October 8-14
Written October 12 - 14
Dear Family and Friends,
This is just a bridging diary, connecting Italy and America as we recover from four weeks of travel and start eight weeks. As you might expect, the ten days in-between are proving to be mostly chores.
First, we need to get the garden and house ready for winter and for a long period away. We have pulled the worst of the weeds, removed most of the annual plants, moved some plants indoors, put away the outside table and chairs, mowed the lawn one more time, and ignored mowing the orchard field yet again. It is too early to rake leaves, so it looks like that task may need to wait for Spring! It is reassuring that the whole process isn't so time consuming. We have even managed to find enough sunny weather to do the outside work, sunny but cool.
    
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In the house, it's just normal cleaning. Marianne likes a relatively clean house to come home to and I have to admit it is nice to not have week-old dirt as a greeting. I have also set the heating system to "vacation" for the two months we'll be gone. It will be interesting to see how much this stretches our natural gas tank. I'm also counting on some amount of relief on the electric bill. (German has much higher electric rates and natural gas costs than in the US, so these matter.)
Saturday, we had dinner with friends and compared grandkids. It's what we do nowadays. Pretty soon Marianne and I will have a whole new set of pictures and stories! We, Marianne mostly, have also checked in with all the neighbors. This is very important in our little village, not because we need to tell anybody we are gone, they notice that the moment we drive away, but because it's simply polite to tell everyone and to tell everyone the same story.
We have also been doing Christmas shopping. There's nothing like a long trip to focus our efforts and not allow too much procrastination. In nearby Nuremberg, always a nice place to visit on a sunny day, they have already started selling Christmas cookies and we bought several packages to fill our suitcases. We will celebrate most of the holidays in the States, with family, so I expect there will be a letdown when we return in mid-December. It will be very, very, quiet.
Veggies, fresh mushrooms, Christmas cookies, and gifts -- all available on our sunny Saturday    Nuremberg is a nice place to wander and we can even drink imported coffee.      |
As for village excitement this week, the highlight has to be the transport of wind-energy machines on the road in front of our house. We we got back from Italy, we had no parking signs in front of our house, specifically no parking in the evening. Neighbors told us this was to allow the transport of wind-machine parts and over the course of several evenings we did see these giants go by. I tried pictures of the two-piece stalks, the motor-generator, and the humongous blades. The pictures just can not capture how big these pieces are when they are passing through our little highway.
| Wind machine at night - first tower pieces and then the generator |
   The wind blade was most amazing. The truck used all the road, almost in our door!     Up where the building is happening, the trucks look like toys. The erection crane looks like a giant toy!!   |
So, that's all that's happening in our part of Bavaria. Sunday we picked up a rental car to drive to Frankfurt in the early morning and worked our way through packing. Not the most fun, but necessary.
Regards,
John and Marianne