Vacation Time!

     A number of you, including my sister-in-law, JoAnn, have questioned our commitment to actually working here in Freiburg. We post a lot of pictures of places we've been, sights we've seen, and we've been (jokingly) accused of being on vacation out here, and not doing much in the way of real missionary work. All I have to say in our defense is that this post will do nothing to disprove any of those allegations.

    August is THE month for vacations here in Germany. There are lots of cars towing trailers and lots of those rented motor homes clogging the roads all through southern Germany and Switzerland. Friends of ours here have taken off to Italy, the Balearic Islands (Mallorca, Menorca, and Ibiza, vacation islands in the Mediterranean belonging to Spain), and even the Maldives. This is an island nation off the southwestern tip of India, and is becoming quite popular.

    As far as we're concerned, our prime responsibility is to feed the Young Adults after Institute class on Wednesday nights, but they take their summer hiatus in (you guessed it) late July and all of August. So, with our duties greatly reduced, we planned a few outings. 

    Firstly, we took the train to Amsterdam to meet our eldest and youngest, Anna and Katy, at the beginning of their sojourn around Europe.

    This was a two-day stop, and we went to Anne Frank's house, where she hid with her family for two years before being captured. We then took a boat tour on the canals of Amsterdam, which was restful, and Leesa and the girls continued on to the Rijksmuseum.

    It should be noted that Leesa is her daddy's girl, and like him, she likes to examine every single exhibit in a museum and read every plaque in the building. Leesa's mother, on the other hand, got bored easily, and daughter Anna clearly sided with her grandmother. Leesa wanted to spend the rest of the day exploring the museum, but Anna gave her 45 minutes, and that was final. So Leesa spent every one of those minutes on the floor with all the Rembrandt paintings.

    I was tuckered out, and had gone to the hotel for a nap, and we later met the girls and found a good restaurant for dinner. We breakfasted the next day with them, and then onto the train back to Freiburg, while they journeyed on to Athens.

    Most of you know that we spent our first missions in the Frankfurt mission back in the 70s. Leesa only had two cities, Koblenz and Haßloch. One of her fond memores from Koblenz was the evening of the Rhein in Flammen (Rhine in Flames), an odd celebration which takes place on the second Saturday in August, and which commemorates the charming practice of the looting and burning of castles along the Rhein. 

    Leesa's first experience at this was back in 1977. Koblenz was a six-missionary district then (two now). The district met at the riverside quay, and they played Charades until 9 p.m., when darkness fell and the big castle, Ehrenbreitstein, was illuminated in red phosphorus while fireworks zoomed overhead.

    She wanted to recreate this experience (I drew the line at Charades), and instead booked a river cruise, from which we could see several of the towns and castles up and down the river. Plus dinner was served on board.

(Ehrenbreitstein in "flames.")

    Next morning, Sunday, a wonderful treat awaited her. We found the branch of the Church in Koblenz and made our way to the chapel. She was certain that nobody there would remember her from the vantage point of 45 years. I have been blessed to meet with some people I knew from my mission, and I was hoping and praying that she could have that opportunity as well.

    Back in 1977, she knew a family, the Konifkas, who of course were a lot younger then. The young couple had a bit of wanderlust, so they got the romantic idea of driving up and down North and South America in a VW bus. Just before they left, though, the encountered a couple of young missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The young Elders presented them with a Book of Mormon, which they took with them on their trip to the New World.

    The drove indeed from the tip of Argentina all the way to Alaska, and goodness knows how many places in between, and they did this over the course of an entire year. Along the way, they read to each other from the Book of Mormon in the quiet evenings, and became convinced of the truth of its content. 

    By the time they reached Salt Lake City, one of the Elders who had given them the book had since been released from his mission, and they met with him and were baptized into the Church. They eventually ended their odyssey, and returned to Koblenz, where they met Leesa.

    So we showed up in the Koblenz branch, and there was Sister Konifka!

    Leesa had been afraid that they had immigrated to the U.S.A, but no, they remained in Koblenz, raised their children in the Church, some of whom themselves served missions. They had a wonderful reunion.

    We had one day at home, then we were off again for a week this time, and Leesa wanted to see the former Nazi concentration camp, one of the first, in Dachau, just northwest of Munich. They don't allow photography there (for good reason), and we found it very moving. 

    The next morning we were off to one of my big "bucket-list" items, Berchtesgaden, about an hour and a half southeast of Munich. This is where I pulled off one of my infrequent travel-related miracles, when we checked into the Alpenvilla Berchtesgaden Hotel, on the side of a mountain, overlooking the town. It was sumptuous! 

    We had booked a suite, very roomy, with an "L"-shaped balcony which offered a spectacular view of the entire valley. The following shots were taken from the balcony from left to right. 

    All strung together, this is the view that greeted us all day, every day. We'd just sit on the balcony with our mouths gawping open. Now, in the top picture, you see a tree-covered mountain on the left. The second shot, zoomed in, shows Hitler's Kehlsteinhaus (KAYL-shtine-house) on top.

    He was not the reason that this stop was so important to me. I'm a big fan of the 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers, which follows a company of paratroopers from their formation in Georgia, their training, their involvement in the D-Day invasion, and on through Europe fighting the Germans, including the Battle of the Bulge. They were so successful and accomplished, they drew the plum assignment, at war's end, of being the first into Berchtesgaden and into the Kehlsteinhaus.

    In the 1930s, the Nazi brass got together and had the house built as a birthday present for their Führer. You can only get to it through a 200-foot tunnel dug into the mountain, and then up what was then a gold-plated elevator (It has since been re-plated with brass). Hitler had a fear of heights (the house sits at 8200 feet), and he only visited it eleven times. All of the Nazi leadership had homes in the area (Hermann Göring had a massive wine cellar with about 10,000 of the finest wines, liquors, and champagnes from around the world). All of their homes were destroyed after the war, save the Kehlsteinhaus.

(Brass (formerly gold) Elevator)

(Tunnel on the right, anteroom for elevator on left)

(Main rotunda, with fireplace)

("Standing Fast" portico)

        Leesa and I walked down the tunnel (all the walls were wet) to the elevator, and it opened out near the main rotunda, seen here with tables and chairs, as it's been turned into a restaurant. In the same shot, you see the fireplace, made of Italian marble, donated by Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

    Directly behind the camera leads to what I call the "Standing Fast" portico. Episode Ten of Band of Brothers shows Easy Company entering the Kehlsteinhaus. Shortly afterward, you see the officers of Easy relaxing on chaise lounges in the portico. The episode was shot on location, and on the extreme left you can see windows, installed for safety reasons. For the episode, the windows were removed, as were the informational boards on the right.

    Major Richard Winters, former commander of Easy, enters the portico, where the officers, mostly drunk, are relaxing. He brings the news that the German Army had surrendered, and that the European war was over. He reads orders from Division (the famed 101st Airborne) that all personnel are to "stand fast at their posts." Captain Lewis Nixon, Winters' good friend, and the Battalion Intelligence officer, grins and throws a mock salute, "standing fast, sir!" 

    The men of Easy are such an example to me of men who sacrificed and suffered, almost passing credibility, to keep our freedom intact. I need to honor them and what they did, and I wanted to be, just for awhile, in a place where they were.

    We spent three days in Berchtesgaden. Leesa wanted to visit a salt processing facility in nearby Bad Reichenhall, but I took a nap after the Kehlsteinhaus, and woke up too late in the day to see either that or the local castle. "We're finding a yarn store," and that came in the kind of tone that wasn't a request, so off we went to downtown Berchtesgaden to the "Woll Oase" (Wool Oasis) for her fix.

    We made it to the salt refinery the next morning, where it has drawn salt from a deep undergroung salt pool for centuries. Leesa then took on the castle while I rested.

    We were sorry to leave our suite, but on Saturday we headed to nearby Salzburg, former home of the von Trapps from The Sound of Music.

    They used to have guided tours of the villa, but Covid put an end to that, so this is the closest we could get. By this time, we were getting homesick for Freiburg, and in retrospect, we both wished we had gone home from Berchtesgaden. We're naturally homebodies, and three or four days is about all we're going to enjoy away from home. We stopped in Innsbruck, Austria, to break up the long drive to Freiburg, and we were so glad to get back to our apartment.

    The calendar has turned to September, and tomorrow night is our first Young Adult/Institute dinner for the fall. We got to celebrate birthdays for the two sister missionaries living on the floor above us.

    We love being back to work, if you can call cooking "work;" it's my idea of heaven. And we love celebrating missionaries' birthdays, Sister Payte Reynolds was first off, and she wanted BEEF. So I found some good ribeye, roasted some potatoes, and made a BIG cheesecake. With raspberries. Sister Makenna Kunz wanted lasagna, so we did that, along with garlic bread. For dessert, she wanted chocolate chip cookies, and we had a raft of them, homemade, with all the milk they wanted for dipping.

We have a lot of plans for the remainder of the year, but that's another post. This one's gone on too long as it is. See y'all next time!