Goodbye Dagobert

We had a tearful parting of the ways with Dagobert at the Cologne train station this morning. When Jolene wasn't looking I booted him in the tailpipe--those were tears of joy on my part. Actually, I have to admit that our little piece of German automobile history treated us very well for two months, with over 3600 miles driven through 10 countries in the heat, snow, and rain.




We are on a high-speed train to Paris now and it's nice to just sit back and watch the scenery go by. I was tasked with cleaning out the van's food supply yesterday, so I ate cereal, yogurt, soup, noodles, cheese, salami, and topped it off with a few bottles of wine we had been carting around since Italy. Somebody had to do it! I almost ate as much as we ate a few nights back in a "hamburger" stand in France.



We ordered hamburgers and they arrived on an entire baguette loaded with sausage, mystery dressing and fries. The portions were beyond American sized and sadly we ate almost everything in the photo.



A few days back while we were strolling along a pond in a park in Maastricht the funniest thing happened. There were a few adults taking kids fishing, using very long ocean-style poles that were laid across the shoreline path that we were walking on. Allie and Noelle drifted back then a few moments later came running up laughing. They pointed out one of the fishing poles heading out towards the center of the pond. They had noticed that one of the unattended poles had a fish on and the pole was wiggling. As they discussed how to say in Dutch, "Excuse me but I think that one of your poles has caught a fish", the pole jumped off the sidewalk and started accelerating across the pond. We laughed hysterically as the pole reached planing speed, cruising the shoreline towards the far side of the pond. Soon a line of ducks began following the mysterious vessel and the whole lot of them paraded to the other side of the pond. We watched as the pole's owner went to check the poles, looked around confused, counted the number of kids, then inventoried the poles and finding one less than the number of kids began to search around. Confusedly, he squinted out over the pond and startled himself as he spied it at the head of the parade, by this time almost across the pond. He grabbed a pole and raced over to the far shore where he attempted to cast a line across the escaped pole. He wasn't exactly a seasoned angler as the first two casts slammed into the pond a foot from shore, then one snagged the bush behind him, another landed halfway across the pond and finally one hit its target. He managed to retrieve the pole but the fish wiggled free as he pulled it from the water. We laughed the rest of the day.