Catch up days

 We’ll time to catch up. We arrived at our friends home on the scheduled train. It is a small town although a lot like Carlsbad. Lots of touristy shops and apartments. Apparently many of the apartments are vacant awaiting tourists to the beach.  Scott and Brian spent 6 weeks here one summer with this family.  The last time we were here was 2009.  Since that time they bought the upstairs apartments and remodeled   This is a good news bad news issue for us  good news is we really had our own space as well as they had there own space   The bad news is the climb to the upper floor on the curving staircase with our over sized over weight bags ( the Petersen’s don’t understand the word traveling light)    Poor Dan  had to carry them up the staircase   

So on arrival in the apartments is a washer and we could use the dryer downstairs but it takes 2 1/2 hours  there is a baloney so we just hung the clothes out there   There really weren’t many since we had the laundry fiasco a couple of days ago  too many choices for washing Christa was able to add everything and set it up. Unfortunately even though it was sunny the clothes took all day to dry and still seemed damp. 

Our first night there we stayed up past midnight chatting. Hans never goes to bed earlier than 12 or 1AM and Christa turns in early but gets up at 5AM.   We are spending 2 days with them and 3 nights   We head to Berlin on the 7th   This is probably just the right amount of time.

We went into Lubeck for the day  Hans took us as Christa spent time with her 95 year old mother and they went “shopping”  Lubeck is a port town and was the center of the “Hansa League”  which was the beginning of the trade routes in the 1300’s  This included at its height 194 cities and 16 countries in Europe   The museum was amazing  Lubeck is a pleasant town and it was great just people watching.  Hans’ meal plan is interesting and different from ours.  It is imperative that you stop for coffee and cake or ice cream about 2PM.  Dinner is about 7:30 or so. Dan and I have been doing just breakfast and an early dinner and we will surely gain weight stopping for a coffee and cake each day. 

We were able to sneak off to bed by 1130.  The next day we drove about 45 miles to an open air museum.  A wealthy individual in order to preserve history purchased older homes and relocated them to this site.  The government now manages the site. It was a fun day lots of walking but at a snail’s pace and of course the 1 hour stop for coffee.  There were some school children since there are some farm animals etc.  A quiet day over all since the trip was done on country roads with speed limits. 

The morning we left we visited with Christa’s mom.  This was an interesting visit except Christa and Hans would need to stop her from talking to translate.  She was 15 during WWII and had some interesting stories to share about her remembrances.  Her father lost his job because he was against the Nazi’s and he was out of work for 7 years.  Hans shared stories about his father who was in the Nazi army working to relocate people from Budapest into Germany. He shared stories of he and Dan (when Dan was in Germany at age 21) going to a village and the townspeople remembering his father and the interactions. Needless to say apparently it was a 3 day we are happy to have you here party for a bunch of 20 year olds. I will leave the rest to your imagination or if you want details Ask Dan