Germany Trip - Day 2

Saturday May 16th - Amsterdam is beautiful!

Flying in we got to see a long sandy beach, a huge shipping port with what looked like lochs, tons of wind turbines in the ocean and even several baseball diamonds. Anna got to see another airplane in the sky flying near us over Ireland, she thought that was neat.

the Amsterdam airport is HUGE. We should land in Berlin at 11:20 am. Emma and Daddy slept on the flight to Berlin while James and I read The Graveyard Book (very good read, but terrible beginning). we purchased a camera battery charger in the Amsterdam airport for $130! ouch. That was expensive.

Claudia was waiting for us right off the plane. It is really good to see her. We went to the car rentals but the carl taht wwe got was supposed to seat 6 plus luggage, but would only fit 5 and no luggage. So there were no 7-9 seaters in Berlin available. She ended up getting us a 5 seater with a jump seat and we really squished in it. On Monday there will be a bigger car available and we will change for a 7 seater. It was really helpful to have Claudia to translate for that experience. It would have been a good test of my rusty German.

Emma near one of the neat old houses on our walk. We didn't take a pic of Claudia's family house...oops

We went straight out to the country to Riewend, to Claudia's family weekend house. It was a really old one built at the turn of the century that they have restored. interesting they did a ton of structural things like taking out the floors and ceilings and putting in steel beams. Quite a remodeling project. Christine had a really nice lunch prepared for us, Emma wouldn't touch it. The entire day she ate mostly chocolate. The kids were so tired we couldn't push too hard. Once they have a good sleep it will be better.

After lunch we went on a really nice walk through the village, near their lake and into the woods a little. It was so beautiful with amazing old buildings, very small town. We had dinner that night which was excellent. Barbeque sausage, chicken, pork, salad and broetchen. yummy. At the house we met Christine's sister, Connie and Daniel's fiancee, Tina. We had a wonderful time. The kids played in the dirt outside and got really dirty. So I put them all in the tub. Christine helped me out and seemed to really like having a little one to bathe, as she clucked sweet things at Anna in German while she was in the tub. We left around 8:15pm and they were all asleep before we left the village.