Life on the Vine

On Monday January 18, Martin Luther King Holiday in the U.S., Tom and I went on our second daylong tour with the USO.  We traveled about three hours from Stuttgart to Trier, Germany. Trier is Germany's oldest city.  It was founded by Augustus in 16 BC but historians claim the area was inhabited by Celts for 1,300 years before Rome even existed.  Trier was a Roman town called Augusta Treverorum for 400 years.  When Emperor Diocletian (ruled AD 285-305) divided the overextended empire into four sectors - Trier was made the capital of the west (roughly modern-day Germany, France, Spain and England). Trier is smaller now than it was during Roman times but it is still a good sized city with lots of shopping, Germany's oldest Christian church and Germany's best Roman ruins. Our first stop was the Tourist Information center where a tour guide got on our bus and led us on about a two hour driving tour with two stops.  The first was a scenic overlook point and the second was t

It's funny the things you find satisfaction in and consider little victories when living in a foreign country.  Who knew that a feeling of such delight could accompany the simple act of getting your car washed?  For U.S. service members here in Stuttgart there isn't an automatic car wash on any of the posts, and there is only ONE car wash bay that can be used during the winter months.  It's one of those do-it-yourself spray down wash stations and I'm told the lines to use it can be quite long.  So that means  option B is to figure out how to use the plethora of car washes around the area, most at gas stations but several stand alone facilities too. When learning how to do things like the locals, there is always the language barrier (which challenges me more than I probably let on in this blog) and then also having to figure out how to maneuver the particular challenge, whether it's getting your car washed, bagging and tagging your produce properly, or any other

Our plan for the long holiday weekend was to take two day trips.  On Thursday we went to Triberg in the Black Forest, and today we made our first trip to France, crossing the border into Strasbourg. Triberg is famous for its cuckoo clocks and it is home to Germany's tallest waterfall.  Weather-wise Thursday was not a very good day (pouring rain) so I do not have any pictures to share with you.  Despite the weather Tom and I spent a few hours exploring and did some shopping.  We came home with real, bona fide black forest ham and it is so good.  We got three different kinds.  Tom learned from the butcher that the ham is smoked using pine wood, and you can taste it. YUM! We decided not to go anywhere on New Year's Day because it's a holiday here too and most places were closed.  So we spent the day at the house, watched a few movies, read some and Tom made a really nice dinner.  We woke up this morning to a winter wonderland.  We got a good couple inches of snow but aft