One more picture

The name of the hunting lodge was "Falkenlust,"I guess because of a desire for falcons.

Where was I?

Sorry about the delay. I know you all were on the edge of your seats about our fourth day in Europe. When we got back to the U.S. I remembered that I had a half finished bathroom project downstairs that needed attention. My brother told me that old houses will eat you up, but until this point we had dodged some bullets. Not so with this project. It was a pain in the butt, about 4 times as much as I expected, and WAY more work, but as of tonight I am more or less done. All that needs to be done now is new paint, and a new light fixture. That should be pretty simple.


So anyway, once we got back from the Neherlands we had one day in Germany before we headed to France so we decided to take it easy. We did want to see a castle however, so we took a short train ride to Bruhl where we saw this.

This is the Brühl Castle Augustusburg. It was commissioned by the Archbishop of Cologne - Clemens August von Wittelsbach. It was started in 1725, and modeled after Versailles. From what I am told it is a great example of Rococo architecture. This castle had a huge amount of property and about a mile away through the woods and gardens was this "hunting lodge."

This was his weekend retreat from his weekend retreat home, as if I have my facts straight the first house was not his primary residence. It would be best not to think about that for too long.
As we were walking around the property I started to miss millie. Everyone had their dogs with them. I did not see any German Shepherds or Rottweilers, but I did see a standard poodle, and I wanted to pet the dog, but I couldn't remember how to ask if I could, even though Courtney told me about 10 times.

The day was kind of dreary so we headed back to Cologne by way of a thrift shop, and grocery store. As I remember we tried a bunch of random things, cheese, drinks, bread, candy. I also went on a mission to try to find out the difference between liverwurst and brunchweiger, turns out brunchweiger is what they call liverwurst in Braunschweig, Germany, but not in Cologne so people had no idea what I was talking about.

Back in Cologne, Courtney and Dustin had three of their local friends over, Kai, Gunnar, and Susana. It was neat to meet some locals, so I learned much about being a German and they got to practice their English on us. Their hunger for English, and determination to go beyond their native tongue impressed me and convicted me of my laziness to pursue a broader knowledge.

So anyway, I think we stayed up until 1:00 a.m talking, eating awesome cheese, and sampling new beer and wine.

Tomorrow we go to Paris....parle vous engles?

PBS

The most watched show on PBS, Antiques Roadshow, will be coming to Chattanooga on July 19th.
I just signed up to try to get tickets. They are chosen at random so you should try to get tickets. If you can't attend I'll go for you. Here is the link. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/tickets.html

I just saw a person who brought in a first printing of the Raven that the guy estimated at 600,00-800,0o0 with a strong feeling that it could go for over $1,000,000 at auction. If I find anything that I buy at a garage sale and it is worth 1,000,000 I assure you that I will sell it and retire. Sarah will of course keep working.

Day 3: Maastricht the Netherlands

I am not as eloquent as Sarah, but I will try to give you the gist of our third day in Europe.

We took a train from Cologne to Aachen which is the last city in Germany before crossing the western border into the Netherlands. We then took a short bus ride into the city of Maastricht. It was Sarah's favorite place of the whole trip.

When I first got to Europe I was most impressed by the churches, but likes the beaches of Florida I grew to take them for granted. I mean, they all have crazy history, and are staggering architecturally. Our church in TN was built around 1900, and most of the churches in Europe were built by Moses himself. My Dutch is not good, but if Moses didn't build it, it is real old.

After walking around downtown and checking out the Christmas market we decided to walk to the outskirts of town to check out some caves. It was only 4 inches on the map, but it was about a 2 hour walk. The upside is that it took us through a neat residential neighborhood and then the countryside. This is a house and car that I thought was pretty typical of the area. I didn't see any pickups and very few SUV's. Their cars are much smaller. Here is a link to "Smart Car" which is coming to the US. It starts at 11,000. http://smartusa.com/

As we made our way out of town and walked through the countryside, we came across another old church. The farmland there looked rich and fertile. I noticed that in addition to big farms even the average homeowner had a small garden. To match their small cars, they also have small yards. I saw very few homes that were bigger than ours or that had more land.
This is the cemetery at that church.
And finally, we arrived at the caves outside of Maastricht. The tour we took was in Dutch, but this is what I gathered.
* This picture is one of the stations of the cross that was drawn on the wall when church was held there during WWII since they had to meet in Secret.
* The caves were originally built as they mined them for limestone during construction of the city.
* There are many kilometers of tunnels which translates to many miles. The whole town would seek refuge there during bombing.
* Some art was hidden here to protect it from the Nazis.

We walked back into town and ate Thai food. We were exhausted. I asked the waiter what he recommended, but that didn't go so well. The problem was not the language barrier since he spoke English, but rather he just didn't want to bother. I have always heard the waiters in Europe are rude, and this confirmed it, but here is the catch. They don't get paid by tips. They get paid a normal wage, so they have no reason to kiss butt. So I conclude that waiters in Europe are not rude but rather honest and waiters here are just good actors. I would say that a waiter in Europe is no more rude or ambivalent than your average clerk at the DMV.

So, anyway we ate Thai food, and it was really hot.