Nevok’s Keep

When you pick up any Rand McNally street map, go search for roads that have green dots alongside them. This is the indication that this route is scenic. The Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia is all green dots, for example.

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Pity we had to check out of the Radisson and not take it with us. I just love their beds, the dial-a-yield kind of thing. Not that I’d need the diversity, just patch it up to 100 and I am good. Yeah, I could just as well sleep on the ground, but I just love a firm underground, those soft, sink-in squishy things…so not my up of tea.

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Hands down, one of the best things you can do for getting an initial introduction to a new city is taking a bus tour. If it is in a double decker with the hop on/hop off functionality and a guide who knows what he is doing…it’s great. So we try to do this whenever we have the possibility.

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Not too many people know that as a toddler, I was mainly raised at the family owned drug store. It was the old kind of drugstore where you got your baby diapers, camomille and other herbs for your own tea, hair colorations and perfume, before all the big chains opened in my hometown and crushed these mom-and-pop shops. It was founded by my grandfather and later managed by my mom and I was raised either at my stay-home grandmom’s or the drugstore until I was six and my family wisely sold the store before it could go belly-up.

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So, today we had our work cut out for us. First, we had to pick up the rental.

Sounds easy, don’t it? As always, we had, through the German equivalent of AAA, booked a car. A compact, which always results in something like a Ford Focus, Toyota Corolla, etc. For an economy, we do seem to end up with a Hyundai Accent, which, considering the size, also is a really decent car, albeit a bit bland, but, hey, it IS an economy after all.

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Ok, the beginning of this vacation compared to the other trips to Virginia, Florida and Arizona was strange. Good experiences and bad followed in such close succession that after all, life was good. It started relatively uneventful with a relaxed trip to the airport in Düsseldorf at a moderate early morning time.

We did an electronic check-in, which is rather time consuming when you travel to the U.S…. and our boarding passes wouldn’t print. The weather outside: sunny with a chance of obstacles. The first leg to Amsterdam was ok with plenty of legroom. But our plane was a little late and we only had 40 minutes to catch our next plane.

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5 AM CET: The alarmclock goes down without mercy. Yeah, I have to do some last minute packing, don’t I ever? A quick shower helps getting awake at least, considering how warm the bedroom was this night, it also helps feling like a human being again. Not that it’ll make much of a difference considering how long we will be on our way to Seattle…

6 AM CET: Picking up mother-in-law to return our car from the airport. So unfair, she looks way more awake than I do. Bah. Some people are morning people. Not that I wouldn’t be one, too, just that my mornings start in the two digit range preferably…10 AM is a great time, really

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Having had a rather good appointment across the border in the Netherlands today, I will elaborate on that one sometime in the future, I started my cellphone while crossing the border to give Mel the good news.

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…at least that was the idea behind it.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

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Would you believe that apparently there is no such thing as a song, at least easy to google, about Phoenix? I did find a song about Arizona by The Scorpions but, well, what can I say, a one night stand in a car is not quite what I want to have as a headline….

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