Our Trip Itinerary

I'm really excited about our upcoming trip. We've got our itinerary pretty well figured out, and we've reserved all of our hotels and our car for the trip. I put together a little map and a little montage of pictures of the places we'll be going.


Our flight arrives in Frankfurt at 5:00am (yikes!) so we'll be spending the first part of that day driving to our first destination, Reims, France. Reims is in the heart of the Champagne region, and many of the fine champagne houses are located there. We don't plan to see those on the first day, though, we're just stopping in Reims to see the Cathedrale Notre Dame de Reims, which is famous for its size, as well as for its Chagall stained glass windows. We'll probably grab lunch in Reims, then start to mosey our way towards our hotel for the night, viewing famous vineyards from the car, checking out the town of Epernay, and searching for the little Salon stone along the way. Eventually we'll get to our hotel which is located about an hour away in a little town called Etoges. The hotel is located in a 17th century chateau, and it features A MOAT!!! How cool is that? Who knows if it will actually have water in it when we're there, but who cares. It has A MOAT!!! LOL

The next day we go back to Reims to tour the Roman chalk caves at Ruinart. They are a UNESCO world heritage site, and it should be a pretty cool tour. After that, we get to taste a few wines at the Ruinart house. We're not quite sure what we're doing for the rest of the day, but it will involve more champagne tours and general walking around Reims. We spend the night at our moat hotel again that night.

The next morning, we head to Paris. We've been there before, but it was just for 2.5 days. This time we'll have 3 days to see some things we missed last time, like the Musee d'Orsay, the Eiffel Tower at night, the side and top of Notre Dame cathedral (we saw the front and the inside, but not the side or top last time, LOL), Sacre Coeur, a river Seine cruise, and a general wandering around the neighborhoods. We are staying right off Luxembourg Parc, so our opportunities for neighborhood wandering are excellent. We also get to have dinner at Taillevent one night, which we're hoping will be nearly as good as some of the great meals we had in Germany on our last trip.

After three nights in Paris, we drive back towards Germany via Luxembourg. We're going to visit Luxembourg City and see the Fortress and many of the other old buildings they have surrounding the town. We're hoping to have time to take the "Wenzel Walk," which is a self-guided tour through the history of the town. The town looks pretty amazing in the pictures I've seen. It's certainly nothing like what we can see on vacation here in the good old USA!

That night, we move to Trier to spend the night. We wanted to stay at least one night in a cute German hotel for one reason: THE BREAKFAST BUFFET!!! Germany has the most amazing breakfasts at the hotels. We're talking bacon, sausage, ham, eggs, dried meats, smoked salmon, fresh fruit juices, cheeses of all varieties, fresh jams and jellies, and the best hard rolls you've ever had, and I'm sure I'm forgetting something. Anyway, breakfast in Germany rocks! After breakfast, we'll spend our last day in Europe seeing the Roman ruins in Trier, then we'll drive up the Mosel river through wine country. We've been there before, but it's so beautiful and the little towns are so quaint that we wanted to see more. We'll stop at a winery that Jeff wants to visit, and then we'll end up back in Frankfurt for the night. We fly back home the next day.

I will eventually get around to posting about that whole wedding coordinator thing...

Uh oh - I've been tagged...

I have no idea how this started, but it seems harmless enough. I even got to learn something in the process: the definition of "meme". Look it up.

Book meme:

Rules:
1. Pick up the nearest book of at least 123 pages.
2. Turn to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Here goes. I'm sitting in my office, surround by at least a couple hundred books on bookshelves. None are actually sitting on my computer desk, as we have recently cleaned the office in preparation to receive houseguests tonight. The nearest bookshelf houses our war/war machine/and aircraft reference books, none of which I care to look through tonight (or any night, for that matter). So, I've made the executive decision to move up one shelf to the wine section. The closest book is "The Sotheby's Wine Encyclopedia" by Tom Stevenson. It consists of 664 pages of tiny print describing the wine estates of the world. Pretty exciting, eh? Jeff's read the entire thing. I just grab it now and then when I want to look something up.

Page 123 falls in the "Bordeaux - The Libournais and Fronsadais - Pomerol" section of the book. Sentences 6-8 are as follows:

"The result is a wine of superstar quality, even in poor years. Petit-Village is matured in wood for 18 months with at least 50 percent of the casks made from new oak. RED: These wines seem to have everything."

They are in reference to Chateau Petit-Village, an estate I've never even heard of, but perhaps should look into, judging by the tasty review above. I have at least heard of the two estates that border it, Vieux Chateau Certan and Chateau La Conseillante, so I don't feel too dumb. The estate that follows this entry, Chateau Petrus, is quite famous, too. Not that I'll ever need to worry about owning any of that.

I'm going to ignore rule number 5, because I'm just not the type to perpetuate memes. If you're just desperate to follow the trail, though, check out my friend's blog: jak-in-the-house. She's the one who got me! She also saved me from starting my next post. It's going to be about how I'm pretty sure I'm totally insane - I just signed up to be one of the wedding coordinators at my church. You'll hear more about that later!

Three Day Weekend!

Yay! It's a three day weekend! This is the first year that our company has decided to let everyone have MLK Jr. Day as a holiday, and we are very appreciative. We have a lot of work to do around the house this weekend, and as it is going to be freezing or below for most of the weekend, I think we might actually get some of it done.

Yesterday started with a bit of lounging about the house, then we showered and proceeded to drain and flush out our two hot water heaters. We ran out of hot water for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and couldn't quite figure out why (no excessive water use that day, pilot lights were fine), so we thought we'd better check to make sure we didn't have a bunch of sediment in the bottom of the water tanks. It turns out that there was very little sediment anywhere in the system, so who knows what caused it. We did successfully perform home maintenance without breaking anything else in the process, though, so we felt pretty good about that.

Flush from our morning home maintenance success, we decided to try for some more. I've been wanting to get some carpet down in the unfinished part of our basement that we use for storage so I can walk down there barefoot and not come back with my feel all dirty or gross. So we hit the local carpet outlet and found a couple of perfectly sized remnants for the storage space and stuffed them in our car for the trip home. After a very small amount of trimming to size, our new carpet was installed (i.e. tossed on the floor and stomped on for smoothing) and vacuumed and looking quite nice, for storage room carpet.

Last night was the KU-Mizzou basketball game (a stressful time for nearly all KU fans). For some reason, it was broadcast on ESPN-U, a channel that we don't get. Why on earth they decided to broadcast one of the biggest games of the season on an obscure channel is beyond me. We decided we'd either have to hit a sports bar to watch the game, or see if Matthew and Joella had that channel. We called M&J, but they didn't have that channel. However, they had been planning to upgrade their subscription to another package that did have that channel, so Matthew went ahead and did that in the afternoon, and by gametime, he had ESPN-U for us all to watch! We matched his kindness by bringing over a big BBQ dinner to share, and happily (well, nervously) watched KU pull out the victory.

On tap for the rest of the weekend:

Hang storage hooks in garage, apply misc. shovels, brooms, etc. to said hooks.

Wash four or five sets of bedclothes (we have 4 missionaries passing through next weekend, plus our bed needs washing)

Clean out the mess of junk in the basement (the pile of empty boxes and misc. junk has reached Jeff's tipping point)

Move my sewing and craft stuff into a room where I might be more likely to use it (it's in the unfinished part of the basement right now, dark, cold, dreary)

What's been going on

It's been a busy couple of weeks around here. We got back to work on the 2nd, which was good, because we were starting to run out of things to work on at home. I can't remember what we did on Saturday (puttering about town window shopping, I think), but Sunday morning we were woken up with a phone call from my uncle Don and aunt Becky calling to tell us that my grandmother had had a heart attack overnight and that she was in the hospital in Manhattan. We quickly called all my siblings to let them know about it, then got dressed and got in the car to go see her and to be with my grandfather. My brother, Dan, was also able to come in from Hays. When we got to the hospital, Grandmother was alert and smiling and laughing with friends. She slept on and off during the time we were there, but otherwise looked and felt pretty normal, with the exception of all the tubes and bruises. My aunt and uncle, Roger and Sue, from Albuquerque, were planning to arrive late that night, so shortly after dinner, we left Manhattan to come back home because we knew that Grandfather would be okay if he had help from them for the week. Grandmother was released from the hospital on Tuesday, and is doing fine.

Sometime right before my grandmother's heart attack, Jeff and I were trying to decide where to take a vacation to this spring/summer. We were comtemplating San Francisco, Aspen, and DisneyWorld, but none of those places were really appealing to both of us. I guess San Francisco was, but we were shooting for a week long vacation, and if we went there, we'd want to see Monterey, and Napa, and probably Yosemite, and that would take more than a week. Jeff wasn't too keen on Aspen because we were in Colorado on our last long vacation, and Disney sounded fun, but just not as fun as the others. So, on a whim, we checked ticket prices to Europe. We found a killer deal on tickets to Frankfurt, so we bought them, and have been spending the last week trying to book hotels and restaurants and a car and various tours. We're going to rent a car and drive to the Champagne region of France, see Reims and maybe Epernay, and tour some caves. Then we're going to move into Paris for about three days and catch some sights that we missed out on last time we were there. After that, it's back towards the airport, and we'll see Luxembourg City, Trier and some more of the Mosel River before flying back home from Frankfurt. It will be a short trip for flying all the way over there, only about 8 days, but I think we'll have a great time!