So: I left for Germany on Monday the 7th, taking an evening flight from JFK Airport in New York. (More choices for flight times, and it’s actually not that much further than the Philly airport for us.) This is not my plane, but rather an Air France Airbus A380 getting ready for the milk run to Paris:

She’s an unusual bird – two decks running the length of the plane, a first in the commercial jet age. I would have enjoyed having a chance to take a tour, or better yet, to go out for a spin. Another time.

My bird was no slouch, though… this was my first time on a 747:

First impressions: Huge plane. Incredibly long – I was in one of the back rows and it felt like I had traveled a mile to get to my seat. Kind of like a fun house version of an airplane. Also, it turns out the 747 is a pretty ungainly bird on the ground and at low altitude. Below 10,000 feet (3,300m) it shook and shimmied like a car with a bad transmission.

Anyway, after seven hours aloft we touched down at mid-day in Frankfurt. I took the train from the airport to Heidelberg, and then picked up a car. The train was an Inter-City Express (ICE), and it was gorgeous inside:

Hard to see from the picture, but they have this beautiful glass sliding door arrangement between the passenger compartments, and it is slightly mirrored, and the information display is set into the mirrored surface so it looks like it is floating there. German engineering.

My hotel was only a few minutes from the train station and rental car place, so I was in the room fairly quickly. The hotel is a boutique, not part of a chain, and the rooms are actually distributed among three older buildings along the same block in a neighborhood. The room itself was bright, airy, and surprisingly spacious for a European hotel:

The strange little oval in the foreground of this picture is actually a small dining table and two chairs:

There was a small kitchenette in the room, which came in handy:

In fact, soon after I arrived I went to the local Aldi supermarket (yes!) around the corner and bought some essentials:

Don’t let anyone tell you life in Germany is always outrageously expensive – I picked up a six-pack of beer for the equivalent of $2.40. Try that in Pennsylvania.

The room had no air conditioning, but this wasn’t a problem – most days the weather was cool enough on its own. And anyway, the room had a fan with the brand name Alaska. Isn’t that a fine brand name for a fan?

So, there I was, safely ensconced in Heidelberg. I went out and had a nice dinner, and then had a long, long sleep – 13 hours! Woke up fresh and ready to get to work the next day.

Tomorrow: Trees, bikes, and cathedrals.

One of my colleagues at work was kind enough to snap a picture of me taking flight on the zip line. Unfortunately you can’t see the height of the line in this picture – I was about 30 feet (10m) off the ground, which was, shall we say, exhilarating.

I’ve got all of the photos available now for upload, so I’ll start the pictorial tour of Germany tomorrow. Tchuss!

And we’ve had a very busy weekend since I landed Friday night. Fortunately, there are going to be about a thousand new pictures for me to show you. Catch up with you soon….

Hallo und guten tag von Deutschland!

I’m pretty busy with work, but I wanted to post a couple of pictures. On Thursday our team went to a “high ropes garden” for an afternoon of team building activities. If you can navigate the German-language text, you can see their Web site here.

Your intrepid reporter is not a great fan of heights, to be sure, so this outing was a bit of a challenge for me. Even so, I had a great time once I got comfortable with walking around on planks and wires hanging in the sky.

Grandma, I assure you all this was very safe. They had a harness system that was incredibly strong and well-designed. Would we expect any less from our German cousins?

Many more pictures and updates when I get home. Tchuss!

Hallo und guten tag von Deutschland!

I’m pretty busy with work, but I wanted to post a couple of pictures. On Thursday our team went to a “high ropes garden” for an afternoon of team building activities. If you can navigate the German-language text, you can see their Web site here.

Your intrepid reporter is not a great fan of heights, to be sure, so this outing was a bit of a challenge for me. Even so, I had a great time once I got comfortable with walking around on planks and wires hanging in the sky.

That thing over my left shoulder is a car down on the ground.

It’s time for that business trip to Germany that I mentioned the other day, so I’ll be away from the blog during the next two weeks (week of June 7th and week of June 14th). When I come back, I’ll have a review of my action-packed trip, plus a rundown of the 4,000 events and activities that will be keeping Chels and the kids busy in my absence.

See you real soon!

For the past couple years, my dad and Nick have been going camping on Memorial Day weekend. They go with my dad’s friend Mike to a place he owns up in the mountains north of Scranton, about 3 hours away from our house. This year, I asked if I could tag along. It was Nick’s decision, and he graciously said yes. (There was some worry that having his dad along would make the weekend less fun.)

We drove up Saturday morning, and arrived mid-day. There was an impressive crowd there of about 30 people, all friends and family of the owners. The camping is primitive – there is no electricity and no running water onsite. However, there is a big barn-like cabin there, so we had plenty of space for sleeping:

The cabin sits right on a lakefront, and the view from the porch looks like this:

Accommodations are pretty sparse – we had a room in the upstairs loft of the cabin. Though there are some built-in bunk beds, we slept on cots my dad brought for us:

But the lakefront setting is spectacular:

That’s Nick out there on the dock. He spent a lot of time during the weekend catching minnows and salamanders in the lake with a net:

In fact, he was still at it when evening came around:

It was an incredibly peaceful weekend, and the weather was perfect all around.

I’m glad Nick let me go with them!

Last week both of our girls had reading events at school. Anna read us an “alphabet book” of facts about animals, and Maria read us a selection from her realistic fiction story that she’s been writing for the past couple months.

Maria’s reading event was in the evening, and the other two rabble rousers came along, so afterward they spent a few minutes on the playground:

Tomorrow: Memorial Day boys’ weekend on the lake.

Chelsea came home the other day with exciting news: Her driver’s door window in her van wouldn’t roll up or down. Completely stuck. Rain in the forecast? You bet.

I jumped online and did some research, and suspected that it was the window regulator gone bad. It looked like something I could fix on my own, if I was feeling brave, or cheap, or both. So I ordered the part, which took two days to come in, and the meantime I tracked down the service manual for our van.

Funny thing about the manual – all of the pictures in it are from a different model year, and when it came time to start by removing the trim panel from the door, the manual was of no help whatsoever. Fortunately, my neighbor Franny came around while I was getting started, and decided to drop what he was doing and help the poor, confused English major who was trying to disassemble his wife’s car.

We managed to figure out how to remove that panel:

Franny went at the door with relish:

I performed crucial holding-the-window duties:

I’m delighted to report that the window regulator was just fine. A bolt had fallen out of place inside the door, and we simply needed to put it back in place. Took about an hour and a half from start to finish, and it was very satisfying to get it fixed successfully. Franny won himself a case of beer for his troubles.

(Thanks to Nick for the photography work.)