We are driving back to Marietta today after our week visiting Utah and Missouri. I will fill you in on all the details next week. In the meantime, enjoy some photos of our adorable grandsons, Teddy and Peter. Have a great week!
This will be a quick post as we are traveling this week.
Back in Ohio and West Virginia we spent some fun times with the family. We played with the kids and did some minor projects at Lauren’s place. Nathan is in what seems to be a never-ending battle with the wasps. It’s been great to soak up grandkid time in simple, sweet ways. We also enjoyed a delicious dinner with our niece Sarah and her family and we got to meet their newest addition, Poppy.
We hopped on a plane yesterday and flew to Utah to spend a few days with family and to take care of some pressing business. It was kind of wild to fly over the Wasatch Front. We are just two weeks shy of one year since we drove out of the Salt Lake valley, bound for Missouri, Weet Virginia, and Germany.
Nathan’s dad has been moved to a care center, so we are visiting him every day. We also wanted to see our dear family and a few friends. Living a “nomadic” life has some unexpected challenges. A couple of challenges that we are addressing this week are renewing a driver’s license and titling a car. It sure is simpler to do that in a place where you own property.
We wish you all a very fun and safe Independence Day and we will catch you again next week!
We are just back from a quick trip to San Antonio and I will give you the details on that next week. But for now, I asked for questions from you last week and here are some answers!
This week started out very quiet and ended with a trip into Corpus Christi.
Hello and Happy New Year! I hope you are all well!
I promised a more detailed update of our last few weeks, so here it is…
It’s good to be back in the U.S.! We are staying in the beautiful town of Marietta, Ohio, about a 30-minute drive from our daughter’s home in Waverly, West Virginia. We are loving our new grandson, Hugh! He is a sweetheart and we are already over the moon for him.
We have been really soaking in the time with Lauren, Bo, and the kids, so not a lot of earth-shattering news here. We have enjoyed the yummy food at Chez Lauren (she’s such a good cook) as well as trying to find some good food here in town. The weather here has been hot, hot, hot, but we’ve still found opportunities to hang out at the pool, jump on the trampoline with the kids, and take walks by the mighty Muskingum and Ohio rivers. We also took this prime opportunity to visit our dentist, Dr. Bo. It was also nice to go to church and to know what was being said!
We are in an AirBnB in Harmar Village in Marietta. This town was the first to be settled in the Ohio Territory in 1788. We knew years ago that Lauren and her family would be moving here after Bo’s dental schooling. When we visited the town for the first time, we learned that a branch of Nathan’s family (his maternal grandmother’s side, the Putnams) had a prominent role in founding this area. So, it’s been fun to learn more about the history and how we are linked to it. There is even an excellent book about this area by David McCullough called The Pioneers. I recommend it.
We have some business to take care of in the next couple of weeks, so that’s going to take some work. We will also be returning to Utah soon for a whirlwind tour to visit Nathan’s dad, Max. Max is getting on in years and he broke his arm about a month ago. We want to see him, help with a few things with the family, and take care of some of our chores, too. Of course, we will bring you all along on those adventures as we go. Have a great week!
We are just back from a quick trip to San Antonio and I will give you the details on that next week. But for now, I asked for questions from you last week and here are some answers!
This week started out very quiet and ended with a trip into Corpus Christi.
Hello and Happy New Year! I hope you are all well!
I promised a more detailed update of our last few weeks, so here it is…
We have just about 24 hours left here in Mainz and we have spent this week saying goodbye to this chapter of our life. We made a list of a few things that we didn’t want to miss and all the food we wanted to eat before leaving and we checked everything off our list this week.
We went to two performances. We returned to the Alte Oper in Frankfurt for a mindblowing piano performance by Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili. She played Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Liszt. Some of the pieces were so smoking fast that it seemed like she wasn’t even touching the keyboard. In other moments, she seemed like she wanted to take all the time in the world in order to emphasize a phrase. Truly excellent. We also returned across the Rhein to Wiesbaden for the Verdi opera Falstaff. It was pretty good, but not world-class like the opera we saw in Leipzig. The production was set in the twentieth century, so they had an old car on stage at one point and the costumes were more 1940s or 50s. But the costumes for the last act got weird, with the men in these strange, modern-looking screen-printed sweatsuits. The staging felt a bit boring for a comedy. However, the singing and orchestra were really good.
We haved really loved living near this amazing, historical river, so we took one more adventure into the valley. We took the train to the town of Boppard and did a little hike into the hills above the Rhein. We spent a nice afternoon walking through the woods and wildflowers and seeing the pretty towns, castles, and vineyards one more time. Back in Mainz, we strolled around the old Citadel. Some of it is still in ruins and some of the defensive walls and tunnels have been reconstructed. We also couldn’t leave Mainz without a visit to the Gutenberg museum. We just scratched the surface there in two hours. They have two of Gutenberg’s original bibles there in the vault as well as printing presses, books, paper, tools, and many other print-related items through the centuries. I could have spent the entire day. They also have workshops where you can go print your own items, which would have been fun to participate in…next time! We also grabbed tacos with our friends from the apartment building. We had a great Italian meal (Sardinian, actually), great Viatnamese and sushi, burgers, and our last dürüm döner.
We have come to the end of our European adventure (for now). We have spent over nine months here and it has been quite the experience. We have figured out some significant things about how we want to shape our life going forward and what is most important to us. Travel always helps to remind us to be more empathetic and that the overwhelming majority of people in the world want the same things: love, security, and a chance to make a good life for their family. We are also reminded to “travel light” in the world and try to make less of an impact physically while hopefully making an positive impact on people. There are some things that Germans and Europeans do really well, like public transportation, bikes, and recycling. But there are things we have missed about the United States and we look forward to diving back into our own culture in a couple of days. Last, but certainly not least, we are so excited to start to visit our family again and get all the grandkid snuggles! Although this is the end of this trip to Europe, this is not the end of our travel adventures!
We are just back from a quick trip to San Antonio and I will give you the details on that next week. But for now, I asked for questions from you last week and here are some answers!
This week started out very quiet and ended with a trip into Corpus Christi.
Hello and Happy New Year! I hope you are all well!
I promised a more detailed update of our last few weeks, so here it is…
We are just back from a quick trip to San Antonio and I will give you the details on that next week. But for now, I asked for questions from you last week and here are some answers!
This week started out very quiet and ended with a trip into Corpus Christi.
Hello and Happy New Year! I hope you are all well!
I promised a more detailed update of our last few weeks, so here it is…