Glad you made it! Following along on your adventures.

wow...
try doing that with a bicycle ;-)

Oh boy, those train dramas.
Feeling your pain.

Oh, man, Ann! One stressful trip. I hope you were well pampered after that.

You'll have to wait to find out! Of course I did have to get a train back to Dusseldorf so.......

Thanks for all your kind railway thoughts - and trains will feature again later in my story.

Waking quite late the next morning, I discovered that R was already up and about and preparing what turned out to the the first of several very lavish breakfasts. Being frugal folk, R and her husband P tend to eat hearty breakfasts and dinners at home, and to economise when they eat out. This led to a few problems a few years ago [the first time that Bill and I had stayed with them for quite a long time] as we were doing the typical British thing of not eating too much at breakfast in order to be polite, expecting to buy lunch when we were out. Not a bit of it! In the end we cottoned on and stopped being polite which made life easier.

Reading over my thread I realised that I haven't actually explained who these friends are. When I was at school, at about age 13 I started to learn German and the next year, our teacher who had a friend who taught English in Germany, provided a pen friend for anyone who wanted one. Completely randomly I was given R as my penfriend and we started to write to each other, me in German and she in English. I learnt that she lived in a part of Germany called the Pfalz [the bit north of Alsace and west of the Rhine called the Palatinate in English when we call it anything at all], and that she lived on a tobacco farm with her younger border Hans, her parents, an aunt and her paternal grandparents. My dad, who had himself learnt German at school, came up with the idea that in the summer we should go on a touring holiday of what was then called "the Continent" and with the help of the RAC, plotted a route through France and Germany which would take us to their house for a visit. To this day neither R nor I can remember whether they knew we were coming but on one very hot Sunday afternoon we, my dad, mum and I, arrived outside their house and knocked on the door. I have the impression that they must have known we were coming because we were greeted very warmly, plied with Kaffee und Kuchen, given a tour of the outbuildings and farm, including the Tabakschuppen [a type of barn where the leaves were dried which are seen all over this part of Germany] and I remember very distinctly her grandfather showing my dad where the tanks had rolled over the fields, though whose tanks they were, if I ever knew, I have completely forgotten. Apart from her none of R's family spoke English [though her dad understood some because he'd been a British POW in northern Germany after he'd been taken prisoner after fighting on the Eastern Front against the USSR] and only dad and I spoke German, and that not very well, at least in my case . However we all got on well and just "clicked". So this was just the first of many visits I have made to see R including attending her wedding to P a few years later, and of hers to visit me, including my wedding to Bill a few years after that. All thanks to our teachers randomly choosing us to write to each other!

Anyway, back to breakfast! As well as the usual selection of Wurst [german sausage] there were boiled eggs, tomato and cucumber [not my favourite breakfast food I must admit] radishes and [new to me] large chunks of hot Weisswurst which I was told is a particular speciality of a local prize winning butcher. Later in my stay they discovered that it would soon be closing down because no-one could be found to take it over and the owners wanted to retire. How sad especially as it means that P will have to go further afield for his favourite Weisswurst. We also had tea for breakfast instead of their usual coffee - over the years they have come to like "proper english tea" which I made with some teabags I had brought from home, knowing that whatever they had would not hit the spot in quite the same way as Twinings English Breakfast.

I don't really remember what we did after that but in the early afternoon we took a very short excursion to a nearby town where a local gardener had been awarded a national TV prize as part of a programme called "Garten und Lecker" which broadly translated means "Gardens which taste good". The format is that with the help of designer and cook, the gardener entertains 7 fellow gardeners picked from all over Germany for their gardening and cooking prowess who then award points for best garden, best food, etc etc. Now i don't know about you, but I had been imagining a very well tended garden with well manicured lawns and orderly if not regimented borders. Not a bit of it. This garden was just this side of haphazard, with windy paths, a plethora of different styles, materials and colours all placed next to each other, plants crammed in seemingly at random, and lovely secret sitting places with lots of water features and climbing plants especially roses. It was, to borrow a phrase from a character in "Porridge", a riot of colour. There were also a number of tables and a cafe serving food made from the vegetables and fruit grown in that garden which had qualified it for the programme. It was a wonderful little oasis on green calm and it was no wonder to me that it had won, though of course I hadn't seen the competition.

While we were exploring we came across the owner who was immensely chatty [unfortunately mostly in Pfaelzisch which is the local dialect with which I struggle] but I got the gist, and when my friends said that I was from England he was extremely keen to introduce me to his partner who he said had recently been on an english language course in Cornwall. Well it turned out that he'd been in Bournemouth not Cornwall but no matter, he had obviously had a terrific time and loved England and the English with a passion which was lovely to hear.

After an hour or two even we had had enough [ they are both as keen on gardens as I am] so we drove to the nearby home of their DS, DIL and 4 year old GD who were expecting us for tea - or rather Kaffee und Kuchen - which in this case was a delicious Zwetschgekuchen made from local damsons. Their GD was most upset when I sat in the "wrong" chair at the table but I moved to let her Opa [grandfather] sit there and peace was restored. She was rather wary of me at first but by the end of the week we were getting very well. Her parents who both speak vey good english are teaching her too so I will be sending them a few books for her to learn from as they are not easy to find there. After that we walked over to the Rhine to see how low it was [much lower than on my previous visit 3 or so years before] and then went home for supper. No idea what we had except I suspect that it featured meat and potatoes of which R is inordinately fond .

Tomorrow - and now for something completely different.

What a lovely way to make a new friend Ann. No one seems to have pen friends any more do they? I had on in the then communist Czechoslovakia. No idea how we came to be penfriends but we were and remained so for a long time. Around the time of the break up of the Communist bloc she stopped writing. I never found out what happened to her. Even in the Prague Spring she had managed to get letters to me telling me about it.
We were also all assigned a French penfriend in school (German wasn't an option there sadly), but we didn't click and it petered out after a few letters.
It sounds like you had an enjoyable time after the train stress. Looking forward to more.

I also loved the story of your pen friend annhig, brought back memories of mine from when we were in school. Her name was Anne, but for the life of me I can’t remember her last name! We corresponded right through high school, but it petered out once we got to college, don’t know why.

Yes heti, no one has pen friends any more, nowadays kids are on Instagram, etc. Perhaps you can try to find your friend on Facebook, I reconnected with several old school friends after 45+ years! Social media does have its used 😉

Love it. So good to have lifelong friends like that, too.

Me too!

Can't wait to read more about your trip, annhig!

Really enjoying your tale of lovely friends, huge hearty breakfasts (not my favorite either), unexpected gardens and mystery suppers. Can't wait to read about your next Monty Python adventure.