So here is how the first night of my vacation to Germany looked. Yes, that is the airport in Charlotte, NC. Severe weather up the eastern seaboard caused extensive flight delays leaving hundreds of people stranded. I was one of those hundreds...number 216 I think. The Red Cross came and gave out cots for people to sleep on as there were no vacancies in local hotels. I wasn't going to get a hotel anyway, so it was nice to sleep on a cot instead of curled up on the floor or slumped over the armrests of a row of airport seats like an earthworm. It was the biggest 
slumber party I've ever been to, and the loudest chorus of squeaking cots you can imagine. So the next morning was nice. I was still in the US but it was a beautiful day outside so I propped my feet up and enjoyed the view of the Charlotte skyline. I happened to purchase a book the day before in the Raleigh airport thinking I might get a little of it read on the trip between activities. It's a spirit- lifting story of a Himalayan-mountain climber turned humanitarian who built schools for impoverished villages in the most remote regions of Pakistan and Afganistan near the 
world's largest mountain range. Anyway, when I got to Charlotte and learned that the delay in my first flight caused me to miss my connector to Frankfurt, I started reading. 28 hours later I boarded the next flight with any vacancies to Germany and had read 2/3 of the book. I finished it on Monday at my brother's house in Baumholder, before I had been in-country for 28 hours yet. What I was greeted by in Germany was snow; constant, relentless suffocating snow every day I was there except the day I left. Nice. Nevertheless, the wintry weather did provide some scenic photograph opportunities. We spent most of the time I 
was there hitting historical and scenic points 
throughout the country. It was good to be back to the place where I'd spent well over half of my childhood before we left the second time when I was 11. And it was certainly good to spend time again with the guy who I'd spent my whole childhood with, and with my new sister. It was just as I remembered...except I did not remember how hilarious the sign for "exit" off a highway or out of a parking deck was. The picture tells that story. 
This little linguistic oddity proved fodder for comedic interludes throughout the trip. Anyone who knows me does not find that hard to believe at all. :0)Ok, following will be a bunch of pictures from the trip. I don't really see the need to bore everyone with lengthy discourse about what the photos meant or what was going on when I took them. (That's code talk for "man, I really don't want to write that much about every one of these things!")
The best thing about Germany!
A Roman gate still standing in the southern city of Trier.
Above and below ground ruins of a Roman baths in Trier. 
This gal was playing Mozart on those glasses!
Acordian Sal.
Not Tom Ford. :)
Looks like Germany to me.
Pretty place, huh?
