May 31, 2018 – Day Sixteen – Kreuztal

May 31, 2018 – Day Sixteen – Kreuztal

What a  delightful day!  It starts out normally enough, with fried eggs, toast and tomatoes, coffee and tea. Aside – these tomatoes are so fantastically delicious!!

We’ve finished breakfast and cleaned up the kitchen when our doorbell rings!!  What!?  Who can be here?  Do we answer??  It’s pretty grand that we figured out how to use the phone/intercom before this panic moment! 

It turns out to be our across-the-street neighbor, Evelyn Kopta, telling us to close all our windows.  I go downstairs to see her while Marilyn quickly changes out of her jammies, and we invite her upstairs for some coffee.  She seems genuinely pleased by the invitation and up we go.  It seems the little town down the road burns something – trash? – and the smoke always blows here, so everyone closes their windows until it passes.  Evelyn has an app on her phone that warns her.

We sit around the dining-room table and chat for at least an hour and we spend most of it laughing!  She is enjoying practicing her English, which is very good, and she tells us about her travels and her family.  Her son, Stephen, is twenty-nine and disabled;  but he lives on his own in Koln (Cologne), so it can’t be too debilitating.  They went to York a while back to visit some of Evelyn’s school friends.  She also tells her about one of her friends here with whom she used to party.  The lady got sick and can’t drink anymore, so Evelyn told her she’s boring now!  J

We tell her where we’ve been on this trip and about how Intervac works.  We ask for advice for the rest of our stay and she says Biggesee is nice, and Olpe;  but she really thinks Koln’s big dome is worth seeing.  I ask her about touring the neighborhood brewery, Krombacher’s, and she tells us that her husband works there!! She will ask him about tours, since I haven’t gotten a reply to my email to the company.  In the mean time, she takes us across the street to her house and loads us up with eleven bottles of Krombacher products!  There is a lemon soda, a cola with orange flavoring soda, and of course, Krombacher Pils!  Even the carrier is cool!  Evelyn tells us that they receive 680 liters every year from the company!!  She says they don’t drink it all!!

 

As we’re leaving she says that if we get bored, we can come over to her house!

We come home and before we begin researching Koblenz and planning out our two days there, we sample Krombacher’s Fassbrause, a soft drink made of cola and orange!  Very different! We also make a reservation in Frankfort for the night before out flight, so that we won’t be so rushed and panicked when we’re leaving.  We’ll have to park the car, find our way to baggage services to drop off the keys, go to another terminal and drop off our luggage before we can go through security and find our gate.  If we, at least, know how to get to the airport, that will be one less thing to worry about.  And we won’t have a two-hour drive to get there!  We might even take a test drive to make sure we can find the airport!

Time flies!  It’s time for dinner and we make grilled-cheese sandwiches with our new bread, some of those delicious “Sweet Tom” tomatoes, onions, and a lovely Danish cheese!  Served with our new potato salad and chips, dinner is delicious.  I have my first bottle of Krombacher’s Pils and it is a nice pilsner.  We’re saving the caps because Evelyn said they are game pieces and we could win a million euros!  We promise to give her all the caps and she promises to share if she wins!

Marilyn is having wine and when my beer is gone I join her.  Time for more “Lie to Me”.  What will we do if we run out of episodes?!  It doesn’t happen tonight and it looks like there are enough to get us through the trip!  :)

Note - Blogger isn't send email notifications when y'all comment on a post.  They say they're working on it;  but it explains why I haven't been responding to you!  I'm not the callous, rude jerk you might have thought!

Bonus shots!

Marilyn mapped out our walking tour of Dusseldorf, all 3.23 miles!

The hail from the other day.

It was a full moon a couple of nights ago!