With work, out of town visitors and life all pouring heaps of activity into my life I fear I'm never going to have time to write a proper post about the trip we took to Germany with my parents so I'm just going to brain dump quickly so I can refer back to it later.

Here's a quick summary of our German trip:

1. Flew into Düsseldorf to visit our old house and haunts
2. Drove to Ilsenburg in the Harz mountains to stay for a few days.  From Ilsenburg we took a day trip to Goslar (home to some of Paula's ancestors) did some hiking and visited Wernigerode.
3. Drove to Hamburg, toured the massive harbor and saw some of the town.
4. Drove to Lübeck to stay a night and tour the old town
5. Drove north to check out the Baltic Sea then south through Schwerin to stay in Berlin for a couple nights.

It was a fantastic trip and a great chance to spend some quality time with my parents.  About the only complaint we had was that there are no smoking restrictions in Germany, so no matter where you go you are going to be sucking in lots of second-hand smoke.  It's not ideal, but you just gotta deal.

Oh, and Tami, you might be able to eat off the streets on weekdays but not on weekends.  They don't sweep the streets on weekends.  When we were walking around Lübeck the local guide told us the streets were filthy because they don't sweep on weekends (I just figured they were filthy because people couldn't be bothered to use trash cans).