Mmmm, beer. Part 2.

Wow!  I was just flipping through the iPhoto album of our trip to look for pictures of beer and I realized that I completely forgot about our long weekend in Germany.  See, drink enough water sachets and your past begins to fade until all you can remember is what it’s like to be hot and dusty and in need of a bucket bath.  But look!  James, Ashlyn, Chad and I took a post-Christmas trip along Germany’s “Fairytale Road.”  We drove, saw old things and ate/drank.  It was awesome.  (Please note in the following pictures that my younger brother came to Europe in late December without a coat.  Even though we had this conversation before he arrived:  Me:  “Chaddy, you still have a coat, right?”  Chad:  “Yeah, that puffy one.”  Me:  “Oh good, that’s a warm coat and it is really cold in the Netherlands right now.”  Chad:  “Cool.”  Message not received, apparently.)

Because my family is cool and thought that seeing a statue of Gauss was pretty exciting.  

I made James take this picture because I have an obsession with small doors and stairways . . . I hope that someday one of them will lead me to a magical world where I’m a witch who is at least as smart as Hermione Granger.  Or where I become Anne Shirley before she gave up writing to raise Gilbert-Blythe-babies.

And then there was the romantic vacation-within-a-vacation that James and I took to Antwerp.  We’ve decided that Scotland and Belgium are our ‘go-to’ Europe countries.  Scotland because it has an interesting history and isles and lots of space with no people and Belgium because it has old buildings and beer and waffles.  (Although James, being a good African-historian-husband, is made uncomfortable by Belgium’s colonial past.)

Most importantly, after all of this beer-drinking in good company, I decided that my drink-with-a-pizza-on-a-Wednesday-night beer is Rodenbach.  It is sour and delicious – almost as good as a cold bottle of Coke.  I know, Important Decisions must be made.  After all, I’m nearly 30 and I need to know these things!

The moral of the story?  Delicious beer is easy to find in Europe.  Also, it is waaaay cheaper there, making you think that it is ok to drink a lot more.

A toast to all seven of our dear readers and to great memories!

(And now all of this blogging has made me punchy and I'm about to share way too much information: this picture made me think about the time that Diana sent me a video of a German woman giving birth to cheer me up.  We’re weird, I know: but the man in the video was wearing black socks and orange pants and the woman only had on a flannel shirt, which we found hilarious in all of its German-ness.  And when I described this video to my sister, she said that I would probably wear my gray cashmere cardigan while giving birth.  Which might be true, but ewww – now my favorite cardigan is known as “the birth cardigan.”  I think I need a new one.)