Family time in Austria

This is my favorite photo from the trip. The kids got to swim that first evening
after our long train ride from Berlin.

We hadn't finished unpacking from our month in the US when it was time to pack up again, this time for a 5 day trip to Austria to spend time with Dan's aunt and uncle. We have a close relationship with them, having stayed in their home twice before and spent several days with them earlier this year on our ski trip. They consider Dan like a son; he lived with them twice during his childhood for about 6 months each time. And so our kids are like their grandkids and they spoil them rotten.

The kids love Hedi for many reasons, not the
least of which is she buys them chocolate
for breakfast. This is the cereal she bought for
us: chocolate wafers filled with Nougat!

Hedi and Helmut live in Pasching, near Linz, Austria. They keep a camper on a nearby lake called the Ausee (pronounced Ow-say), and that is where we stayed for this trip.

Hedi kept the refrigerator stocked for us, and we had eggs and sweet breads with juice and coffee each morning for breakfast. In typical Austrian fashion we had huge hot meals for lunch and then small dinners in the evenings, or sometimes just tea and cake if lunch had been particularly large. We went out to eat for lunch one day and I ordered schnitzel (flattened, breaded and fried pork) because it's hard to pass up a good schnitzel, but when the food orders came I saw that Hedi had ordered something I had also considered on the menu and I asked if I could have a bite.

Carter ordered a cup of hot chocolate that was literally as
big as his head

She immediately insisted on trading with me and I ended up eating her whole plate of food. It was something that loosely translates as a "lumberjack plate", intended for large men who have spent the day slaving away in heavy manual labor. By contrast I had slept late, had breakfast, and gone for a drive to reach this restaurant about an hour away. The meal had seriously about an entire package of bacon cooked to crispy and spread over 2 large pork cutlets with caramelized onions. It was to die for, literally, because I'm sure my arteries became several millimeters more constricted after consuming almost the entire plate. Man, was it good! I didn't need dinner that night.

We had planned to hang out at the lake all day every day, swimming and playing in the sand. But the weather didn't cooperate with us so well. Whereas it had been upwards of 90 degrees the whole prior week, the week of our visit was wet and cool. It rained at least a little nearly every day and while the water temperature wasn't too bad, the air was too cool to really enjoy hanging out at the lake. We were warm enough as long as we were moving around in the water and climbing in and out to jump in, but if you didn't keep moving it got too cold. We ended up spending a lot of time in the camper playing board games. We had brought some with us, and we also ended up playing some games that Dan's cousin's kids had. One of them, a teenage boy named Christian, spent a lot of time with Carter and Haley playing games. It was nice to have him there.

Sorry! with Christian and Hedi. The kids are enjoying
chocolate ice cream, courtesy of Hedi

Christian and Hedi speak good English but are far more comfortable with German, and Helmut doesn't really speak English, so the four of us tried to speak mostly in German during our visit. It was interesting to see the kids interacting with Christian over the games. Both of them had studied "game play" in German class last year, so they knew how to say "your turn", "my turn", etc. Dan of course can carry on a conversation, but I stayed silent until I had something I knew how to say. After 3 or 4 days my brain was exhausted and I was really tired of trying to communicate in German. It definitely made me realize how different our lives would be here if we weren't surrounded by so much English. On the one hand I think life would have been a lot more silent and I would have felt a lot more isolated. But on the other hand that silence wouldn't have lasted too long. Had we been immersed in German for this first year we would be able to communicate very well by now. Even after 5 days of immersion we had all made progress. The last day we were there another of Dan's cousins came to visit with her family. The kids played Uno Extreme while the adults sat around chatting. It was mentally exhausting but I was surprised to discover that I understood most of what was being said. Not every word, but I mostly got the main points.

"Flying" on the swings

The first day we were there we went to an odd little tourist attraction that was a combination of education, kid activities and modern art. It was called Höhenrausch, something about the thrill of heights. The theme was birds and there was a lot of abstract bird art as well as activities related to flying. We rode on flying swings and the kids did one of those trampoline bungee things. There was also a tower to climb, with exhibits on local birds on the way up and a nice view of Linz from the top.

Bird art

Looking out at Linz

Modern art: Hundreds of plastic eggs lined up under incubating lights, watched over by a gigantic chicken eye. From the website, “With his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (CCP), [the Belgian artist] uses the chicken as a metaphor for observations on “la condition humaine.” The installation New Brood stands for the potential of unborn life and the complex relationships between nature, evolution and human influence. Hmmmm....

Racing down the sled track

The day we drove an hour away into the Alps and ate huge amounts of food, we also went to the Wurbauerkogel, a place with a summer downhill sled track as well as an alpine coaster. The sled was really fun, the coaster was fun but too short. That was Dan's birthday so we also celebrated with cake later in the day.

Whee!!

Alpine coaster track 

Happy birthday to Dan!

Saturday was finally a nice day and we swam for a long time and tried out the jumping platforms. The kids were brave and both of them jumped from the tallest platform. It was tall enough that you had time on the way down to think about the fall and to feel your stomach flying up into your head. I did back flips off the low platform which was fine until I threw my back out. Ugh, my body isn't what it used to be! It's been almost a week and I'm still recovering. All in all it was a really nice way to end the summer. We have been unpacking and laying low this week, getting ready for school to start on Monday!

Haley in a running leap from the high jump

P.S. We gave Dan a GoPro for his birthday, something he has wanted for a long time. He tried it out during our trip and put together this video:

Initial Re-entry

Well, we are back in Berlin after a month at home in the good ol’ US of A. I didn’t realize how much I needed and wanted to be back home. Before we left for our trip, I had thought I was relatively happy here and was wishing we had waited a little longer to plan a trip home, for when I was feeling a little more desperate. But boy was it wonderful to have that time with family and friends in familiar places. 

I won’t recap all our time at home, but suffice it to say that we saw so many friends and had so much fun. I don’t know that I have ever been on vacation for a whole month! Hardly any cooking and cleaning, lots of dinners out or meals prepared by friends, lots of special events planned, not the normal routine at all. It was tiring but wonderful. 

Cripe and Cravy kids

Lake McDonald, Glacier NP

The kids had never been to Waffle House! Boy did I
enjoy my Southern food while I was home!

Haley got boots and a holster for an early
birthday present. We got to spend time with
Gramma and Grampa and a special visit
by cousin Crenshaw!

All our favorite neighbors tried to stow away in the back
of our truck!

Pool party with the Langstons in Monroe, GA

Best friends with the crew of cute kiddos

How cute is this cowgirl??

The other really wonderful thing about being in the US was being able to communicate with others without hesitation. We speak a lot of English in Berlin, which is not necessarily a good thing, but English is obviously not the dominant language. I can only manage the basics in German, which keeps me from fully communicating with many of the people in my day to day life. It was such a relief to speak freely in the US, in order to communicate stories and feelings to friends and family, and also to communicate daily life with people I meet. For example, returning from Glacier and exiting off the highway, a lady hit our truck from the rear. Thank goodness this happened in the US. I was able to discuss what happened and what should happen next with her, talk to the auto body shop to get an estimate for repair, communicate with the lady’s insurance company to verify the damage and the estimate, rent a car to use while the truck was being repaired, and manage the check sent from the insurance company. When you speak the same language, even if you have never had a certain experience and don’t know the process you can ask questions and figure it all out. But when you don’t speak the same language, even a simple problem can seem incredibly daunting because you lack the tools to gain understanding. I can only imagine the nightmare this situation would have been had it happened in Germany.

Monday/Tuesday the kids and I flew back to Berlin (Dan had returned 2 weeks earlier, poor guy.) It was a LONG trip. We flew from Missoula to Seattle to Reykjavik to Copenhagen to Berlin. Returning here didn’t feel like coming “home” at all, but it wasn’t something I was dreading either. It helped that Dan and Diablo and Rhythm were here waiting for us. It also helped that we had such a nice long time away. But there was also a sense of excitement, the feeling that this year is going to be better than the last because we are more settled, we know more, there won’t be so much newness. 

Just recognizing the airport was nice. My German has deteriorated while we’ve been gone, but I managed to make the cab driver understand that I needed a child seat, we had a lot of luggage, and that I needed to pay with a credit card. We recognized things all along the route home. We were greeted by a neighbor just minutes after dragging our suitcases out of the taxi. My clothes are in the closet, I have a bed to sleep on, there was a dining room table for us to have a reunion meal at (burritos, which Dan cooked for us).

It’s actually kind of amazing how much that was foreign to me last year is second nature now. I made pretty short work of a trip to the grocery store today knowing:

1. How to use a coin to release a shopping cart
2. The eggs aren’t refrigerated
3. I need to buy 2 of the small cartons of milk unless I want to go back the very next day
4. Which of the 25 brands of yogurt we like
5. How to navigate the bread aisle
6. Which of the many types of cream is good for my coffee (now that I have become a coffee drinker)

...and now that I am an expert grocery packer there was no stress at the checkout line.

I also had a mission committee meeting tonight at the church. Heading to the church across town was originally a major outing, but tonight it was just a matter of seeing which S-bahn I needed to catch in order to get there on time. Then I just hopped on my bike 15 minutes before, made the short ride to the station, parked, locked up, and met the arriving train. On the long train ride I worked on this blog entry! And when the meeting was over I came straight back, no problems, by myself, been there done that.

I imagine that more and more things will jump out at me that are so much easier now than they used to be. I am so thankful for this, and appreciative of each thing I do that isn't hard!! One thing that is still intimidating is the mail. I have a large stack of it that piled up while I was gone. Each letter needs to be translated so I can figure out if there is action required. Ugh. I was thinking of paying the kids to do it, I wonder if they would think it was fun?

Aside from the two outings I mentioned, I have spent most of my time either sleeping (8 hour time difference = jet lag) or unpacking. We stuffed 6 bags FULL of stuff to bring here with us. I went clothes shopping for the kids, I bought some medicines and supplies that are hard to get here, plus we brought back a ton of food items we wanted to have here: 2 5-pound bags of chocolate chips from Costco, 3 boxes of Cracklin Oat Bran, 6 cans of chopped green chilies, 2 bags of brown sugar, a 3-pound bag of pancake mix, an enormous bottle of vanilla, etc. I also brought as much food as we could carry that was leftover in our pantry and just needs to be eaten: cans of tuna and chili, spices, snack bars, pudding, cake mix, Goldfish, oatmeal, etc. I even brought several partial bags of dog treats! We had 3 bags packed just over 50 lbs that squeaked through check-in, plus 3 duffel bags stuffed so full I was afraid the zippers would pop. I spent several days packing and repacking the bags until they each held as much as could possibly be held. I should have taken a picture of all the loot! Anyway, I am ALMOST finished unpacking and putting everything away. I had to go out today to buy more hangers because we didn't have nearly enough for all the clothes we brought back!

I also managed to bathe the cat today. It has been scorching hot and I brushed about a pound of loose fur off of him. I endured him screeching and peeing in the bathtub (that's a first!) and put him outside to dry. In this heat he was almost completely dry in about an hour. Dan had bathed Diablo before we came, so I didn't have to subject him to that torture. The park at the end of our street looks strangely fall-like, which was incongruous with the heat, but I realized it's not fall colors - the leaves are turning brown and falling off because they are withering in the heat. Many of the plants in our yard have died, and the ones that are still green are hanging limp. There is supposed to be rain this weekend, the first rain in weeks. Hopefully it will actually come. It is oppressively hot during the days and of course the house has no AC, but the nice thing is that it does cool down at night. And, in contrast to Missoula where the heat of the day is 6 or 7 p.m., here by that time of night it is cooling and becoming pleasant. 

I'm glad we have a few weeks before school starts and we get into the busy routine. There is plenty of planning and organizing to be done, but at the moment I'm taking it slow.

Crashed in Copenhagen

Sunrise/sunset? over Iceland