Please forgive me, dear readers, it's been entirely too long since my last confession. I'm (close to) certain that you'll forgive me, once you take this epic journey with me. If not.... sorry 'bout it!
The wife travels for work every September, and we've admitted to ourselves that I'm not the most comfortable with being left on another continent by myself for that long. This year, we arranged for Palmer to come over here and spend September with me while the wife was gone. Easy peasy, right?
Unfortunately, the universe had other plans. Not "easy peasy." Not "easy peasy" at all. Wherever the opposite of easy peasy is, that's squarely where we found ourselves.
One random Tuesday afternoon in August, Palmer called and told me that he'd discovered a leak on the water heater. No biggie, we have a home warranty - a $75 call to get a plumber dispatched, and all is well. Until the follow-up call the following day: "Dad, the plumber guy is here, and he said something about 'black mold.' Do you want to talk to him?"
No thank you, I most assuredly do not want to talk to him. However, sometimes, you just have to pull up your big boy underoos. Against my better judgement, I talked with him.
Turns out, the water heater had been spraying water on the wall, and the sheetrock had gotten soaked and started to grow some mold. Not much, about a 5 foot wide by 2 foot high section. It was enough that we needed to get someone out there to take a look at it. At that point, the boss and I decided that this would be too much to ask the kids to do (coordinating with an insurance adjuster, multiple contractors, etc.), so I'd better go back and handle it. I flew out on Saturday, arriving in Knoxville later that day (because of the wonders of time zones).
Over the course of the next week or so, I had multiple contractors come out to work on (and fix) the black mold - insurance ended up paying for most of it. For part of the repairs, the water heater had to be disconnected, moved out, and reconnected (remember this - it's important for later!).
While the repair guys were there, the boss told me to ask them about cleaning out the dryer vent - it hadn't been done since we moved in ten years ago. We scheduled that for late in the week the last week I was planning on being there.
One warm afternoon, I innocently went to Costco for a quick shopping trip. Everything was fine on the way there, but the air conditioning didn't work in the car on the way home. Let's add that to the list of things that need to be fixed while I'm home. Arranged to drop the car off and find a way to share a vehicle with the kids. Grrrrrr! That ended up taking the better part of a week to get addressed.
Remember how the water heater had to be moved out and reinstalled? Turns out, sometime in that whole procedure, something broke. Not sure what it does, but the "thermopile" (yeah... I looked it up, and that's a real word) stopped working, and now the pilot light won't stay lit.
Just in case you're wondering, cold showers aren't fun. The warranty company dragged their feet on getting that replaced, and Cori ended up meeting with the plumber the day after Palmer and I got to Germany.
When the company came back to clean out the dryer vent.... well, of course it couldn't be that simple, could it? Turns out, when (one of) the previous owners put the vent in, they used one of the expandable ducts that looks like a slinky covered in plastic. That's evidently a big no-no. At some point in the past few years, that slinky had disconnected itself, and the dryer has been spraying lint onto the drop-ceiling in the basement for quite a while. The contractor told me that he was surprised that the house hasn't gone up in flames. They didn't have time to fully clean it out and rebuild it that day, and Palmer and I were scheduled to leave the following Thursday; the next time that they'd be able to come would be the Wednesday before we left. They assured me that they'd be able to do it in a single day, so I didn't need to change my travel plans. I told them that if they weren't able to finish on Wednesday, they'd have 2 hours (at most) to finish up on Thursday. They assured me again that they'd be able to finish on Wednesday.
The plan was for 2 of them to work on it: One would work on the cleanup, while the other would head to Home Depot for ducting and parts (once they'd been able to measure and figure out exactly what they needed). They didn't count on the amount of lint that they'd be facing... it actually took 3 trips to Home Depot. They both got there, one measured while the other cleaned. The guy who measured took off for Home Depot. When he got back, he had to return to Home Depot for another filter for the vacuum that they were using (as the filter had given up the ghost, not being able to be de-linted thoroughly enough). Eventually, the shop-vac that they were using just gave up, and he had to go back yet again to buy another shop-vac.
Wonder of wonders, they were able to finish on Wednesday, and Palmer and I flew out the next day.
Sometime in all of that, I was able to spend some time with Cori's boyfriend. He's a really nice guy. The four of us (me, him, Cori, Palmer) went to an escape room - it was his first time. We ended up finishing in 35 minutes. He spent a bit of time hanging out at our house - seems like a genuinely good guy.
Anyway, on to Germany!
Palmer is just here to hang out, not wanting to do anything specific. We'd probably be bored just sitting around the house staring at each other though, so I planned a trip. I thought I planned it for the Tuesday after we arrived. I discovered otherwise on Sunday. I happened to randomly check to reassure myself that I was thinking of the right date, at 3:37pm on Sunday. Turns out, our first night in Garmisch (4 and a half hours away) was supposed to be Sunday night.
It took 13 minutes from discovering that I had the wrong date, until we were packed and on the road.
Palmer snapped this picture as we approached Garmisch - we were still around 20 miles away from the resort (as the crow flies) - we think this is the Zugspitze. We were still around an hour away, because of the winding roads.
We did a bunch of stuff, and honestly, I'm not sure I'd be able to tell it in my normal "narrative" style, so I'll just tell you all we did, in no particular order (except by location).
We spent two nights in Garmisch. We visited our favorite wood carver a couple of towns away. We wandered through Garmisch, stopping in all of the little touristy shops. We ate at "our" Pizza Hut in town. We swam in the pool and hot tub at the resort. We drove over to the parking lot of Zugspitze (with the intention of going to the top), but I wasn't able to justify the €68 per person round trip.
In short, we just hung out around town for a couple of days.
We had 3 days booked in Salzburg afterwards, and I took a lot more pictures there.
The wife and I particularly enjoyed the Stiegl Brauwelt (the Stiegl Brewery restaurant) on our previous visit, so that was our first stop on the way into town. That's my radler in the foreground, and Palmer with a regular beer. Please note the color of my radler.
We went to the biergarten that the boss and I fell in love with last trip; Palmer wasn't overly impressed - he enjoyed the food, but he's just not that big a fan of beer.
On the walk from the hotel to the mall, there was an interesting church:
Yes, that's a two story ear on that church. No, I'm not sure why it's there. The building is evidently some sort of museum / activity center, called Bible World. I'm not sure what the ear has to do with it, but there's a piece of plywood over the ear canal that says (in English) "Do Not Open" in big black spray painted letters. There's a story there, I'm sure.
One of the big things I've been wanting to do around Salzburg is visit Eagle's Nest. It's a little less than an hour outside of town. Well, the parking lot is around an hour outside of Salzburg. Once you get there, you have to take a bus up the mountain. The road up is a 20 minute long winding two lane (paved) goat trail. We eventually ended up at the upper lot:
I chose to include this pic because this is the upper lot, with Eagle's Nest itself at the top of the pic. From this lot, you can buy a separate ticket to take a bus to the top (around €25 per person, round trip). If you'd prefer, you can hike up, by heading to the right from this lot - they say it's a 20 minute hike. I simply don't believe them. The other alternative is to go through the tunnel on the left, which dates back to the original construction in 1938, and take an elevator up to the top. We chose the tunnel and elevator.
The complex was intended to be a conference center for the Nazi party. Here's what the view from the top is supposed to look like (this pic was shamelessly taken of a tourism book - if you look at the right hand side of the pic, you'll see a red star... remember where that is, relative to the rest of the pic):
Here's what it looked like during our visit - Palmer is standing near where I put the red star in the previous pic:
Visibility from the other side was a little bit better - way off in the background, you can almost see Salzburg:
Back in Salzburg, we explored for the rest of the time we were there. During our travels around town, we found a Manner store (the wafer company based in Vienna), so we couldn't help but give them part of our money:
Please note the color of my radler there; this particular restaurant made their radlers manually, by pouring sprite and beer together. The beer was fine, but this wasn't what I'd consider a true radler. Page back up and see what the radler from Stiegl looked like. At this restaurant, Palmer had pizza... most of the pizzas at this restaurant had corn on them, for some odd reason:
One of the other places that we found was the "Red Bull Hangar." Red Bull is based right outside of Salzburg, and they've got a hangar next to the airport that's filled with a bunch of Red Bull vehicles - Formula One cars, motorcycles, planes... you name it, if Red Bull has raced it, there's one of them in the hangar. Including, for some reason, a WWII Corsair:
In the back left hand corner, you can see the tail of a DC-6 in Red Bull livery. On the right side, you can see part of an Alpha jet. Evidently, these are all of the planes that they use in airshows, stored here when they're not in use.
Anyway, Palmer is here for a a few more weeks, so there might be another post or two coming - we don't have anything planned, but we've got nothing else going on, so you never know!
