Visitors from home.

Grandma and Poppo arrived from Vineland on Friday morning. They will be staying with us for just over a week, and while they are here we will all travel to Amsterdam for a few days. So far we have had a fun visit.

On Saturday we took a the Eppelwoi Express, a trolley that tours the major sites of Frankfurt. Unfortunately, there is some HUGE festival happening down on the Main River, and the tour is not following its usual route. We did have fun though. Each rider gets an apple juice or another beverage and a bag of pretzels for the ride, so both boys were very happy. We had a group of 'happy' young men on our trolley car and they spent much of the ride singing loudly. They also had a habit of messing with the controls at the back of the car, and our conductor was NOT happy about that. There were several conversations that ended with the conductor threatening to throw them off the trolley. Luckily, Steve could translate so we were able to understand the controversy.






Once we realized that the trolley was not following its usual route we decided to hop off in the Sachsenhausen section of town. This is the part of the city with the traditional Cider bars. The six of us had a traditional Frankfurt meal, complete with apple wine and hankasse mit musik. It was quite tasty, although Steve was really the only one to enjoy the hankasse.





Today we another lovely day- bright and sunny but not too hot. I got a good run in this morning, about 8.5 miles along the Main. The boys did some schoolwork as well. We also spoke a bit with them about the history of the region and of World War II. One of our stops in Amsterdam will be the Anne Frank House, so it seemed an appropriate time to start talking about who she was and why her story is so important.
After lunch all six of us walked over to Grueneberg Park, which is an enormous park about a mile from our apartment. Today there was some Olympic run event happening in the park, with lots of different events- kid’s runs, speed walking and races. The boys threw their ‘howler’ around and we watched them climb on the various jungle gyms. We also had a little treat at the park café- a giant bowl of ice cream for the two little ones, apple strudel and ice cream for Grandma and Poppo, a Radler for me, and nothing for Stevie.









Tomorrow I will head out to Riedberg for the day and then we leave for Amsterdam on Tuesday morning!