Category: Family

I was thinking this morning, when I was taking some of these pictures of Will as Darth, what a series of costumes that he has gone through over the years. It seems like just yesterday when Will was dressed as Blue and I had to go through all sorts of rig-a-ma-roll to get a shirt to look like Steve. A couple of years ago, Will was a knight. A few years before that, I think, he was a gladiator.

And this year, Darth.

I guess I like to see that as a sign of progress and maturity. But maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, Halloween also included a “Halloween parade” and various parties at Will’s school that Annette attended. My favorite picture from that is this one with Will (in the mask) giving a friend, also dressed as Darth Vader, the bunny ears. Just the sort of thing that any evil villain should do.

Halloween festivities actually began around here a couple of weeks ago during Will’s and my annual adventure to the pumpkin patch and our carving session last night. I was pretty pleased with the results, and, as this picture shows, we only had some modest squirrel damage, unlike some previous years:

Of course, the real point of Halloween– and this is why it is fundamentally a children’s holiday– is the candy and the trick or treating. I’ve written in previous years about my humbug-ness about some of the trick and/or treating that happens around here, and I won’t relive that now. All I will say for the time-being is that mild weather brought what I have to think is a record number of T&T commuters. We were out of candy by 7:00pm.

Will and his friend Gage certainly made a good haul. After they got done, they came back and began the process of sorting and then trading candy:

This activity had the chance of turning into an all-night affair, so Annette and Gage’s mother broke it up pretty quick.

And then it was time for Darth to go off to bed, snuggling with his plastic light saber and his doggie.

I’m super-duper pooped from a great weekend up in Traverse City, but I thought I’d post a little something about the whole whirlwind of a trip. Kind of in the order of the trip, but also in the order I remembered it:

• We drove up there in pretty crappy rain, but by the time we got up there, it was just kind of grey.
• Big BIG ups to our hosts with the mosts John and Karen. John and I were in the comp/rhet program at BGSU together way back when. He and Karen were just very generous and kind and just a ton of fun. Too much fun on Saturday night, but that’s a whole different story.
• One of our missions was to check out the cabin/house that my side of the family (well, really, my parents) are going to rent next summer. It looks like it’s going to be as cool as this web site suggests.
• Drove around, went to the beach (see above), saw changing leaves, talked textbook publishing and teaching and stuff, went to Cherry Republic, bought cherry ketchup after much encouragement from John and Karen.
• We ended up at a very nice restaurant, getting a table after all the homecoming dance kids cleared out. Will was pretty sleepy by then, and the nice folks at this restaurant let him stretch out on a booth bench. They even got him a little pillow.
• Stayed up way too late Saturday. And I don’t know if it was a good idea to have three different bottles of wine open at the same time….
• Toured around this morning on Mission Peninsula, hiked a little, looked at pretty views a lot, had a little lunch, and then said our farewells.
• Not much to report about the drive back, but we stopped at a very cool veggie and fruit market, which included this amusing sale of water-logged golfballs.

Not a lot of pictures, but the set from this trip is here.

Home! Here at my computer, drinking my coffee, listening to my radio, in my house! Home! It’s always fun to go on a trip like we went on (and we did have a lot of fun), but it also always nice to be home after a trip like the one we went on.

I’m in that fuzzy space of time right now; it’s 6:30-7:00 am here, but it’s about midnight in Munich, and my body is somewhere lost in that space. So for now, while I download pictures from my iPod, I thought I’d post a few miscellaneous thoughts on our last couple of days:

• Sunday we went to Munich as a sort of “staging area” for our flight home on Monday/yesterday. We stayed at a hotel in a suburb of Munich near the airport. Our first activity of the day was going to the airport to check things out, which turned out to be a pretty good idea– the airport was a bit of a maze, at least to us.
• Back at the hotel we were staying, there was some kind of wine/beer festival out in the courtyard. It was kind of rainy and such, not exactly festival weather, but it was kind of fun nonetheless. We had some wine and beer, some sort of Bavarian cheese spread (which I found kind of yucky), and trout roasted on a stick (which was good). The entertainment featured what struck me as a bizarre sort of German lounge act. These three guys in lederhosen had all this computer stuff backing up their singing, and they sang a combination of old American pop music and German songs. They did a terrible job with the American songs, so I can only imagine what they did with the German ones.
• While at the Munich airport, I managed to spend most of our Euros, though I had to make two trips. There was some rig-a-ma-roll doing all this; even though I was spending cash, I had to give them my passport and country of origin and such. So when I came back to the counter for a second time to buy a soda, the woman waiting on me said to the other woman behind the counter (in German, of course) something like “Can you believe this guy is back? Jeez, why didn’t he just buy everything at once?” The other woman behind the counter said “Idiot!” (in German, of course– which, btw, is “Idiot!” but pronounced with a German accent). Hearing this I gave them a stare, I said in my bad German “Ich spreche ein bischen Deutsch, und ich verstehe Idiot.” Which means “I speak a little German, and I understand ‘idiot.'” I should have added something like “you dumbasses,” but I was pretty tired.
• The flight stuff was largely uneventful, and the heightened security wasn’t that bad to deal with, really. We did have to go through a fair amount of security stuff in Atlanta, though: first through customs, then to get our luggage, and then back through customs, and then we had to recheck the bags, and then go back through security for a domestic flight. It seems to me like they could have streamlined those last two steps. Oh, and the only flight on this whole trip that was late was the last one. Figures.
• Our house/dog sitter Molly picked us up from the airport, and btw, a big shout-out to Molly. She did a just awesome job, watering the plants, taking great care of Sophie (who she just loves even more now), keeping everything clean, etc., etc. Hell, she even baked some cookies!
• Sophie had a gloriously happy reunion with everyone– particularly Will.
• I started up my cell phone and there was a message from Steve B. informing me that we had a computer stolen out of my office. Jesus F. Christ, welcome back to work, eh? So I get to go in there this morning and deal with some of that, I guess….
• I downloaded 662 photos from the trip to my computer. I think a lot of those are duplicates, but I did indeed take a lot of pictures. It’ll be fun going through the “keepers” on those. Stay tuned for a bunch of stuff being uploaded to my Flickr account, for sure.
• And now back to life. Annette and I both want to make an effort to purge ourselves of the pork/wine/beer fest that was Europe. A nice salad. And maybe a cheeseburger.

It’s funny, but I do think that my wife, who is over at the next computer in this Internet cafe/bar, actually enjoys checking her email and such while here in Germany more than I do. Go figure. Anyway, we are back in the cafe today because Grandma and Grandpa Wannamaker have taken Will off to go hiking and then swimming and then out to dinner. But I’ll get to that later….

Yesterday, we went to Neuschwanstein, and yesterday was pretty miserable. The weather here (up until today, at least) was just freakin’ miserable, I mean like mid-40s and raining, and we had packed thinking that it would be in the 70s pretty much the whole time here. So for a couple of days at least, I was getting by with borrowed sweaters from Annette’s father.

But back to the trip.

So, the deal is they take you out th Neuschwanstein, which is easily the biggest tourist attraction in Germany, or at least this part of Germany. The whole Cinderella castle thing. The deal was, at least as we understood it, they take you out there and then get you tickets to get in. Well, we get out there and the bus driver comes back and says, basically, sorry, no tickets today, they are sold out. Now, since I was a guest and, quite frankly, this wasn’t my dime, I didn’t make a stink. But what was very surprising to me was that no one on the bus made a fuss about this, which I found odd. I mean, had this happened in the US, the people on the bus would have killed the guy. Literally.

In any event, this meant that the closest I got to our destination for the day, and as you can see, the weather was just fabulous. We went to tour the castle next door (this is actually part of a pretty large complex), and when we got done with that tour, it was not just pouring rain, it was hailing. Here’s Annette, enjoying the moment.

Oh yeah, and the place was full of construction, like this:

And also crazy full of tourists. I think this is the “high season” for things like Neurschwanstein, while it was the “low season” for Florence. I tell ya, if the crowds were this bad in Florence, we would have had a much different trip to Italy, that’s for sure.

But hey, it all works out. Today, which is actually a holiday in Bavaria (the Ascention of Mary), is absolutely beautiful, which is why Will went hiking with the grandparents. Annette and I did a little light shopping (lots of the stores are closed), and we could not resist the allure of the “umpa music” coming from this Gastaus:

Beer, brats, and polka, and all of a sudden, rainy days are but a memory…..

Annette and I are in an Internet cafe right now while Will is with her parents/his grandparents/ my inlaws, which is the reason why we came to Mittenwald in the first place. And by “Internet cafe” I really mean “bar,” one that features a bunch of different kinds of games and stuff, inclduing Internet access. Nice computers, though again, a sort of weird interface. The “z” is where the “y” should be.

Anzwaz, here I am able to upload pictures to flickr but not my own server space. Whatever. Here’s some picts with narrative:

• We left Florence on Saturday in a bit of confusion (is that our train? really?), but it all worked out to a lovely but relatively boring train trip to Innsbruck, where we met Annette’s parents, and then Mittenwald. Here’s Will in Florence; here’s Annette on the train from Innsbruck to Mittenwald, which featured lovely (albeit somewhat scary) mountain views.
• Mittenwald is a lovely and VERY German kinda town– people wandering around in lederhosen and the whole 10 yards. It is the kind of tourist town the Germans go to when they want to experience something really REALLY German. Here’s a view from the room, Will and Annette on the balcony, walking through town, and mountains with painted houses in the foreground. Oh, and me and Will in a Cafe.

There’s much more to tell, but right now, Annette and I need to go meet the Grand-Ps and kinder for dinner. More later….