Road to Recovery

In light of the disturbing and disquieting contents of my previous blog post, I feel I owe you all an apology. I must confess that I had watched the first six minutes of Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the RNC on youtube immediately prior to writing the blog, and as such, my connection to reality at that time should be considered tenuous at best. Consequently, I may have slightly exaggerated certain elements of our experience.

As it happens, our new Workaway housemate, Pedro, re-appeared last night, after taking a quick and unannounced overnight trip to nearby Osnabrück. The children seem to be recovering little by little from their blight of eye infections, or at least some of them are looking somewhat better, and our two little ones remain untouched by the scourge. Furthermore, the 24 chicks that hatched last week appear to be thriving, all but one anyway.

We also finished our extreme makeover of the stairwell, a sizable area occupied by six flights of stairs servicing the ground floor the first floor and the cellar. Over the better part of the last week we cleared out this commodious space in order to repaint the weathered walls that hadn’t seen a fresh coat since as long as our 33 year old hostess could remember. (She grew up in this house.)

The lengthy process required two to three coats of paint, around 30 liters in all, as well as the removal and replacement of various shelves, wall hangings, curtains and coat racks, and some agile acrobatics between stairs and stepladders in order to reach the highest ceiling corners. My talented wife put on the finishing touches of flaming fadeout orange, while I replaced a couple of light fixtures in strict accordance with German electrical standards.

Best of all, after grandpa passed through the stairwell and took one look at our handiwork, he was was so breathtaken, that he volunteered to take a look under the hood of gurgling vehicle. Within a matter of minutes and with a single minor adjustment, he managed to transform our humble VW camper into a high performance wonder bus. It suddenly runs ten times better, and just in time.

Because in our free time, when not scouring the nearby hamlets for playgrounds and ice cream parlors, we’ve been making careful plans for our upcoming road trip to Austria. After three months of provincial living and serial farm-hopping, we hope to finally squeeze in one or two actual tourist sights on this south-easterly journey.

The first half of the trip will take us as far as Dresden, a seven hour drive which we’ll break up into two unhurried days. On day one we plan to take our midday leisure stop in Hanover, just a couple hours east of here. I spent the better part of 2001 on a solo back-tripping across Europe, seeking, among other things, the continent’s best botanical gardens, and Hanover’s Herrenhausen Gardens came in very high on that list.

It was the first week of September, just days before 9-11. I had spent the previous two months Woofing on a farm in France, and I was on my way up to Lübeck, in very northern Germany, where days later I would meet my future wife, who would be traveling with her best friend, Merry, whose Dresden wedding we are heading to this week. Stop me if I’m going too fast.

Basically, it’s just the perfect time for us to drop in on one of Europe’s most impressive spectacles of botanical and baroque gardening. Hanover should make a good place for lunch too. And from there we’ll drive another couple hours before stopping to camp somewhere around the Harz Mountains, among the region’s historic villages of half-timbered houses and fairy tale landscapes.

Two nights in Dresden will bring us in contact with some old friends before heading south to Austria by way of Bavaria. We’ve set aside three days to cover this eight hour journey over the eastern wing of the alps, giving us plenty of time to take in the countryside, and maybe even make another border-hopping detour over to Cheb, Czech Rep., for lunch.

It’s become something of a tradition of ours to make these international lunch excursions, as we’ve consistently been based very close to borders, with Poland and the Netherlands specifically. Also, our next locale will put us about 10 kilometers from Austria’s border with Slovenia. It’s one of Europe’s greatest charms, the proximity of small countries, myriad cultures and diverse ethnicities, all rubbing shoulder to shoulder. And these days, moving in and out of EU countries couldn’t be easier. Whenever we see a border crossing approaching, we all just put on our Trump baseball caps, and they wave us right in.