The germs on the plane go round and round...

Before the plane landed in Houston, I was sick with a sore throat and the sniffles. The non-stop flight from Germany was ten hours long, and I heard so much coughing and sneezing as soon as the doors closed in Frankfurt... I knew I'd get a bad cold, but I didn't think it would come on that quickly. Maybe I picked up a germ or two towards the end of our trip, and those tiny germs just burst into full bloom on that plane.

I've been sick with this cold since we got home, and that was nearly two weeks ago. It hasn't been fun, but it was surely not the worst thing that could have happened. We had safe flights both ways, one thousand miles of safe driving in the rental car, our GPS Greta helped us from getting lost in the Bavarian Alps, and we have wonderful memories of our beautiful trip.

During our trip, whenever our hotel or guesthouse room had a television, we would turn it on and flip around the channels. We saw German cooking shows, home-shopping channels, decorating shows, old Arnold Swartzenegger movies, morning cartoons, afternoon soap operas, American sit-coms (the worst, most inane ones), German game shows (with contestants dressed as knights), and (in the larger cities) we could listen to CNN-- in English.

The churches in all the cities and towns would ring their bells in the early morning, and then every hour thereafter. It was a wonderful nostalgic sound, and I've thought of those bells every day.

The linens in all the guesthouses were wonderfully soft, the pillows large and plump. Rather than a comforter or bedspread, there were always two fluffy blankets on our bed, one for each of us. The blankets were folded in a tri-fold pattern and would be set vertically along the bed, from the pillow to the footboard. Being that the sturdy form mattresses were so low to the floor, those thick triple-folded blankets would make the bed look higher than it actually was.

Since we got home, I've been using my teapots every day. Instead of having just one cup of tea, I use a teapot and indulge in two cups of chamomille tea for breakfast, and sometimes I do the same for lunch and dinner as well. Every cup of tea in Germany was an event, and I'm trying to recreate the same feeling here.

I've tried to make some of the potatos that we had during our trip. I would call the small quartered potato wedges roasted, the Germans called them baked. Whatever you call them, their potatoes were better than mine. But I will keep trying.

Every morning when I have my tea and bread and fruit, I remember all the wonderful breads we had during our trip. We have just one bakery in this area (I don't count the bakeries in supermarkets) and I guess if I want really good bread, I will have to go there and buy some. Either that, or start baking my own. I have a bread machine, and that makes very good bread, but I know it just won't be the same as those cute little rolls that we had at the German guesthouses.

I imagine that we will be talking about this trip for a long time to come. And that's fine. It was a good one, the best one, and worth everything we can say about it, and more.

I miss the Black Forest and the vineyards, I miss the Mosel and the Rhine, I miss the narrow winding streets filled with the tiny shops and outdoor cafes. I miss all those castles, both the ones we toured and the ones that sat abandoned in the middle of the mountains. And most of all, I miss the thousands upon thousands of fields filled with those bright yellow butterblooms. But, as Monika told us... "If you come back next year, or in five years or twenty years, what you see now will still be here."