daughter-heir.
travel report, part the second.
When last we checked in with our intrepid correspondent, Team Munchkin Wrangler had returned from their excellent little side trip to Vienna.
Back at my brother’s place, we spent the next few days with Family Stuff™. One thing that really worked out well on this trip was the way in which we were able to spread ourselves around evenly among the family so everyone could spend time with us and nobody felt like they got the short end of the stick. Robin and I went gift-shopping in Muenster and used the opportunity to leave Lyra and Quinn with my mother, who was more than happy to ply them with toys and treats all day long.
(When we came to pick them up, I asked my mom if they’d had nothing but candy all day long. She shook her head and asserted that OF COURSE they’d had real food. At McDonald’s.)
The kids had no problem at all being the center of attention and consuming their own body weights in German candy all day long at Oma’s place, and we got to stroll around Muenster without any complaints about hurting feet or boredom.
Quinn, Lyra, and their Oma.
Lyra even got to spend a day at a German kindergarten with her cousin Janne, who is also five years old. You’d figure the language barrier would have been a problem, but at that age, it doesn’t seem to hold them back much when they can’t really understand the words coming out of the other’s mouth. When I came to pick her up, she asked to go again the next day. (“It’s a school just for playing!”) In Germany, kindergarten starts at age 3, so they don’t do all that much educational stuff in the mixed classes and mostly let the kids engage in free play.
The sight that greeted me when I walked into the Kindergarten to pick up Lyra.
I took a little bit of time on this trip to visit some landmarks of my childhood. This time I had a DSLR in tow, thanks to my friend Oleg. For example, I went to see my old kindergarten in the center of Muenster:
St. Ludgeri kindergarten in Muenster. I went there as a wee lad, back in 1976-77.
I also drove out to a small village called Ladbergen, where we used to live in the late 1970s. I’ve always had fond memories of that quaint little place, unlike some of the places we lived in subsequent years.
Moeller’s Hof gasthaus in Ladbergen. My father ran the place in the late 1970s/early 1980s. My sister Nadine was born while we lived here.
The village bookstore, still in the same spot where it stood in 1978/79. I used it as my unofficial library quite a bit.
Another gasthaus on what is Main Street in town. Also another family landmark: my little brother got hit by a car right in front of the place. (He was fine.)
My old elementary school. I spent second and third grades here.
The church and main cemetery, right in the town center. I played there a lot as a kid with my local friends.
A closer look at the church and that ancient cemetery wall all around the place.
Detail above the church door. It’s been in that spot for a while. The words are “Come; for all things are now ready”, from Luke 14:15-24, the parable of the Great Supper.
Memorial in the cemetery, commemorating “our brothers fallen for king and fatherland” of the Franco-Prussian and Austro-Prussian Wars. Before the German Empire’s establishment in 1871, Westphalia was part of the Kingdom of Prussia.
I appreciated that the trip was unhurried enough for me to indulge in a bit of personal history sleuthing, going back to places I hadn’t seen in thirty years or more. If you don’t know where you came from, you can’t know where you’re headed.
(Part Three to follow, in which I will show you around Muenster, my favorite city.)
travel report, part the first.
First off—our trip was pretty stellar. All the flights and trains were on schedule, all our luggage came along with us, and even though our schedule was packed from front to back, it was actually a pretty relaxing vacation as such things go.
We left on February 13th, the day before Quinn’s birthday. Our flights were booked on Icelandair, so we had a stop and plane change in Keflavik, Iceland both on the way to Europe and back from there. I have no complaints about the Viking long-planes or their crews. Food was optional, but reasonably priced, and the kids got lunch & dinner boxes for free (or rather, included in the fare). The Viking long-planes had personal touch-screen entertainment centers in the headrests from which one can stream any of the 50+ movies in the on-board catalog at any time. They also had a ton of kid flicks and TV shows, which did a lot to keep the sprogs occupied for the duration of the flights. (It was 4h 45m from Boston to Keflavik, and another 2h 30m from KEF to Amsterdam, which is the closest big airport to my brother’s place.)
A Viking long-plane, the scourge of the European skies.
We were hosted by my brother and sister-in-law for the duration of the trip. Having a home base for recharging and keeping our stuff made this trip a lot more relaxing than the last one seven years ago, where we had kind of a wandering circus thing going on. In 2005, we stayed with various relatives and basically had to pack and unpack our stuff pretty much every other day to set up somewhere else. My brother has three kids, we brought our two, and their place isn’t all that big, so it was pretty….lively.
Five cousins demolishing Quinn’s birthday cake. He turned eight on the day of our arrival.
We got in on Thursday, did the family thing Thursday and Friday, and then headed down to Vienna, Austria on the first weekend of our stay. Robin had wanted to check the item “Spanish Riding School” off her bucket list, and there was one performance scheduled in the time span of our stay, so off we went. Rather than driving a car for 600 miles in German winter weather, we opted to take the train, and it turned out to be a wise decision. We left Westphalia for Hannover on Saturday morning, got onto the ICE high-speed train to Vienna around lunchtime, and stepped off the train in Vienna’s Westbahnhof at dinnertime. Those things will move.
A nap at 150MPH.
Zippy train is zippy.
Vienna was all-around spectacular. Beautiful city, shiny new hotel (with the best breakfast buffet I’ve ever had in any hotel anywhere), agreeable weather, and easy getting around via subway. Alas, we were there mostly on Sunday, which means that we couldn’t do much shopping. We missed out on being able to buy fashionable shoes like these:
Or these:
So we limited our spending to Austrian restaurant food and the gift shop at the Spanish Riding School.
Ah, yes, the Spanish Riding School. One of the highlights of our trip. It’s located in a purpose-built baroque building that has housed the school in the center of Vienna for over three hundred years now. And it is flippin’ gorgeous, sitting as it does on Michaelerplatz, surrounded by all that old architecture.
The Spanish Riding School on the Michaelerplatz (St. Michael’s Square).
If you’re a horse nut, you’ll know why the performances of the Spanish Riding School are so special. They represent the apex of horsemanship, and the venue in which they perform is known as the most beautiful riding hall in the world. Even for someone like me who knows roughly as much about horses as horses do about configuring WiFi network security, it’s a pretty impressive event.
Before the show. Photography during the show is not allowed because the flashes irritate the horses.
Lovely wife in the lovely Imperial Box, where we had our seats. Shitty iPhone photo because Genius Husband forgot the DSLR in Germany.
The Imperial Box from a distance. Taken during the tour we booked afterward, which was well worth the money.
And this is where the horses dance.
After the Hofreitschule performance, we did the touristy thing and took a Fiaker carriage ride through the Old City.
After the ride, we spent the rest of the afternoon walking around Vienna and finding a local restaurant to have dinner. That too went really well except for the lapful of hot chocolate my daughter bestowed upon me, but even that couldn’t make a dent in my day.
After dinner, we went back to the hotel for a glass of wine or two at the excellent hotel bar before we made our way back to the nearby Westbahnhof for the train ride back to Germany.
(Just in case you’re ever in Vienna and in need of affordable high-quality accomodations, I can wholeheartedly recommend Fleming’s at the Westbahnhof. Brand new interior, friendly and helpful staff, a killer breakfast buffet, and a lovely bar with a great wine selection.)
For the ride on the night train back to Germany, we reserved a sleeper car compartment. The kids got the top bunks, we got the bottom ones, and everybody was able to sleep through the eight-hour ride back to Hannover.
That was the main tourist-y part of the trip. The rest of the week we spent with the family and on various outings in the area around Muenster. I got to squeeze in some research for a YA novel I’m writing, and my mother got to spend a bit of time with her grandkids while we went off to buy gifts to bring back to the U.S.
(Part Two to follow…)
achievement unlocked: european vacation complete.
Annnnnnd we’re back.
Taking a DSLR to Germany turned out to be a wise decision. I took 1,174 pictures while I was there. Taking an extra suitcase to Germany turned out to be a wise decision as well, because that suitcase came back chock-full of German chocolate and candy.
The travel gods smiled upon Team Munchkin Wrangler—all the flights were on time, no luggage was lost, and a jolly good time was had by all. I’ll post some of those 1,174 pictures in the next few days. Right now we’re still busy getting Castle Frostbite and our schedules back to normal. It was a fantastic trip–Robin got to see the Spanish Riding School, the kids got to know their cousins, I got to see my family and friends again—but it’s nice to be home again.
More later…
travel update.
Team Munchkin Wrangler is still in Germany, and the trip is going swimmingly so far. If you’ve sent me an email or TwitFace message, I’ll probably won’t get around to replying until the middle of next week. They do have the Internets here in Germany, but we’ve been too busy seeing people and doing stuff to spend much time online.
(Also, our Verizon iPhones don’t work on the European GSM network, which makes it hard to just check mail and dash off a quick update on the run.)
And now we’re off to see some more relatives down in Hessen. Later, imaginary Intertubes pals!
LOLjet.
“Hi! I’m Mahmoud from Teheran. I’m into religion, Jew-hating, and building really big model airplanes.”
Iran just unveiled its next thirty-twelfth generation air superiority stealth fighter, the Revell Qaher-313.
That thing looks a lot like the fighter planes I designed when I was twelve. Downswept wings! Huge canards! Outswept vertical stabilizers! Aggressively angular fuselage! Apparently, Iranian engineering technology is so advanced that aviation experts can’t see a single rivet, weapons hard point, or service hatch on the thing. It’s almost like they made it completely out of model resin.
a thought on the LAPD manhunt.
Only the police should have guns. Because with qualified immunity, they’re not personally liable for turning uninvolved trucks into Swiss cheese in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
If you think that the LAPD shooting up random pickup trucks in pursuit of a single threatening suspect is almost comically excessive, think about what would happen if DiFi gets her “assault weapons” ban through Congress, just a half dozen of those retrograde gun nuts decide that they won’t give up their property without a fight, and a few of L.A.’s Finest get injured or killed. The resulting mobilization and Fourth Amendment Gang Rape Party would make the L.A. riots and the Katrina aftermath look like a post-lunch corporate PowerPoint presentation.
Then multiply that kind of mayhem times, say, the number of large metropolitan areas with heavily geared and militarized police departments. Sounds like a recipe for kicking off a peaceful and violence-free America, doesn’t it?
a suggestion.
“Assault weapons”. “High-capacity magazines.” “Military-style rifles”.
The Department of Homeland Security buys 1.6 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition in just a little over a year, and 7,000 fully automatic machine guns for “personal protection”. Police departments all over the country have tanks and drones, and you can’t tell the difference between a police SWAT team and a Marine infantry section at first glance anymore. One guy threatens the LAPD personally and kills a cop, and they piss all over the Fourth Amendment and make the whole city a free-fire zone in search of the suspect.
I suggest we just call them “police-style weapons” instead.
a left argument for gun rights.
I’ve had an essay in the works for weeks now. It’s mostly for my liberal and left-leaning friends and lays out in great detail why opposition to civilian gun ownership is fundamentally un-progressive, historically and philosophically speaking.
And out comes The Polemicist with an article that precisely lays out the argument for gun ownership from a left-socialist perspective, thereby blowing all my work away.
It’s a very good and thorough read, and immensely thought-provoking.
übersnappenclicker.
This? Is quite possibly my new Favorite Thing.
Saying that it takes better shots than the iPhone 4 is like saying that an Aston Martin DBS V12 is a little faster than a Fiat 500.