So my last trip to Germany was quite a whirlwind. That little cliche doesn’t seem to do it justice, but unfortunately my banal and sophomoric command of the English language doesn’t afford me a better way to describe it. It was my longest trip yet at 3 and a half weeks, and included the requisite 200 hours of work and travel, not to mention trips to both Paris and Prague. And I still somehow managed to find the time to fall for a beautiful girl along the way. It was an amazing trip, and frankly, I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it.
Here’s a little peek at my 25-day European foray.
I was sent to work here:
The Schwandorf waste incinerator plant.
But turns out this place is a little different from my usual power plants… Instead of burning coal, they burn this:
Trash. Astonishing amounts of trash.
That made things a little more difficult than normal.
A bunch of this shit wasn't working.
And that made this:
A damn-near fully functional lasery-measurey-thingy.
Look like this:
A much less than damn-near fully functional lasery-measurey-thingy.
It meant a few extra days here:
but after 14 days in the power plant, and one day off in…
Glendo and I, with a lot of help from our software homies, got everything working. From there I headed 5 hours west to:
for a week of actual vacation time in Europe. In Bergheim I met up with my favorite KGB agent who is currently masquerading as a German bartender…
Miss Lotta Müller. That's a fake name of course.
And after a couple of nights of hanging out here:
Best, the bar in which she works. It's easily the best bar in Bergheim, and it's where we met on my last trip to Deutschland,
we hopped in the rental car and headed another 468 kilometers southwest and ended up here:
There we made like a shitty romantic comedy and…
fell pretty hard for each other.
And after two days that were quite possibly the best of my life, we made the long trip back here:
The Hotel Meyer in Bergheim.
After a couple of disturbingly wonderful days of doing pretty much nothing with Ms. Müller, I took off for the Frankfurt airport with a happy but heavy heart for this:
The long-ass flight home.
After about 15 hours of this:
I was finally back where I started 25 days earlier…
Denver International Airport.
Since my return, I’ve gone to work in only the most literal sense, and spent the rest of my time sitting around in a haze of jet-lag and lonely wondering what the hell just happened. I guess it’s kind of like that feeling you get after finishing an amazing book, when you’re left awestruck, flipping through the pages hoping there’s a couple there at the end you might have missed. Thankful for what just transpired, but frustrated as all hell that it’s over.
It’s going to be hard to go back to cubicle life after this one.
-B. Littleton
