March Madness

Can you believe it's the third week of March already?  Wow!  We are only down to four more months in Germany.  SO much to do and so little time!   

 This week we celebrated our friend Jerry Youngblood's birthday with our first "fire up the grill barbeque" of the year.  The weather has been so beautiful!  Sunny and warm, so when Barbara suggested Brats for Jerry's birthday dinner, I just couldn't resist! 

Jerry, the birthday boy and his cake

Mike Mc., Barbara, Mike, Jerry and Missy

  We invited Mike and Missy McGrath over too and it was a fun evening!

The Easter and Spring Markets are in full swing here in Germany.  They do love Easter and I think it's because there are so many chickens here and this is a great excuse to decorate their entire villages with eggs!   Egg Trees are really the big decoration and are lots of fun. 

The church in St. Wendel

Missy and I went to St Wendel to see their Easter Market.  It was really cute.  Lots of booths selling all kinds of spring wreaths and Easter decorations.  

 There were food booths too, of course and we found a new one.  It was similar to a twisted baked treat I had in Prague, but bigger and really yummy.  I never figured out what they were called but oh was it ever good!

The things on the wall are the bread dough spindles.

They wound this soft dough around a big spindle, brush it with lots of butter and then cook it over a fire.  Then they slide it off of the spindle and dust it with sugar and cinnamon.  

Cooking up our sweet bread treats.

Enjoying the sunny afternoon!

Missy was looking for some hand painted eggs and this market really only had one booth that had them.  We each bought an egg and wandered around a bit more and that was it!  The adventure really was that we drove there and back without a GPS!!  

Saturday was a big outing day.  Mike took Travis and the scouts on a twenty mile bike ride along the Rhine River.  He's doing a "blog" about it and I will add a few of his photos.  They had a great time!!

For my outing, I went to Cuijk, Netherlands with four of my girlfriends.  If you're a regular reader of this blog, then you know how much I love a trip to Cuijk!  If not and you're wondering "What the heck is in Cuijk??"  Two words....Flea Market!  The biggest flea market around and it's all indoors.  It takes about 4 hours to get there but it is so fun and so worth it.  It will probably be my last trip up there and that just makes me so sad.  I've been trying to collect enough brown English transferward to be able to set a table for eight and I was missing a key item...dinner plates!  I knew if there was any place to find them...it would be Cuijk, so I invited a few friends who had never been there (you know I have to pass on the tradition that was introduced to me by my dear expert flea market friend, Susan).  Shirlene offered to drive her van so we would have a lot more room for treasures.

Sharma, Shirlene, Bobbi Jo and Kathryn in Cuijk

You know it must be a worthy destination if five ladies will get up early enough to be on the road at 5:30 a.m.!!   

The entrance to the Cuijk Flea Market

Lunch time...we had Gyros...funny since we were in the Netherlands, not Greece!

We were at the market and shopping by 9:30 and sure enough I found my eight dinner plates and a serving bowl and little creamer to boot!  

Sharma was the master at making everything fit in.

It was a good thing we took Shirlene's van because we filled every inch PLUS the rooftop carrier!  

It's all in!!!!

We all got home about the same time last night...and were we ever tired!  The boys were a little sunburned and the girls were just plain exhausted from being up since 0 dark thirty and then shopping all day...hey, it's hard work!!


love and miss you all, 
-corri