On the first day of vacation,

... my true love gave to me:

750 kilometers,
10 hours en route,
50 liters of gas,
2 extra detours,
196 windmills,
2 hot-air balloons,
and a room on the sixth floor of a hostel in Lübeck

John has a great interest in genealogy and has dug up quite a bit of info about his ancestors on his mother’s side. Since we were going to be in the area on the first leg of our trip, we made a detour to Hameln (ever hear of the Pied Piper of Hamelin?—that’s the one) and a village (called Weibeck) just past that where he’s traced at least one ancestor to. Which is when it began to rain. John can be insanely persistent, and he walked around taking pictures in the rain and knocking on doors to ask questions. He actually managed to find someone with the key to the village church so he could look around and take a bunch of photos. I won’t even mention his unfamiliarity with the word “trespassing.”

Hannah occupied herself in the back seat by counting windmills. We saw a few old wooden ones, but she refused to add them to the count. She only wanted the gigantic modern kind. When we stopped for the night at Lübeck, we were within 1 hour of the Baltic. The next day, there were so many windmills that Hannah gave up before she’d really gotten started counting again. But my 2 hot-air balloons counted as 2 windmills each (in Hannah’s estimation), so we “officially” made 200.

Links to our vacation photos on the right.