Big changes...

You all know the Shores family never does anything the normal way, right? Well, we're at it again.

The wife and I are at that stage in life where the kids are getting ready to move on, and most normal people in our situation would be working on being "Empty Nesters." Well, we're finally "Full Nesters."

Cori is (at this moment) over the coast of Newfoundland, on her way back home after a couple hour layover in Chicago. The parents have officially turned over control of the house to the kids, and flown the coop.

Cori is eager to get back to her life, her friends, her job, her schooling... and her cat. Palmer is planning on picking her up from the airport this evening... he'll have to leave a get together with all the folks from work, and the first test for the kids is whether he takes her straight home, or drags her back to the bowling alley (and the party). They both work at the same restaurant, so they know all the same people, but after flying 4500+ miles in 23 hours, I'm not sure she'll be up for socializing much.

Right now, the line is -4 on him dragging her back to the bowling alley, but circumstances might change those odds as the time approaches, so get your bets in now!

I'm in the process of planning trips to have "in the can," so at any point the wife can say "Let's take a long weekend," and I can present her with multiple options. I've got a couple of day trips planned, and 3 weekend trips planned thus far. I'll post about the trips as we take them, but feel free to send us your suggestions on where we should go.

A local trip, then a trip to The Hague!

Becca's boss was travelling, and his wife was going stir crazy, so we "planned" a trip with her to a neighboring town, as a little touristy jaunt (our version of "planning" just being repeatedly asking each other where we wanted to go until we just gave up and randomly picked). We ended up going to a little town a bit outside Frankfurt called Rüdesheim am Rhein, a cute little winemaking town. We wandered around for a couple of hours, had lunch, and took the train and bus back home. Becca's boss and his wife live in the same town as we do, so we ride the same buses, subways, and trams all the way home when we do touristy stuff together.

Speaking of Becca's boss's wife: I've noticed that she's made a few different appearances in the blog (and will undoubtedly make many future appearances), but she's a bit shy and would prefer to go by an alias rather than her real name. In the future, I shall refer to her as "K," short for "Karen". She's a delightful person, and should in no way be thought to have the stereotypical "Karen" personality, and her name isn't "Karen", but it amuses me to periodically harass her (by proxy) simply by referring to her with that letter. Honestly, she'll probably make me change it, but for now..... she's K.

And now, back to your normally scheduled blog post.

So Becca's job over here is actually to provide support for two offices, the office in Frankfurt and the one in The Hague, in The Netherlands. Both offices have a big inspection coming up, and she needed to visit the office in The Hague to go over all of the paperwork, so she timed it so that Cori and I could go as well.

We were looking at train tickets, and my frustration level was rising... there wasn't a direct train - all of them had connections, and some of the times were quite tight. The fewer connections, the higher the price. Taking all of that into account, I did some research, and found that there's a bus line that goes from here to there, with only one connection - a 45 minute layover. The return trip would be direct. The price was quite attractive (about a third of the cost), and only about 2 hours longer each way - that seemed like a fair tradeoff to me. I ran it by the boss, and she okayed it, so I booked it.

As our trip approached, I got an email from the bus company telling me that the bus from Frankfurt to Amsterdam was cancelled - they thankfully kept our ride from Amsterdam to The Hague though (the segment after our layover), for some odd reason.

I cancelled the whole trip there (keeping our return), and we went up to the train station one afternoon to just buy them from one of the kiosks up there - hoping that'd be simpler. It was... kinda. We ended up with tickets with short layovers. Ugh.

We took a bus and metro to the main train station Monday morning and got onto our train (and into our reserved seats) with no issues. For a couple of the connections, we had to run between trains, but we made it okay. We wandered the streets of The Hague until we found our hotel, and found out that because of Becca's status with Hilton, we'd been upgraded to a King Suite room - a big bedroom with a king size bed, and a second room (with its own bathroom) that they rolled a twin size into for Cori. Score!

I must share about our shower - it was a double shower, with a connecting area between them. Picture two standard sized stalls, with an additional two feet between them - so extra wide. Each end had one of the big rain type showerheads, and one of the handheld wands mounted on a vertical bar, so you could adjust the height and angle. The first night, I found that if I turned the rain head on in one end, and the handheld wand in the other, and positioned the wand just right, I could effectively get flooded from both directions at the same time, with different temperature water if I wanted. I want one of these showers - but I think they're only for rich people. I don't know if I rate one of these in real life.

During the day... I'd get up with Becca and we'd go down to breakfast in the attached restaurant (Cori told us that she'd rather sleep), then we'd go back upstairs and Becca would get ready and go to work. Different days, Cori and I would do different things... the only thing that was a requirement for me was the Escher museum, so Cori and I went there on Tuesday afternoon. The other days, we putzed around, sometimes went out and found stuff to eat, sometimes explored. When Becca got home, we'd figure out what we wanted to do for dinner; one night, we found a Japanese restaurant, one night an Italian restaurant.

One afternoon, Becca got off early, so we took a tram over to the beach (our hotel was about a 20 minute tram ride to the North Sea). We wandered along the boardwalk area for a couple of hours. There's a double-decker pier (with all of the normal beachy stores on it) that has a huge ferris wheel out at the end (with air-conditioned, enclosed cars). We took a ride on that, took a bunch of pics. Got dinner at a restaurant on the beach then walked around some more. Took a tram back to the hotel.

Let's talk about public transportation for a second. Sounds boring, but stay with me here. Public transportation over here is a lot more prevalent than in the states; cheap, easy, and convenient. For our trips in Germany, they've got a special running right now where you buy a ticket for €9, and you can ride any kind of public transport except the high speed rail for free. There's no scanning your ticket or showing it to the driver (or conductor) - it's basically on the honor system. At any point, they can ask to see it, but on all of our trips on local transport, we've only had to show them once (ironically, it was on the train back from Rüdesheim with K). If you don't have one and you get carded, it's a €60 fine - I don't know how the fines work, because I've always got my ticket with me. Hopefully, I'll get through the entire tour here without having to find out how the fines work.

The transit system in The Netherlands works in a similar fashion, but you can buy a ticket for a specific amount of time, with the default being 2 hours for €4. That's for single trips. If you live there, you can buy a card to use with money stored on it, where you scan your card when you get on the tram and it debits the card for the right amount of money. We bought timed tickets on the way there, then bought an additional set on the way back. On the tram on the way back, some transit officers got on board the tram and checked everyone's tickets, ending up at the back of the tram. The tram stopped, and more people got on, but one guy who got on had trouble getting his card to scan - evidently, he didn't have enough loaded on it for his trip. He glanced around the tram and saw the transit officers, so he beelined up to the front of the tram, planning on getting off on the next stop. I don't know what the officers saw, but they immediately followed him up there, and blocked him from getting off the tram. When we got off a few stops later, they were all still deep in conversation. I suspect that interaction didn't go well for him.

Friday morning, we got up, had breakfast, then headed out to catch our bus home at 10:40. The train/bus station was about a half hour walk from the hotel, so we meandered over there with enough time to get some food and drinks for the trip.

The bus left on time, but with a traffic jam outside of Düsseldorf and an accident about 20 miles outside of Frankfurt, we ended up being on the bus for around 10 hours. I actually didn't have any issues with taking the bus, while Becca and Cori weren't the biggest fans. I had downloaded some stuff to watch, so I was fine. The girls just stared out the window and time seemed to drag for them. We ended up having to wait for about a half hour for the bus home - I stopped at the store once we got to town and picked up some pizzas to throw in the oven for dinner.

So... that was our trip to The Hague. Becca will have to go back there occasionally, and I'll undoubtedly accompany her on some of her other trips there too, but we thought it'd be nice to give Cori an opportunity to visit there while she's in town.

Till next time!

Happy Fourth!

We wanted to take a long weekend for the Fourth, so we broke out the old laptop. Between Google maps, the Deutsche Bahn (train) site, and Trip Advisor, we threw a bunch of electronic darts at the screen, waffling back and forth between a few different options before settling on Stuttgart.

Cori and I took a bus down to Becca's office on Friday and met her when she got off work. We caught another bus to a metro station, and rode down to the main train station downtown. We rode the train around an hour and a half south. Our hotel was fairly close to the main train station, so we just walked over there. Our hotel was next door to a mall, so we walked to the food court for a quick dinner.

Next morning, we had tickets for the Mercedes-Benz museum, so we took the metro up to the nearest station and walked over. Very extensive museum, covering not just the history of the company, but delving into a lot of what was happening around the world at the same time.

Afterwards... well, one of the things I'd found in Stuttgart was the Schweine-Museum. Just by looking at the name of the place, you might think that it's a museum about pigs... you'd be right. I thought it would be a cutesy, folksy, fun place.

[NARRATOR] You'd be wrong. Dead wrong.

Everybody's got a friend who collects something, right? You may have that one friend who collects stuff with frogs on it, right? They really like frogs, maybe have a couple of frog figurines in a curio cabinet, and a couple of posters of frogs doing silly stuff, right? Everyone that they know knows that person likes frogs, so when you're out shopping and see something cute with a frog on it, you pick it up for them, right? I think that's how this pig museum started. One couple really liked pigs, so everyone they knew decided to get them more random crap with pigs on it.

However many years later, there's a pretty good sized 3 story building completely filled with all kinds of pig stuff, including a room devoted to pig porn. This place was pretty over the top, and I feel a little bad dragging the girls to go see it. Honestly, I feel a little bad dragging myself to go see it. Let's move on.

We made our way back to the rooms and rested for a while, then I packed up and took off for the mineral baths... basically a pool complex. Evidently, Stuttgart is known for its mineral water, and there were a few different facilities with swimming pools filled with the stuff. The one I went to had multiple different indoor/outdoor pools, at different temperatures, all the way from cold to cool to normal pool temp, all the way up to hot tubs. Really cool place, and I enjoyed paddling around for a couple of hours. Yes, everyone wore suits. There was a section where suits weren't allowed, but I didn't go in there. Evidently the saunas were in there, but I didn't go in to look around.

I went back and met up with the girls, they'd evidently walked around the downtown area. For dinner, Becca and I took the metro back over to the downtown area and found a restaurant; pretty good food, I took half a salad back for Cori.

Sunday morning we took the train up to the Porsche museum. This museum wasn't laid out as neatly as the Mercedes museum, and it seemed to focus specifically on the 911 and their racing program (whereas the Mercedes museum tried to put the history of the company more into context with what was happening around the world at the same time). It was still fun looking at the cars though.

Sunday afternoon we found a little museum right next to the hotel called the Museum of Illusions, and I dragged the girls in there as well. This one went a lot better than the pig museum though. It was rather small, but there were a lot of fun things packed in there, including an Ames Room; that's the room that's got weird dimensions, where people stand in two different corners and because of the distance from the viewer, they look to be of drastically different sizes.

Here, for your amusement, are a limited selection of photos from the museum:

Cori got big, huh?!?!?

I got better.

Me and my midget wife.

We wasted some time there and then found a restaurant nearby that was open.

Monday morning we took our time getting out of the rooms and checked out around 11:00, then wasted a couple of hours in the mall food court until our train was scheduled. Turned out the train was late by 40 minutes, but it didn't really matter much in the whole scheme of things.

Becca went to work today, then Becca's boss's wife and I met her downtown, and we went to the Green Sauce Festival. What's that? Glad you asked!

One of the things that Frankfurt is (evidently) well known for is something called "Green Sauce." Well known enough that it's recognized and protected by the EU. I'm not sure that there's a similar concept in the states, since you can get just about anything anywhere. I guess if barbecue were somehow certified by the government, and you could only get it in Texas (the true home of barbecue, as we all know). Anywhere else you went, you could call it whatever you wanted, but you couldn't call it "barbecue," because that name would be restricted to only brisket from Texas.

Anyway, Green Sauce is made of: parsley, chives, sorrel, chervil, borage, garden cress, and salad burnet, together with sour cream, oil, vinegar, mustard, salt, and hard boiled eggs. Think "Green Goddess," and you won't be far off. We've had Green Sauce at a couple of restaurants, served with schnitzel and/or boiled potatoes, served by itself with hard boiled eggs (literally just 4 halves of hard boiled eggs, sitting in a plate of Green Sauce)... we've got some in the fridge that we bought at the store, and we've had it with a few meals around the house - veggies, sausages, etc. Pretty good, but it's not barbecue sauce.

Anyway, that's what we've been up to lately... as always, feel free to let one of us know if I've brought up any burning questions for ya!