I can’t believe another week has flown by!
We had a relatively quiet week. The most exciting thing to happen is that we finally got internet at our house and it almost didn’t happen.
After all of the delays in getting a tech to come out to the house to run the line to the house, the 29th finally arrived. Our installation window was from 8am-12 and in very German fashion, the tech showed up at exactly 8. He walked around the whole house looking for a port and finally told us he needed to get into the neighbor’s house (our house is a duplex) to run the line. We panicked because no one lives in the other half of the house. He walked around and walked around and Matt showed him a couple of places he though the internet could be run. We knew the tenants before us ran the line into our dressing room and finally, the tech said that would work.
After an hour, he said the internet was run and we were like ok, thanks how do we get online? He said that wasn’t part of his job and that we needed to call the internet company to get a router. We made another call to the internet company waited about an hour to speak with an English speaker. After a few minutes, he came back on the line and said that they were all out of routers in their logistics center. He gave us three options: 1) we could call back in two hours and see if any appeared, 2) we could order one online and wait another week for delivery, 3) we could drive around to O2 stores and see if there were any in the stores. We chose to have Matt drive around since I had to go in to work.
While I went to work, Matt drove to three different stores and they all said that it would be a week before they had any. After I got off work, we made the executive decision to go buy a router ourselves instead of renting from the internet company. Once we bought it, we were all connected to the internet within the hour! So exciting; we are now back to being members of society!
Friday, I was able to work from home for the first time. The timing is great because they made masks mandatory again in the office so I will be teleworking for the foreseeable future.
This weekend, we were home again. I made another short list of eight activities we could do over the weekend and let each kid pick 2. Brooklyn picked a Barefoot Walk and Ryan picked the Sinsheim Technical Museum, where we had seen the Concorde jets on the side of the road a few weeks ago.
We overslept on Saturday and Matt and Ryan needed haircuts, so we waited for them to get back and then made the one hour drive out to Dornstetten, in the Black Forest for the Barefoot walk.
Barefoot walks are pretty popular in Germany. The website of this particular one explains that walking barefoot helps re-connect you with nature, increases your balances (due to your toes not being restricted), toughens you up, and “improves your constitution.” Matt is terrified of walking around barefoot outside after getting a bee sting as a kid so this was a big day for him.
Luckily, we got parking right by the entrance, we stripped our shoes and headed out on the walk. It started out so easy with a walk through grass, crossing a few streams. There were lots of “challenges” to climb over and jump on. We carried on and the trail led us into the woods. The terrain of the trail changed periodically from mulch, to sticks, to sand, to mud, to dirt.
As we went on, the trail also mixed in different types of gravel that were really hard on your feet. However, there were lots of Germans there with their little kids and even walking babies around so it made it hard for us to complain. I wondered aloud what was next and I wish I hadn’t asked because it was a pit of broken glass. We made it through the entire 3k of terrain challengers (including two glass pits). At the end, they had a foot washing station.
After we got cleaned up, we were starving so we drove around looking for kebabs. We didn’t have any trouble finding a kebab shop since they are everywhere, but they were all closed. We finally found one in a town called Horb. It was so cute, we will definitely be back to check out the town.
After we got home, we got Ryan settled and Matt, Brooklyn and I headed to the biergarten to meet some friends. They have the cutest 2 year old daughter and Brooklyn wanted to come along to play with her, which worked out great for all of the parents.
After a few beers and hearing about our friend’s E-bike, Matt decided it would be a great time to try it out. E-bikes are a really popular form of transportation in Germany, and are even subsidized by the government. They are bikes that have electric batteries. They are legally classified as bikes instead of mo-peds so don’t require special licenses so many people use them as commuter cars. We walked back to their house and after a quick tutorial, he was off. I think E-bike’s may be in our future.
Sunday was rainy so it was a perfect day for museum. It was a one hour drive to the Sinsheim Museum. If it has a motor, they had it there. Planes, trains, classic American cars, antique cars, military vehicles, helicopters, you name it.
They have an Air France Concorde and a Russian Tupolev that you can tour. We’ve seen a Concorde at the Udvar Hazy Museum at Dulles but have never been inside so it was pretty cool. Both planes were propped up at 25% inclines so we pretty much had to climb from the base to the flight decks.
We got our daily Eis, stopped at the commissary for some grocery shopping and headed home. Next week, we are supposed to go to Nice, France. This trip was originally supposed to happen a few weeks ago but our flights were cancelled so we rescheduled to this upcoming weekend. The Covid rules have just changed though so Ryan will have to quarantine when we get back. We are willing to take the chance as long as things don’t get more strict so hopefully, everything goes according to plan!
Links:
Barefoot Walk: https://www.barfusspark.de
Sinsheim Museum: https://tinyurl.com/p9aec38e
Gilcrests Abroad 