt, went on a ride and made it back to the train station by 11:44 for our party train-ride home, which rolled into Landstuhl at 6am. We were home and back in bed just 25 hours after we left. It could have been a dream.

I’m losing the spider war.  I’m fine with a little spider here or there.  They don’t even really make me squeamish if I know where they are.  But huge mammoth spiders are invading our basement apartment, munching on me in the night.  It’s really getting out of control.  I’m losing sleep and feeling desperate.  At first I hauled out the vacuum and vacuumed them up.  These guys are too big to squish with toilet paper, or even a paper towel.  I can’t stand it when you can feel the squirm and crunch under your fingers.  Now, because of global warming or whatever, they seem to be having a population-control problem and I am finding them with such frequency that getting out the vacuum each time is no longer a practical option.  I’ve resorted to the fly-swatter method.  I made a concoction of vegetable oil, dish soap, vanilla and water (I got the recipe online) and sprayed it all over our bedroom…an environmentally friendly, poison-free method of encouraging the spiders to find lunch elsewhere.  It seemed to be working for a couple of days but yesterday I found a horker and tried to kill it but MISSED.  It got away.  That’s the worst.  Then you KNOW there’s a big, mad one somewhere close by.  Today there was one on the bedroom floor.  (A big one, I mean.  The little ones don’t even merit a mention anymore.)  I always find it hard to get cozy in bed just after I’ve found a spider the size of my head just inches from my pillow.  Well, off to beddie-by.  Sleep tight.

We have fulfilled half of our obligation, spent half of our money, experienced half our adventure.  We’ve consumed half the pretzels and beer, taken half of the pictures and put half of the miles on our BMW we will before we leave.  We’ve seen half of Sports Night and half of another show I swore I’d never tell we watched.  We’ve seen Ben and Nico grow half a year older.  We’ve eaten half as many Sunday morning buns, killed half as many gargantuan spiders and slept half as many nights as we ever will in this apartment. We’ve read more than half the books, I’m sure.  More than half of the longing for home, I hope.  Less than half of our trips, if we’re lucky.  Perhaps we’ve had half of our visitors.  We’re nowhere near halfway to figuring out what we want to be when we grow up (we thought we might figure that out this year).  We’re halfway through our year in Germany.

Josh and Clarissa were hoping visiting us would mean they’d be featured on our website. I’d say it qualifies. They stayed at our house in Steinbach and enjoyed a delicious meal at our favorite place, “The Train Station.” I think Tyler and I have almost achieved “regular” status (not as in being considered regular people, but as regular customers at The Train Station, as we call it, which is the closest restaurant to us. It’s THE restaurant in Glan Munchweiler, which is 7 minutes away). There seem to be festivals very regularly throughout Germany. We happen upon them almost every time we travel. Last weekend was some wine/car festival in Bacharach on the Rhine river. This is something you’d never see in the states. People in old cars paraded through town, which is all fine and good and normal. The unusual part is the wine ceremony. The paraders stop by the “stage” where a man dressed as a wine god passes out glasses of the local Riesling to the drivers and they continue on their drive through town. Anyway, we watched for a while, posed for a photo with the wine god, and sampled some Riesling at Rick’s favorite sampling restaurant. We really are Rick junkies. In Cologne, or Koln, we went bar hopping, which is especially easy and fun for those drinking Kolsh, the local beer. It’s a light beer with a low alcohol content served in small, skinny glasses (.2 liters, to be exact. In restaurants, the glasses have a measurement line, like a measuring cup, and the glass is filled exactly to that line. Soda, water, beer, wine. Any beverage you order.). In traditional bars they bring one Kolsh after another, marking each one with a tick mark on your coaster, until you put your coaster on top of your glass signaling you’re done. If you can’t manage to balance a coaster on top of your glass, I guess you have two problem: you’re drunk and you can’t stop getting drinks.

Since this year marks both our one-year wedding anniversary and our 10-year together anniversary, we figured we’d celebrate twice.  Especially since we’ve never celebrated an anniversary before (one year we had a 7-year itch party…).  I have to say, I’m pretty into this and I think we’ll have to make it a regular event (yearly, I’d say).  On August 5 (our actual wedding anniversary) we spent our last few hours of a WONDERFUL visit with our dear friends Katie and Scott.  Tyler and I stopped at a small city on the river on our way back from dropping them off at the airport and sat on a bench along the water. We got a piece of cheesecake and put a little bride and groom on top and pretended it was the top tier of our wedding cake.  I think that’s waiting for us in someone’s freezer. It’ll be especially tasty on our second anniversary. Maybe it’s lucky to throw it away or feed it to birds???

The next weekend we took an overnight trip to Cochem, a nearby city on the Mosel river.  It’s in a little valley with vineyard-covered hillsides and a big, beautiful castle.  We spent the evening wandering the charming streets and had a lovely meal out. In the morning we went to Burg Eltz (Rick Steves’ favorite castle in Europe), which has been left intact for 700 years and is furnished as it was 500 years ago.  It sits all alone in a forest, which you can hike through.  Then we drove our trusty BMW (I think we should name it…any suggestions?) back home in time for Tyler to get to work.

Tyler and I are both a year older (actually just a day older than we were yesterday…). We went to Heidelberg (a town about an hour away that has a castle, lots of tourists and cute, fun-to-explore, windy streets) to celebrate Tyler’s birthday. Don’t forget to check out the picture of Tyler’s ENORMOUS birthday beer.

Our friends Katie and Scott came for a visit. I met up with them in Stockholm, but Tyler had to stay home and bring home the bacon (actually, since he’s cooking bacon, he’s not bringing much home). I was just there a couple of days, but got a good feel for the city. It’s 1/3 water, 1/3 parks and 1/3 city. It’s gorgeous, very user-friendly, and especially fun to see if you’re a Swede like me. I didn’t have to buy a single souvenir because my grandma owns one of everything Swedish. I went home and they went on to Berlin and then Prague, where they got engaged, and then came to visit us. They stayed with us for four days and we did a little sight seeing in our neck of the woods. There are actually some pretty neat places to go for day trips. About an hour and a half away there is a furnished castle still owned by the Eltz family, which has owned it for over 500 years. There’s an hour long hike up to the castle through the woods and along a creek, which made the trip especially worthwhile.

I’m realizing there are two main types of traveling. Sightseeing and relaxing. Certainly the two can be combined, but sometimes you have to pick one or the other. I’m still not sure what I like more. I think sometimes I like seeing things to say I’ve seen them, or to have it under my belt for some later purpose.  Sometimes taking a relaxing vacation seems like a waste of a trip when there are sights to be seen. In Italy we struck a perfect balance between sightseeing and relaxing. The more I reflect on our trip, the more I think about Tuscany. And the more I think about Tuscany, the more I want to go back.

We stayed in an agriturisimo, a program started in the 60’s to encourage farmers to stay on their land, to keep producing food and to provide accommodation to tourists.  Rick Steves says “think of it as a rural Italian B&B.”  Our “agriturisimo” was on a farm about 45 minutes from Siena, among a bunch of tiny hill towns in Tuscany.  It was a huge house with gracious hosts, three little dogs (Joc, Jill and the other one), and a pool.  Driving along the windy country roads you pass one sunflower field after another, grand-looking entrances to modest farmhouses lined with mile-high cyrpus trees and fields the color of “burnt Siena.”  We went to just a handful of the perfect and unique little hill towns nearby.  Each one has a beautiful church (or two), the best restaurant you’ve ever eaten at, wine tasting, shopping, cobblestone paths, and picturesque alleyways.  We’d spend our days exploring the neighboring towns, swimming in the pool and picking our jaws off the floor.  In the evening we’d come home and sit out on the deck, welcoming the cool evening air, with a bottle of wine and watch the sun set behind the rolling hills.  I know, it’s almost too much.  A lazy morning and a hot cappuccino and we were off again!  What a way to spend a vacation.  I think the jury’s back.

I was so looking forward to seeing Jim and Linda that I forgot to think about going to Italy.  I didn’t read up on it.  I knew it would be wonderful, but didn’t know quite what to expect.  If you’re going (and you should) expect this…

1. History.  Serious, serious history.  And it’s a great place to learn history if you missed it like I did.

2. Variety.  Huge cities (Rome) and tiny villages (Montalcino); sunburned rolling hills covered in sunflowers and cyprus trees; lush, touristy-yet-charming seaside towns; mountains.

3. A cover charge.  Even at the lousiest restaurants (I hear there are only two lousy restaurants in all of Italy.  We found one…) they charge you around 2 Euro just to sit down.

4. If you aren’t at the restaurant we found in Rome or the other bad restaurant, you can expect SUPERB food.  Homemade pasta, fresh just-from-the-garden produce, fresh just-from-the-sea seafood, perfectly salted foccacia and, of course, gelato.

5. Hoards of tourists.

6. If you do it right, relaxation.  Sit by the pool under the Tuscan sun.  Walk “lover’s lane” in Cinque Terra.   Sit on the terrace/balcony/what-have-you with a glass of wine (or what-have-you) and some good company.  Sit in silence in a cathedral.

Have a great trip.

Our good friend Laurel came for a visit and boy did we have a great time. Tyler and I picked her up from the airport in Frankfurt and she was amazingly full of energy and ready to hit the ground running. We got in the car and headed for Mainz, the first stop on our tour of the Rhine. We walked through the rain to the center of town, found a little German restaurant and started chatting with the friendly waiter. Mainz, he told us, was completely full due to a festival. We wouldn’t find lodging, at least not at a reasonable price. So we decided to cut our losses and head up the river. There’s something kind of thrilling about hopping in the car with a map and some friends and just seeing how far you get. Laurel fell asleep, the rain let up a bit, and the drive was beautiful. Around dinnertime, we arrived in Bacharach and decided to stay. We parked the car and had coffee at the ferry dock while we referenced our trusty travel book. For just 16 Euros each we could stay with Irmgard Orth in her Bed and Breakfast up the street, so we took it. As it turns out, it might have been wise to specify that all of the people in our party are full-sized adults. Sweet Irmgard was apparently expecting a toddler, as the third bed turned out to be a folding foam mattress (unfolded length: approx. 5 ft.). Luckily Laurel was both exhausted and generous, so all of us got a good night’s sleep. Bacharach was a very charming town and small enough to be toured in just a part of a day. From there, we went on a boat ride to St. Goar and back, following Rick Steves’ tour from our book. While in St. Goar we grabbed an apricot strudel and coffee for lunch, did a complete tour (again, thanks to Rick Steves) of the castle, and passed up several opportunities to buy terrible German souvenirs. I’m sorry to offend any German readers (or fans of German souvenirs), but honestly. You’d have to see for yourself.