9 to 5 - Nine Weeks to Five Countries

Aloha all,

I’ll be honest: Even though we made it to five countries during our nine weeks in Europe: Wherever we were, we spent a good chunk of that time eating and drinking with our friends & family. That’s why I don’t write weekly blog posts from Europe. As enjoyable as drinking and eating your way through Europe with friends can be, it would get pretty boring to read about it after the second pretzel or the third Hefeweizen. Or would you like to read about every chess game I played with my dad or every walk we took between meals? But we did plenty of more blog-worthy things:

Extended family on our traditional pilgrimage
 to our happy place at Les Alpages

For the very first time, we got to spend a full week at my parent’s favorite little hotel in the Jura region in France. That means: More time to enjoy each other’s company, more time for hiking and swimming in the lakes and more of our favorite food in the world…all without any of us ever having to do any dishes. Extra bonus of staying a whole week from my birthday to my dad’s birthday: We called it one big party and thus were able to celebrate our birthdays together for the first time.

The lake region in the French Jura

Wenn ich den See seh',
brauch' ich kein Meer mehr.

The main reason we return
to Les Alpages every year

On a second trip to the Alsace-Lorraine part of France, Sandra’s sister and mom joined us. That eliminates the hiking, but luckily there were plenty of botanical gardens to keep us busy for four days. And yes, they had great food there, too. 

The whole country of Switzerland, and my brother’s family in particular, were under the spell of the Women’s Euro 2025 soccer championships, which Switzerland hosted this year. How times have changed: Growing up in Germany, I don’t remember ever hearing about any women’s soccer championship. Now it is a really big deal: Sold out stadiums with tens of thousands of fans following their teams from game to game. 

Record setting crowd at the Women Euro 2025

First I got to see Germany win against Denmark with my dad, securing a spot for Germany in the quarter finals. Then I got to join my brother and his Dutch friends for the Netherland-France game. It was a lot of fun, but as much as I like the color orange, we probably would have had even more fun, had we gone with some of our French friends… 

"Dutch for a Day" with my brother & co

Dutch "Fan Walk" to the stadium in Basel

And for those of our American friends who think that soccer is a boring, low scoring game: We saw seven goals. If soccer were scored like American football, it would have been 35-14 in roughly the time it takes to play two quarters. And the women don’t even spend as much time rolling around on the ground in agony as the men often do.

Over Sandra’s sister’s birthday, we took a six day trip to the Allgäu region in Germany and the Bregenzer Wald region in Austria. Obviously, traveling with a mostly wheelchair-bound 90-year-old is somewhat limited; but I’d be thrilled if I still get to travel like that in 2060. 

Ravensburg - home of the famous game company
and one of those picturesque towns 

In the Allgäu we explored the picturesque towns of Ravensburg, Ottobeuren, Memmingen and Kempten. All with lots of history, impressive churches and plenty of good food.

The sky adds to the impressive
architecture of the basilica in Kempten

The basilica in Ottobeuren was the most impressive of all the impressive churches. The grandeur of the architecture, the beauty of the art and then the power of the organ music was overwhelming. I can only imagine how impressed people must have been at a time before amplified music and the constant overstimulation of our modern times. 

Basilica in Ottobeuren
just another small town church
 that I had never heard of before

In Austria, we took full advantage of the lift tickets that were included in our hotel package. We took five different gondolas and chair lifts up and down five different mountains. 

Paraglider at the Diedamskopf
in the Austrian Alps

It would have been fun to go hiking or even paragliding, but it was also fun to hear Emma enthusiastically claim that she has “never seen so many mountains in all her life”. It was so cute, I refrained from pulling up the pictures from a few years ago, when we took her up into the Swiss Alps with even more mountains.

"More mountains than Emma has seen in 90 years"

Both the hotels we stayed at had very nice wellness areas. We got used to spending a couple of hours a day in the saunas and steam rooms. That’s the type of vacation I want to take should I ever get a real stressful job. But it was very enjoyable even without the need of letting go of all that stress.

Sandra doing well(ness)

On our way home, we stopped for a tour at our favorite schnaps distillery: The Prinz Feinbrennerei in Hörbranz in Austria. In wise foresight, we had booked rooms within walking distance of the distillery, since the tour included a very generous tasting. 

10+ kinds of Schnaps...and no headache!

We learned a lot about the history of the company, the distilling process and why their Schnaps doesn’t cause any headaches. This was proven by us sampling at least ten different flavors and still waking up without a headache the next morning. 

Unexpected side trip to Spain

Thanks to some serendipitously well aligned stars, we were able to spend four days with our friends in Spain. They’ve been going to the same campground on the Mediterranean coast by Calella for decades. After hearing about it for so long, we were very grateful that we finally got to experience their second home ourselves.

Viva Espana!

On our way to the airport, we had some hours to explore Barcelona. I was excited to check on the Sagrada Familia Basilica; after having seen it under construction over 30 years ago. It’s still not finished, but they made some impressive progress. Gaudi was a gifted architect: The Sagrada Familia is instantly recognizable as a church, even though it looks very different from any other church I have ever seen anywhere else in the world.

Sagrada Familia - the most impressive church
 I have ever seen anywhere

We had a very close-knit group of friends in college and one of our nieces now lives in Munich, so we spent an extended weekend there. As the capital of Bavaria, this obviously included even more “Bier & Brezen”, but we also joined the festivities for the city’s 867th birthday and a summer solstice celebration in Unterhaching with a huge bonfire.

Biergarten Gemütlichkeit (go, look it up!)

With Linnea, Torben & Sir James
at the Nymphenburg Castle

Traditional solstice festival
in Unterhaching

Sandra and I thought that we had a fairly international wedding since we had guests from France and from Chicago. Now we went to a party for Sandra’s cousin’s son’s wedding, which was international on a different level: His wife is from China, but she lived in Finnland and they now live in Denmark. We only talked to a few of the wedding guests, but they all had stories involving at least three different countries. 

The happy German-Chinese
couple from Denmark

We continued the tradition of “Pinot & Rock”, the music festival in my little hometown, Breisach am Rhein. Not sure how, but after the Scorpions and Alice Cooper last year, they managed to lure Lynyrd Skynyrd and Melissa Etheridge to the German hinterland. We were thrilled that our Maui friends Karine and Ovick were able to join us again. In my view, “Freebird” is one of the most iconic rock songs of all times. And since Willie K is not around anymore, seeing Lynyrd Skynyrd perform it, was the next best thing.

Pinot & Rock in Breisach with Lynyrd Skynyrd,
Ovick, Petra, Melissa Etheridge and Karine

My favorite German band when I grew up was BAP…and it still is. How amazing that Wolfgang Niedecken is still at it after all these years. They are currently on a tour appropriately called “Zeitreise” (‘Time Travel’): They only play songs they wrote at least 40 years ago. They played for 3 1/2 (!) hours and we knew every single song and apparently so did just about everyone else in the crowd. They have a bit of a cult following. Some of those songs I had not heard in decades, so it really felt like time traveling. What a treat!

BAP - my all time favorite band

There are some venues that are so spectacular that I’d go see almost anything there. The Naturbühne Steintäle in Fridingen is such a place. It’s a theater built into a little, green canyon. Think Red Rocks, just cuter and much smaller, but equally spectacular. They performed “Jekyll & Hyde”, which we feel is a timeless masterpiece. Just like when we saw it on Maui a few years ago, we were amazed that one actor can play such polar opposite roles so convincingly.

"Jekyll & Hyde" at the Steintäle Naturbühne

Sigmaringen is not even an hour from Sandra’s hometown. It has a spectacular castle that is still owned by the descendants of the royal bloodline of the Hohenzollern dynasty. I doubt that the 15 euros for the tour cover the cost of maintaining that castle. But even though they don’t live there anymore, apparently the current owners did not want to be the ones selling it to some sheik after 1,000 years of family tradition. 

We also learned that Sigmaringen was technically the capital of France for a few months towards the end of World War II, when the nazi-backed French government was brought here while the Allies liberated France. That might be handy to know for some future game or trivia night. We really should play tourists more often, even when we are in familiar areas.

At the Hohenzollern Schloss in Sigmaringen

A few more rounds of schnaps and we are at the end of our two months in Europe. Since we gain over a pound per week,  maybe it’s about time to leave before we need to replace our entire wardrobe. I already don't need a belt anymore, but my sweat pants still fit. 

It’s never enough time to see everyone as much as we like, but we also really enjoy our time on the road and eventually, we want to return to Maui, which is still where we feel most at home. 

And that’s the news from Lake Europe, where all the old memories are strong, all the food is good looking and all the weeks go by faster than average.

Aloha,

Chris & Sandra