This weekend Ms. Müller and her crazy family were kind enough to take me along on their family outing to Speyer. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re not alone; I hadn’t either until a few days ago. It’s a little town on the Rhine of around 50,000 people not too far from Frankfurt. On Friday night, we all piled in the car and drove a couple of hours south to our hotel room. We had dinner that night, and headed out in the morning to take a little boat trip on the Rhine.
I had absolutely no idea what to expect. Whenever Ms. Müller, or anyone else in Germany for that matter, invites me to go somewhere, my initial reaction is gratitude, soon followed by: ‘I wonder what the fuck that is.’ I’ve spent some time out here for sure, but in the scheme of things, it hasn’t been nearly long enough for me to have informed opinions about much of anything. Also, stuff in Germany has profoundly German names. Like, all of it. So getting invited to Schwandorf, Speyer, or Stuttgart all sound pretty similar, and I know a similar amount about each of them: not much. In reality, that’s sort of like getting invited to Dodge City, Kansas, Fort Collins, Colorado, or Chicago, Illinois, so as far as I was concerned, a little trip to Speyer could have meant anything.
But I did know that Ms. Müller would be there, and her family too, and strangely enough, I’ve taken a liking to these crazy krauts. It’s not like I had anything better to do, so I tagged along and it turned out to be a pretty good time. I’m glad they were kind enough to bring me along. As happens with some regularity out here, I spent a moment or two in disbelief. 5 years ago as I delivered pizza and finished up my English degree at CU, I never thought I’d end up on the deck of a boat motoring around the Rhine…
Anywho, here’s some pictures from our first stop, an hour boat trip around the Rhine:
-
- Here we are at the docks…
-
- Nice to see that America doesn’t have a monopoly on tricked out RVs with satellite tv…
-
- Down we go.
-
- The view from the deck of our ‘mini-yacht’ as they called it. I’m not Kanye West, so it suited me just fine…
-
- Pretty stuff…
-
- My crazy girlfriend’s crazy mother’s crazy boyfriend decided to go for a swim… It was only 70 or 75 that day, had to be cold… Something tells me he just needed to take a leak.
-
- And one last little guy of the river…
That’s all for now, more from Speyer and this here little boat trip coming before long.
Don’t be a stranger.
-B. Littleton
