Happy St George's Day - April 23

Today is St George's Day, the patron saint of England.

Let's take the St George's Day quiz! See how many you get right.

True or false:
1) St George was an English knight from the 3rd Century AD.
2) St George is famous because he slew (slew???) a dragon.
3) St George's flag is the English flag.

Answers:
1) False
2) False
3) True



Interestingly, he neither fought a dragon (that was an easy one for you) nor was he English. He actually was Turkish. Not only that, he likely never even came to England.

St George (actually he was just George back then) lived in the 3rd century AD. He was born in Turkey and joined the Roman Legion. Back then a favorite activity of the Roman soldiers was torturing us Christians. George didn't like it because his parents were Christians and he said so. Rather than having an extended discourse on the subject, they whacked off his head. He was true to the faith till the end.

He symbolizes honor and bravery. He also is the patron saint of Scouting.

It used to be the most important holiday in the UK, second only to Christmas. Gordon Brown (British PM) is trying to get it to a similar status again, but there really was little to do about it.

EXCEPT - at the restaurant we went to for lunch, the waitresses were all wearing hats celebrating the day. I said, "The hats are great. Where can I get one?" They gave me the one in the picture. The hat is shaped like a dragon and in St George's colors.

The logo on the front (that you can't read) says 'Wells Bombardier Premium Bitter." Evidently St George's favorite beer.

Rick Steves

A few years ago when we decided to take our first trip to Europe, a friend recommended the Rick Steves Guidebook. It was excellent, and since then we've accumulated several of them and swear by them. Over the years, when social conversations turn to travel, we have had many people tell us, "I don't know if you've ever tried a guidebook but ..." which in every case the person recommended Rick Steves. There are many on the market but none that I've heard about that is evangelized as much at Rick Steves. And in our travels we've had several "Rick Steves moments" from eating where he recommends, sleeping in the hotels he recommends and getting his discount, to seeing the distinctively colored guidebook in people's pockets to actually sitting beside one of his tour groups in a restaurant. But this one tops them all.
The Friese shop in Rothenburg Germany has Rick Steve's picture on the door. (see above) That is Rick with his arm around the owner. I walked in the door looking for camera batteries and the owner , Anneliese Friese, saw the book in my pocket and kept up a constant stream of stories about Rick. She met Steve when he was 17 traveling with his Dad, and has a picture of him as a kid. She actually drew the map of Rothenburg in Rick's book. She gave us a 10% "Rick Steve's discount", a map of the city, and a cloth shopping bag. She was so sweet. It was great!
While here in the UK, we are using the "Rick Steve's Best of Europe" as our guide, slowly checking off every country and major site in the book. The sites we saw in Germany, Switzerland and Amsterdam on our most recent trip were the 'must see' sites for those three countries. Interestingly (at least to me), I went through the whole book scoring every city based on the number of 3-star, 2-star, and 1-star sites to see, and the city that came out on top in all of Europe was ... (drum roll please) ... London. I never saw that coming.
My friends and family, if you are ever going to Disney World or Europe and need a guidebook ...

Jilly Came to Visit

(Notice Amanda's resemblance to Rebecca?)

April 6, 2008 - Snow????

Last week the weather forecasters started predicting snow for today. In North Carolina when that happens, we expect a heat wave because the forecasters are seldom accurate. They hit it on the head here, it actually snowed twice. But just like in North Carolina, by the end of the day, the sun was out and the evidence was gone ...

J & B

Some shots of John & Brittany

AFA - March 2008 #12 Amsterdam (last day)

Amsterdam was interesting, probably the lesser highlight of this adventure. There was a great deal of reference to the relaxed drug culture and red light district. If you went in a tourist shop, you were inevitably exposed to T-shirts and hats with marajuana symbols, and nudity and / or sex gadgets. So, after learning that lesson we were more careful.
Along with being relaxed about morals, Amsterdam has a similar opinion on cleanliness. We were in one of the major tourist areas in town in a KFC (I know, I know, US food????? - the kids would starve if we didn't hit fast food occasionally) when a mouse ran across the floor by our table. No one seemed shocked but us.
But, Amsterdam has some wonderful museums. (that don't allow pictures) The first day we went to the Anne Frank museum which is actually in the house where they hid. Very moving, and amazing that eight people lived in such a cramped area. They also have a Van Gogh (pronounced van-gock if you are cool --- we aren't) museum that was really very good, the largest collection of his work in the world. I'm not a big fan of his, he was such a sad character. But they also have one called the Rijksmuseum museum (pronounced mew-SEE-um) that is incredible. It has the largest collection of Dutch masters like Rembrandt in the world, and it is fantastic. I would recommend that museum to everyone, if they moved it to another town.
Amsterdam is called the 'Venice of the North' but actually has more canals than does Venice. The pictures you see are all from a tour boat, and as you can probably see, it was raining.
In one picture you can see the hook hanging from the top of the house. It is for moving. The stairs are so tight in the houses that everything goes up via rope to a large door and moved into place from there.
There are also many house boats on the canals, some legit, some not so legit. They also have problems with cars going into the canals. They have, on average, two cars a week that go into canals either by reckless driving, or frequently by making a mistake parking. Much of the parking is right beside the canals.

AFA - March 2008 #11 Rhine Valley

After Rothenburg we drove northwest to the Rhine Valley. We stayed in a little town called St Goar right on the river. St Goar (pronounced 'sahn-gwar') translates to "so many castles close by that you can't toss a rock and not hit one."
The Rhine river is a major river, over 800 miles long, connecting Italy, Switzerland, Germany, France and The Netherlands. An immense amount of commerce travels that river. While we were there we saw huge barges constantly moving up and down the river. Back in the day, the various rulers along the river taxed the river traffic. Their enforcement technique was to build a castle in the hills overlooking the river and empty their cannons on the boats that didn't stop to pay their tribute.
I'm not sure how many different castles we saw, in various states of repair, but they were on about every bend in the river. I've include a sample of them. You'll see a couple of pictures that look like tunnels with the entrance shaped like a castle, they are railroad tunnels. You can't get away from the castle theme.

AFA - March 2008 #10 Funny Stuff

Three funny stories ...
1. Red T-Shirt - It says "If Momma and Papa say 'No', ask Grandma and Grandpa" in German. Very cute and particularly close to our hearts because 'Oma' is German for Grandma, and that's what our grandkids call Shirleen.
2. Naked Man Picture - At the hotel in Rothenburg, we shared a family room (two rooms with no door between) and a bathroom. This piece of "art" was on the wall in the bathroom. Mom decided to wrap the offending bottom in toilet tissue. I think it adds a lot to the picture.
3. White T-Shirt - The word 'ausfahrt' means exit" in German. So while driving the autobahn (just like while driving the major highways in the US), you see 'ausfahrt' signs every few minutes. Hence, "Where the !@#$ is Ausfahrt Germany?" If you sound it out in English, you can imagine the hilarious possibilities for teenagers. (and less mature adults - like fathers) If you add the word for entrance, (einfahrt), you can see how we laughed our way through Germany.

AFA - March 2008 #9 Rothenburg

Rothenburg (pronounced ROTE-un-berg) (no "TH" sound in German) claims to be the only complete medieval walled city still in existence. In the 1200's, Rothenburg was one of the largest cities in the Holy Roman Empire and at the intersection of major trade routes. It was rich and prosperous until finally ransacked, and then the plague broke out. For several hundred years it lay untouched, no one was interested because it was so poor.
If it looks familiar in the pictures it may be because you saw it in Chitty, Chitty, Bang Bang. It was called (I'm not making this up - Vulgaria)
It looks just like you would imagine a walled fortress to look like. Huge walls with gun turrets in the walls and points from which to shoot on top of the walls themselves. All the houses have red tile roofs, so look really cool. It is a beautiful, magical, city.
Back in the middle ages an important job was night watchman. He primarily watched for attack and fires. The night watchman still walks the town every night, but now he's more tourist attraction / comedian than actual watchman. Each night he takes a group walking through the town and tells stories of olden times in Rothenburg (in English). He's the guy in the cloak. He was great, and very funny despite not being a native English speaker.
The most interesting story he told was set back in the 1940's, late in WWII when a group of Nazis hid in Rothenburg from the advancing allied troops. The allies found them and bombed the city. When the ground troops arrived they threatened to attack the city. The Assistant Secretary of War at that time was named McCoy and he heard about this. He'd grown up with a picture of Rothenburg on the wall in his mother's home in the US. She had visited it, and loved the city. He convinced the local military commander to give the Nazis the opportunity to surrender before they attacked. While all this was happening on the outside of the walls, on the inside the Nazi commander gave instructions to die rather than surrender. But then he was called away, just before the allied troops arrived. The guy that was second in command knew the war was lost and surrendered his troops without any additional destruction to Rothenburg. But, sadly, one corner of the city had been destroyed by the bombing. Someone had the idea to ask for help, so a world wide appeal was launched in the media for money to help repair this beautiful, ancient city. What they did was to 'sell' a meter section of the wall for a certain level of donation. The money poured in, the corner of the city was rebuilt, and today you can walk the walls and see the names of those contributors.
Another neat story he told about the watchman's job was that they had responsibility for locking up the city and letting people in who came late. In one of the pictures you can see a rounded door in the walls, with a smaller little door in the left side. (covered in metal grillwork now) That was called "the manhole." If you came back after the gates were locked, you had to convince the guard you were friendly and then climb in through the manhole. Obviously an enemy force couldn't make too aggressive an attach through such a little door. That worked pretty well until heavy cannons became more common hundreds of years later, at which time they'd just destroy the door, or the wall, and enter.

AFA - March 2008 #8 Switzerland

Next, off to see the Alps! We drove about three hours south to Interlakken Switzerland, a jumping off point for a bunch of ski areas. We weren't skiing this trip (we'll learn that on another trip, hopefully), we just wanted to see some of the country.
The town was just what you'd expect a Swiss tourist town to be, cute, lots of hotels, restaurants, tour groups, and souvenir shops. It was neat.
To get a real feel for the mountains, we took the train up to Jungfraujoch, known as "The Top of Europe." It is the highest point in Europe you can reach without climbing a mountain. To reach the station at the top you pass through a mountain in a tunnel that took 16 years to create. Once at the top, you are at a research / tourist area that has the most spectacular, postcard perfect, views imaginable. I probably took 40 or 50 pictures of just the mountains.
If you look closely at the first picture you can see the Sphinx, which is the observation station on top of the ridge. Start in the upper right corner on top of the Jungfrau mountain, and come down the mountain to the left and you will see a little tiny building shaped similarly to the Egyptian Sphinx. We did not get this view, I pulled it off the internet. The second picture is a closer view of the Sphinx, once again a view we could not see, so pulled off the net. But it gives you a sense that it was really, really high up. John Jr had a very difficult time with the altitude, feeling miserable most of our time there, but he felt fine once we rode the train back down. You definitely noticed the thin air.
At one of the train stops on the way up we encountered the lady with the Saint Bernard, complete with the keg under his neck. Too perfect!
They have dug an ice cave under the Sphinx that you see us in - very cool. (get it? cool??? - sorry about that one)
The other picture is the family on the observation deck of the Sphinx. The signs said it was -15 c, but the sun was so bright, and we were sheltered from the wind, so it didn't feel that cold.