cruisin'

Karl and I just celebrated our 10th anniversary. That's right, folks, a whole decade!! We can't hardly believe it ourselves!



Since it's the big one-oh and we've got a baby on the way that will complicate any big trips like this in the near future (and despite the fact we've been saving to buy a house), we decided to take advantage of living near a port town and go on our very first cruise!

Heather and Karl are cruisers!

Although we originally planned our 5-day sojourn in the Gulf of Mexico during the week of our actual anniversary (18 May), my pregnancy demanded that we actually go in early April (see my prego post from 12 March). We left Galveston on the Carnival Ecstasy on 4 April, spent a day in Progresso, Mexico on 6 April, then Cozumel, Mexico on 7 April, and returned to Galveston on 9 April.

We really weren't all that interested in the Mexican ports, and to save money (saving for a house, remember?) we opted out of any shore excursions, but we did get off the boat and wandered the shopping and beach for a couple of hours at each port. On the ship we ate great food, relaxed with books on the deck, ate more great food, relaxed with more books in our room, played miniature golf, ate more yummy food, swam one morning while the ship was in port and everyone was on shore and no where near the pool, ate delicious food, and took night-time strolls on the deck after filling, yummy dinners!

One of the funnest parts of the cruise was bringing Flat Stanley with us everywhere! My niece, Amanda, in Detroit was doing the Flat Stanley project in her class where the kids make and mail off and paper man to someone they know in the world. That person sends back photos and letters of what Flat Stanley has done in that part of the world. Karl and I actually did a similar project for a friend and another niece while we were living in Germany so it was great fun to do it again for Amanda! We realized during our cruise that 90% of our photos had Flat Stanley in them! We really did have fun picking locations for Stanley to get his portrait taken. So...here's some photos of our fun, relaxing cruise with our new friend, Flat Stanley!

Flat Stanley and our ship!



Flat Stanley and our fun ship!



Flat Stanley and our fancy ship! (Yes, that's Karl at the bar in one of the Hawaiian shirts he wore every day or our cruise.)



Flat Stanley and the blue blue water of Mexico!



Flat Stanley at the on-ship art auction (we actually won a free lithograph at the auction)!



Flat Stanley on the Mexican shore!



Flat Stanley being beaten by Karl at minature golf on the ship!

spam-a-lot

On one of our days in Minnesota we took a trip to one of the funnest places I've ever been...the Spam Museum. Yes, that's right...Spam!

In the little community of Austin, Minnesota, the Hormel plant is in full swing making so many food products Americans love and one that if you don't love it, you have to have a least have a sense of humour about it (because Hormel certainly does!).

So, yeah, Hormel built this whole museum dedicated to Spam. The museum is, of course, very educational: you learn about the history of Spam, the role Spam played during World War II, and how Spam is made and canned. And it's all a ton of fun: race each other in canning Spam, play a game show testing your Spam knowledge, and, of course, watch the entire Monty Python Spam skit. And then there's the gift shop with not just every variety of Spam you didn't know existed but over 300 objects with the word Spam on it.

And if you didn't like Spam already going into the museum...well, you're still not going to like Spam coming out. But you'll be able to give Spam some credit for providing a really fun afternoon !

old-fashion american road trip

What is it about a change of location that totally messes up your routines? My day-to-day really hasn't changed much since moving to Texas but I just can't seem to get my blogging in anymore!

I suppose I am having new distractions. My husband just found a new job in a little town just west of Houston so now we're hunting for a new car and a new home and I'm still job hunting myself. But we took a break from all of this hunting for Thanksgiving last week and drove up to Minnesota with my parents to spend the holiday with my mother's sisters and their families.

Rochester Minnesota is about an 18-hour drive (20 hours with rest stops, gas stops, and food stops) from Houston and we drove it all straight through. It was actually not a bad drive at all. And I have actually been craving a good road trip for a while.

I realized while I was living in Germany that road trips are truly an American thing. No one loves their cars so much, has such a lack of a train system, and has created an entire highway/interstate culture like Americans.

I noticed driving long-distance in Germany that you just don't get those long stretches of roads with nothing. There is always something. European towns are so compact with relatively little distance between that you're always within sight of at least a village and the major cities are never more than an hour or so away from each other. You never get "away" from anything.

As you drive cross-country in America, as many of you know, most of your trip is going to be empty fields of grain or cattle with the occasional farm house and truck stop and last-stop-shopping for American Indian artifacts and hand-painted billboards advertising the state's best BBQ. I missed those long stretches of flat plains and the endless winding through mountains without seeing a bit of civilization.

So this road trip to Minnesota really made feel that I arrived home.

And our Thanksgiving was really good, too!

fire party in my room, guys!

One thing I always look forward to when I travel through Europe is the hotel rooms. In America, a hotel room is a hotel room is a hotel room. They're all pretty much the same size, have the same layout, and the same predictable hotel cable TV. In Europe...you never really know what you're going to get and I love that!

I've stayed in all kinds of price ranges from cheap 8 euro a night hostels to some pricier places that feel, well, quite American. But I usually sleep in some lower-priced budget hotels (40-70 euros a night...except for London where it's a confirmed miracle to find anything under 100 pounds a night!) that usually consist of mix-matchy furniture, towels that came from somebody's mother's linen closet, and sometimes there's a bathroom in the room, sometimes the shower's in the room and the toilet's down the hall, and sometimes you get a sink and the shower and toilet are shared by the floor. Sometimes there's a TV, often there's not, and I don't know that I've ever had an alarm clock included in my room.

Almost always they are housed in some ancient European building with rustic medieval wooden beams or beautiful 19th century ceiling molding and the rooms often have some odd size as a result from creating several rooms from what use to be one large space. I never know how big or small they're going to be...for example, when I took my sister and her husband to Paris last year, they stayed in a room that was at least three times the size of my decently sized single room with a ceiling probably twice as high, but in Amsterdam I had quite a nicely sized bathroom in my stylishly decorated room but with just enough space on either side of my bed that I could place my bottle of water and travel alarm clock between the bed and the wall but I had to crawl over the end of the bed to get in and out...smallest room ever!

But they are always clean and neat, always have very friendly staff (which is often the married couple that own the place), a heavenly, light yet filling European breakfast ("good morning, hot chocolate, baguettes and Nutella!") and I've never had a disappointed stay...if sometimes a surprising one!

My cute little hotel in Bruges was no exception!

Cute, medieval building with mix-matchy furniture including a big cozy bed!



A married couple staff that kept my room clean and served me a simply divine breakfast!



But when I first checked in, I noticed this little box on the wall outside my room...



With this sign written in several different languages...



Three guesses who checked into room number 7 (with the only fire escape on the floor)....!

I laughed so hard when I saw that! Thankfully, I never awoke to the sound of breaking glass and a key fumbling in my door. With or without the smell of smoke!

wind through the poplar trees

On one of my days in Bruges I took a guided bike ride around the countryside outside Bruges.

Belgium is one of those flat low countries of Europe where there are almost more bicycles than people, so a bike ride felt a necessary thing to really experience that Flemish corner of Belgium. I grew up in the flat plains of Oklahoma and Texas so even through I've lived in several mountainous and hilly places since then, I've always felt so comfortable being surrounded by flat lands and wide skies. And the low land of Flanders was so, so beautiful!

Our guide rode us out along the canals lined with poplar trees that lean to one side because of the constant wind from the sea--the wind blowing through the poplars, our guide commented, is the true sound of Flanders--to the little town of Damme and back again. We got some history of the area (Flanders was literally Europe's battlefield until their independence and the creation of the Flemish/French/German speaking country of Belgium) and watched the huge (nothing but muscle!) Belgium Blue cows grazing. We passed by windmills and over canals winding their way up to Amsterdam and stopped for coffee, hot chocolate and beers at a canal-side cafe. And passed by a lot of fellow bikers riding from town to town. All accompanied by the sound of the wind blowing through the poplar trees.











You can see all my Bruges photos here including more from my Flemish bike ride!

fairy tale town

I spent about 3 days in Bruges, Belgium, September 17 through the 20th. Bruges isn't like Paris or London where you spend your time cramming tons of wonderful things in a few days, picking and choosing what to do and what's going to be skipped because there is just too much to do and too little time.

Bruges is smaller. Bruges is calmer. Bruges is a few beautiful churches, a couple of small (but excellent) museums, and a city center with a few too many tourists (but even the tourists can't manage to ruin Bruges).

But, mostly, Bruges is street after street after street of brick medieval Flemish houses. And you can spend one day doing the museums and churches and all those tourist-y things and the rest of your time strolling the winding streets, getting lost down tiny alleys, resting on a bench in front of a park of swans, cruising down canals not even bothering to pay attention to the tour guide, stepping out of the way of horse drawn carriages again and again, browsing through an antique market, taking way too many photos of way too many beautiful streets and buildings, and dreading the day when the magic has to end and you have to board that train towards home.

At least that's what I did.

















And that's just a sampling of all the ridiculous beauty Bruges had to offer. I mean really ridiculous. I'm going to have to show you some more photos because really, it's just impossible to take a bad photo in Bruges so click here for my Flickr set of Bruges. (And there are even more great photos I didn't upload onto Flickr. Ridiculous.)

cologne cathedral

So, I went to Belgium a couple of weeks ago and it was amazing! I knew it was going to be amazing so that was no surprise. There were many cool things about my little trip, but one of the coolest was the nice surprise when got my train ticket and I found that I had over an hour and a half wait in the Cologne, Germany train station switching trains on my way to Belgium on September 17th.

Cologne is known for it's big beautiful cathedral begun (as it stands now) in the mid-1200s and so I hoped that would be enough time to go find and see it. I was delighted to find out that the cathedral is literally at the front doorstep of the train station so I was able to spend all my extra time straining my neck up at stained glass windows and stone saints and towering vaulted ceilings amongst chapel altarpieces and working art conservators and praying pilgrims and burning candles.























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Remember that my shop is still having a 10% off the listed price sale in celebration of EtsyBaby's first birthday...but only through October 10th!

a weekend with family i don't even know

So...where have I been, right?

Sorry for disappearing off the blog-o-sphere. I blame a weekend in Gotha, a few days in Belgium, my husband finally coming home to distract me, and a miserable cold we both caught. I still have the cold, but I'm getting sick and tired of feeling sick and tired so I'm determined to get back to you, dear readers, and reassure you that I still live.

But although I have lots to post about, I'm going to start off slowly...because I am still sick and tired...with a little report on a surprisly cool weekend, September 13 and 14, in the German town of Gotha meeting family I hardly knew existed.

So, here's the backstory on this strange little weekend I had. Remember last November when I was in the States visiting my family and Karl searched out his distant German relatives in Gotha and made a very cool film about it? That film was shown at his huge family's annual reunion in February and it inspired one of his uncles to visit Germany. Uncle David planned to come to Germany with one of his sons who was going to be attending a medical conference in Munich and make his own visit to these German relatives. He'd been planning this trip for months with my husband who was going to serve as a translater for him. And then Karl decided to take a trip home for his neice's wedding. So guess who got delegated to be his uncle's translator?

Now, keep in mind that although I've meet many of Karl's relatives I've by no means met them all and I can't even keep straight half the ones I have met. That's how big his family is. I mean really big. Early in our relationship we would often go to his family events and the following scenerio happened to us far more than once: someone would come up and talk to us, they'd leave, I'd ask Karl who that was, and he'd respond with "I'm not sure, I think it was one of my cousins."

Karl's mother was the third of 13 children and I don't think anyone in the family really knows how many first cousins my husband has...everyone seemed to have lost track at 80. In fact, my brother ended up marrying one of my husband's cousins...his family it THAT big. It was bound to happen.

So...long story short, Karl has a big family and I was suddenly in charge of meeting with people I've never met before to show them around a town I've never been before and translate with some German people I've also never met before and that's how much I love my husband!

But it really turned out to be a very, very cool weekend. Karl's family was a delight (not that I was surprised, his family IS amazing!), the Germans were very gracious, we had a lot of fun and I impressed even myself with my German language skills!

I was so busy translating between families most of the time I didn't get many pictures taken, but here are a few...

Gotha is the town where Karl's grandfather, Henry, was born. His grandfather's mother, Gretchen, was also born there and she was the one who made the decision to leave for America, thus separating the German and American lines of his family.



First stop was Wolfgang's house who was the star of Karl's film. I arrived with Karl's uncle David, his son Geoff and Geoff's wife Kathleen with their two sons Jon and Will. They graciously fed us a wonderful meal including tasty Thuringer Wurst (a local specialty!). Then they gave us a tour of the Protestant church next door to their home where Wolfgang and his son restored the original church pews. Wolfgang's son, Wilfred, continues to wind the church clock taking it over from Wolfgang when he retired who had taken over the job from his own father.



Wolfgang's family invited over another cousin, Annemarie, who had some great stories of the family. We all watched Karl's finished film together and I think Wolfgang was very proud of it!



The reason great-grandmother Gretchen decided to leave Germany for America was because she and her mother was baptized into the LDS church when she was a child. After she started her own family she felt the need to move to the States where she could be closer to others of her faith. She only ever described the location of her baptism vaguely but after a bit of research we found a possible location...here is Uncle David with his grandsons at a possible baptism location for David's grandmother. Her choice both to be baptized and to relocate her family to America had obvious far-reaching consequences for Karl's family and I think this trip to Gotha was not only a exploration of family roots but an aknowlegdment of her sacrifices for giving her family the best she could.



Geoff and his sons gazing up at the birthplace of great-grandmother Gretchen.



Geoff and his son Will in front of grandfather Henry's birthplace.



More distant cousins... Klaus and his wife (sorry for the bad photo!). They weren't expecting us and we very nearly didn't find their house. But they were incredibly welcoming once I explained we were distant American relatives!



I had so much fun and I'm so glad I can no longer call these family member, both the Germans and the Americans, strangers. And I even forgave my husband for leaving me all alone to deal with this! And this post turned out longer than I intended and I'm starting to feel that cold again so I'm off to drown myself in juice and cough suppressent on the couch in front of the TV...