January 2019

I knew it had been quite a while since I last posted a blog, but now I see it’s been a year!  That’s pretty pathetic, considering I pay for this website annually.  To make it even worse, last January I posted about my trip to Iceland — that I’d taken a year before that!  (I’ve been working on a post about Switzerland for months – in the future I need to remember to do shorter posts with fewer pictures and less blabbing.)  I know my three readers (2 relatives and 1 friend) have been missing my blog.  At least I tell myself that.

To help make up for it, I’ve created highlight photo cards from each month of 2018.  For some months I was able to select a single picture; for other months it just proved too difficult.  Even so, I didn’t include one additional trip to the US (to Florida for a conference), dozens of festivals, and a few other things in between.  Maybe I’ll blog about them someday, but don’t hold your breath — I do have a new year’s resolution to blog more, but this post already meets my goal.  

I went on this ski trip with co-workers over Martin Luther King Day weekend.

Lisbon was fabulous — it’s definitely worthy of a separate post.

Stone (my youngest son) came to visit for his spring break, and we took the train to Berlin for a few days.   I  thought he’d want to explore a German city since he studied German, and we had a great time — we definitely got enough of the wall.

Ever since taking French in high school, I’ve wanted to visit Mont St. Michel.  Although it was a little overcast, it didn’t disappoint (other than it’s not completely surrounded by water like it used to be).   My friend and I stopped at Rouen (where Joan of Arc was burned) on the way there, visited chateaus along the Loire, and stopped at Sancerre (home of my favorite wine) on the way back.

Malawi was a work trip, but it was fascinating.  This picture is of Lake Malawi.

The picture is from Santorini, but the cruise also stopped at two other locations in Greece (Athens and Corfu), as well as Kotor, Montenegro, and Dubrovnik, Croatia.  It was a fabulous trip, and a cruise allowed my son, Jason, and I to socialize with people our age as well as spend some great quality time together.  (This is also blog-worthy — but it would be a very long post, or possibly need multiple posts.)

Seriously, I will eventually publish a separate post on this trip to Switzerland.

 In August, I took a whirlwind trip to St. Louis to see my friend Kit get married.  While I was there, I squeezed in a few doctor and dental appointments, and my sister Sue stopped for a few days on her drive from FL to WI.  In addition to a beautiful wedding, it was great to see my sons, sister and nephew, even if only for a short time.

This first week in September I went on an amazing sailing trip down the coast of Croatia, from Split to Dubrovnik.  Right after I returned to Germany, I took a weekend trip with a group of friends to hike with alpacas and sleep in a teepee in Liechtenstein.  I would not have purposely scheduled these trips back to back, but you have to be flexible when others are planning the travel!

From early October to November, I went to a month-long class at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas.  Taking advantage of another trip to the US, I spent the first weekend in MN visiting my sister, nephew, dad & his wife; the second weekend I stayed with friends in Kansas City, and the final weekend I visited my boys again.  All were shorter visits than I would have liked, but at least I took advantage of being in the Midwest.

 My boyfriend and I went to Barcelona over Thanksgiving weekend.  It was a great trip, but the best part was spending time with him since he works such long hours.

Last but not least, I went to San Antonio to visit my other sister & her family for Christmas.  Both my sons and Stone’s girlfriend flew down on the 26th.  The last two years they’d flown to Stuttgart after Christmas and spent my birthday and New Year’s Eve here, so this year we did something different.  It was so wonderful to spend time with all of them.

I visited six new countries this year (Portugal, Croatia, Montenegro, Greece, Lichtenstein and Malawi), as well as new cities like Barcelona and Berlin.  It was a nice treat to make 4 trips back to the US, although I won’t be blogging about them — this blog is more about my life in Germany and travels through Europe.  Hopefully there will be more posts to follow, but for now – Here’s to a good 2019!