Having a huge family is great & very fortunate. Enjoy the family while you can.

One year ago, at my granddads funeral, we decided to start an annual family festival. This weekend was the first one. It was fantastic! We all loved it so much that the date for the next get together in 2023 is already set!

All aunts & uncles, cousins, nieces & nephews from my mums side. In total 30 people somehow related to each other having a great time. The youngest guest: 9 months, the oldest 90 years!

Coffee & cake. Games & talks. Home brewed beer, Ahrtal wine & Jan Torf (the killer). Super delicious BBQ and more talks.

My uncle celebrating his big birthday from 1 year ago.

Love you all, looking forward to seeing you soon again!

PS: I’ll be the driver next year. Hangover all day today. Meh!

The school celebrated 70 years. Our class celebrated 22 years! A high school reunion.

I haven’t seen most of my mates for 22 years… in fact this was my very first reunion…

Didn’t we all ask ourselves what to wear (get over it if you didn’t achieve perfect abs, your ideal weight, perfect hair, perfect life, no one really cares that much. And if they did, they didn’t show…. Lol)!

The experience was a bit like speed dating: We all talked a lot. I tried to talk to everyone. It’s like a bunch of interrupted mini conversations and all about the good old times: Ex-boyfriends (or girlfriends). Teachers. Old stories. Out trip to Hamburg. Skiing in 8th grade. A lot of laughing. The good old times. Facebook was a bit of a spoiler alert. Lol.

We took a tour of our old school. A lot has changed.

It’s nice to be back and being reminded about great memories. It was my favorite school & favorite teenager time! Our high school years may not define us.. but they did help shape us into the person we are today. Our next plan: let’s not pass another 22 years by.

Many thanks to our reunion organizers, putting a lot of hours into contacting everyone and making this happen. THANK YOU!

If you are on the fence about going to your high school reunion..: go! You’ll be glad that you did. So am I. 22 years. Wow!

It was really good to see everyone.

Summer. Hair gets lighter. Skin gets darker. Water gets warmer. Drinks get colder. Music gets louder. Nights get longer. Life gets better.

Every summer has a story. This is ours.

The pandemic is over. Yeah! At least according to our managers behavior. Why? After Covid is like before Covid: questioning if we do really work from home or if we hang out in the garden all day. Others may wonder if we still don’t dress when working from home.

You almost could feel sorry for all managers these days… working from home worked (had to work) for the past 2-2.5 years… and all of a sudden it has to be changed… the control freaks (including excel location control lists) are back, worried about us loosing creativity or our team spirit or the emotional connection to the company we work for.

If they could choose, most of them would want us back in the office 100%. Since most of us are not willing to do so (especially the younger generation wouldn’t even consider such employer), we started working hybrid. Ever heard of it? It’s the new „2-day-work-in-the-office-week“. Sounds like a great compromise, doesn’t it? Well, it seems not to work to everyones satisfaction (so far)!

Those, who wanted to return to the office go back for gossiping and talking, but not necessarily to work. Those are keeping the others, who actually want to work, from working (those prefer to work from home).

When I’m in the office these days I have so many „let’s have a coffee“ meetings, that I hardly have time to work! Also I’m talking to so many people on that day I haven’t been talking to in the past 6 months. The summary: office days make tired, you feel like you had an overdose on human face 2 face contact & communication and you didn’t get work done. That’s great, isn’t it?

Oh, and all the technical issues: the office equipment doesn’t work anymore since people took cables back home to set up their home office space. Or how about those on-site meetings when you still need to set up Skype or Teams to also include the international team members. Let’s not start about the not working equipment in meeting rooms and how much time we waste until it works and everyone can hear or see. By now everyone has a working headset at home (noise cancellation included). We also all learnt how to switch the microphone on or off.

At the end of the office day, most of us are wondering why did we travel to the office? Just to hang out in teams meetings like any other home office day? Not to forget that you had to get up earlier, dress properly, commute to the office, find a free desk and figure out how much longer the way to the restroom is and that the canteen food sucks.

If you do decide to work from the office it could happen you are the only one which feels like a ghost town (at least you could get some work done and have no coffee date excuses!). Alternatively you may not be able to find a free desk to sit on, because our management changed to a clean desk policy: first come, first serve – not enough room for everyone.

Our management tries hard: organizing all day team events in cool locations, dinner invitations to the beer garden after work, workshops on site, free ice-cream… (and most of those ending in multi-spreader-Covid-events followed by people on sick leave for a week)… and still… people don’t want to come back. At least not every day. We got used to work remotely.

Some companies, like Apple, changed already back from a 3-day-mandatory-office-week to a 2-day-mandatory-office-week. Other companies delaying the back to the office target due to increasing Covid numbers.

In the end, and to be fair, nobody controls if we are back in the office or on which days. That is leading to the result that the office is empty on Monday’s and Friday‘s and super busy in the middle of the week. Good for the virus to catch up & keep spreading on Wednesdays. Friendly reminder: The pandemic is not over yet!

It’s complicated! Times have changed. We all got used to a digital transformation (finally! Besides, we didn’t really have a choice). It took us a while to get used to work from home, so please provide us the time to get used to hybrid work.

Good luck to all managers out there in organizing hybrid work! I don’t mind to come back to the office for a couple of days per week but please stop controlling us, and rather let us know how much you appreciate us as a team and how beneficial it can be to meet again face to face: for team work! For brainstorming! Team Building! Socializing!

I checked the box for this week: 2 days in the office and got not much done (lol). My weekend bag is packed, I’ll work from my dads home tomorrow! See you (maybe) next Wednesday in the office!

Another rescheduled flight due to Covid. Instead of Easter 2020, we were seeing friends in the capital city in summer 2022!

Friends, art & beer – we had a fabulous time!

We heard & saw the seagulls. We smelt the ocean. We were lucky: 22C degrees and no rain! Yeah! A nice Irish summer weekend.

You simply can’t go to Dublin without stopping into a pub or eight… or „drink and be merry“ as the taxi driver says.

Did you know that it was women who started brewing beer & that pubs were for the working class? Yup, the abbreviation “pubs” stands for publics. And these public houses were a come one, come all enterprise specifically designed for the blue-collar, working class of Ireland.

Well, you cannot only hang around in pubs when in Ireland, so we also visited Van Gogh‘s „The Immersive Experience“. It’s been as interesting as the artist himself who severed a part of his own left ear with a razor after a confrontation with his friend…

I have always been impressed (and still am) by the many types of cream in Britain. Newest favorite: clotted cream.

• Clotted cream: at least 55% milkfat.

• Heavy cream: more than 36% milkfat.

• Whipping cream: 30% to 36% milkfat.

• Light cream: 18% to 30% milkfat.

• Sour cream: at least 18% milkfat.

• Half and half: 10.5% to 18% milkfat.

• Ice cream: more than 10% milkfat.

Great weekend seeing great friends again. Bye for now & hope to see you all soon in Germany again!

PS: traveling these days is a little different: flight preponed by 12 hours, next one delayed by 2 days. Airports are lacking of staff… you need a lot of patience! Well, we made it back, despite carrying the „wrong“ passport.

…and finally it hit us.

Jetlag. Back to work after 3 wonderful weeks of holiday. Maybe a weak immune system… not enough anti-bodies after the last vaccine booster 6 months ago… feeling tired… it would have never come to my mind that this was the beginning of Covid. Not exactly sure where we caught it, also it doesn’t really matter.

How did it start? Being very very tired. I would get up after a full night of sleep… and feel tired. So tired that I had to have sleep breaks in between my work meetings. Luckily, we still work from home… when I felt cold at 25C degrees room temperature I thought that something was wrong and it wasn’t just about missing the Phoenix temperatures…

My body became sore all over, I had a slightly increased temperature and just slept and slept and slept. That was Thursday.

Friday: pretty much same thing: just tired & all day sleeping. Coffee didn’t taste any good (hubby couldn’t taste lemon anymore…). And because of the rally (yes, at that point I still hoped to be the co-pilot next day), I tested myself: a very light 2nd line came up. Bummer. Shock. Surprise. I was positive! It would have never come to my mind that this was Covid. Hubby tested 5 minutes later positive, too.

I don’t remember much Saturday besides a second Covid test clearly showing a positive result: this time 2 very purple bars. I just slept all day. My voice was gone, nose started running, coughing, headache – the classic symptoms.

By Sunday night I had slept so much that I couldn’t fall asleep anymore. Cough became the worst. We had rum & honey at midnight followed by honey water (you try to mix up your own medicine if that’s all you got at home). Well, it helped.

On Monday morning I felt the first time “awake”. Cough became much better. Voice was back but sounded like Donald Duck. Nose still running. I lived through the day with only one little nap. Hey, that’s huge progress! Hubby tested again: still positive.

So that’s it. We were experiencing Covid. In a lot of ways, it’s a bad cold, a lot of respiratory symptoms, stuffy nose, coughing, body aches and fatigue. The good news: pizza delivery for dinner. Yeah!

Luckily I went grocery shopping to fill up the fridge after our holiday… We were also surprised about foodie treasures hidden in our freezer… or leftovers from previous parties…

Luckily, we had manageable symptoms, and I stick with earlier thoughts: it’s best to just not get it! We had it, we survived it. Apparently, now we have an increased risk for Parkinson or Alzheimer’s… oh, that’s great!

The five main VOCs include Alpha (B.1.1.7), Beta (B.1.31), Gamma (P.1), Delta (B.1.617.2) and Omicron (B.1.1.529). Besides we have sub-variants BA.1, BA.2, BA.2.12.1, BA.4 and BA.5 – when people are asking which variant we had? God knows and who cares? We don’t…

Thanks for the vaccine which we were lucky enough to have last year. Thanks family, friends & neighbors for checking on us (and the red wine recommendations from France…)!

It’s been a week since the first positive test… this morning we still tested positive… We still got symptoms but feel much better. Hoping for a soon end of quarantine.

To do: stock up on essentials again: rum, more rum, honey, medicine, tissues, etc.

Take care, stay healthy!

We should be „antibody boostered“ now for the next 4 weeks. Yeah!

When we were kids in the backyard
Playing astronauts and rock stars
No one told us to stop it
Called us unrealistic
Then suddenly you’re eighteen
Go to college for your Plan B
What you want is too risky
Live for weekends and whiskey

We all got these big ideas
One day they’re replaced with fears
How did we get here?

Darlin’ don’t quit your daydream
It’s your life that you’re making
It ain’t big enough if it doesn’t scare the hell out of you
If it makes you nervous
It’s probably worth it
Why save it for sleep when you could be
Living your daydream

Thirty-one waiting tables
She has the voice of an angel
Out of money and power
She only sings in the shower
All these things we say we’ll get to
Shot down by the reasons not to

Darlin’ don’t quit your daydream
It’s your life that you’re making
It ain’t big enough if it doesn’t scare the hell out of you
If it makes you nervous
It’s probably worth it
Why save it for sleep when you could be
Living your daydream

So scared of failure that we fail to try
Turnin’ around before the finish line
Gotta fall for a minute before you can fly

So daydream
It’s your life that you’re making
It ain’t big enough if it doesn’t scare the hell out of you
If it makes you nervous
It’s probably worth it
Why save it for sleep when you could be
Living your daydream

Why save it for sleep when you should be
Living your daydream

Songwriter is the amazing Lily Meola

Our road trip from east to west took us 2 weeks… but only 4 hours to fly back east! And here we are, back in good old South Carolina. It’s summer time, it’s hot & humid. We kind of forgot how that feels like (and no, we didn’t miss the humidity…).

„Hello, Y’all!“

Back “home” after 6 years. So many good memories coming back to our minds… that steak cooking class, Starbucks iced lemon loaf as a treat, learning how to make cake pops, parties at our house, hanging out at the pool with friends on weekends, my convertible Pontiac solstice (heat strokes included) and the fast & furious Camaro, being stopped by the sheriffs for speeding so many times (I’m still paranoid today), shopping and always paying less than expected (I still haven’t understood that concept yet), ribs, so tender they fall off the bone…

Seeing friends & colleagues and it feels like we never have left. So good to have seen y’all again! Driving by our old house (it’s still there, someone else is now living there, obviously). Finding old restaurants & plenty new ones. Sweating in the hot summer heat (37C degrees). Enjoying the A/C cooled buildings. It’s humid. Missed being called “honey” or “sweetheart “. Closing old bank accounts. Trying to get along with the southern accent, checking if favorite stores are still there… so many good memories!

3 days was not enough time, wish we could have stayed longer… missing y’all already!

Goodbye Greenville, Goodbye, America!

Taking back home many many awesome memories as well as beef jerky, chili spice, souvenirs for the family, the good old Levi’s jeans & a Hawaiian shirt and many other goodies 🇺🇸

Drive west onto Colorado Ave. until it ends at Santa Monica Pier. Then walk straight out on the pier…

Wow! Wow! Wow! We made it! We finished >4000km on the mother road and arrived at the end: Santa Monica, California. (Ehm, yes, there’s people out there who walked Route66 from LA to Chicago in 65 days… well… ok… wow!)

Route66: an American icon. The mother road was opened in 1926!

We started at Lake Michigan and we finished >4000km later at the pacific coast. We met many wonderful people along the road who all shared their story with us. A couple who celebrated their 42nd wedding anniversary. A family from Colorado in the Chicago train welcoming us to the States. A chatty barkeeper. Even chattier guests at the bar. The friendliest motel owners. Many Americans who traveled to Germany before happily sharing their story with us. Seeing good old friends along the way. A cool retired chef who worked in France before and shared delicious recipes with us. The hot air balloon pilot who lived in Germany before. The boss of an old diner who couldn’t believe to have us & an Italian couple as customers. Locals sharing recommendations with us. Eating Mexican next to a Japanese couple. That’s our experience. People talk. Worldwide. That’s what makes traveling so wonderful.

The end of an era: Dwight D. Eisenhower, future president of the United States, was not impressed with the efficiency of the Route66. While he was leading Allied troops into Germany during WW II, Eisenhower became enamored with the German Autobahn highway network, reinforcing his belief that America needed a better and more efficient road system. Super highways, with divided lanes, limited access and no stop signs were first built along Route66 in California and Illinois.

Ever since the birth of classic American roadways, small towns and their unique stops along the way have contributed to the iconic status of these old interstate corridors. Roadside communities hold on to treasured locations that define the culture of classic Americana. Thanks guys for keeping it up and making it a real adventure for us!

We fell in love with the mother road, the classic cars & motorcycles, the old gas stations, the food served in neon-lit diners, the ghost towns, the music, the story from a time which passed already many many years ago. It’s a journey through the heart of the country where the meals are homemade and the neon still glows that still kicks 35 years after being officially decommissioned.

Route66 – the symbol of a simpler America. We could have stayed twice as long, so much more to see and do… but we need a reason to come back, right?

Well, we have also seen places and hoped the car wouldn’t breakdown… That’s also part of the experience.

Thanks to my travel companion & husband for driving us safely & being so patient for many many many photo stops. So thankful that we were able & capable to make this trip together. One year ago it didn’t look like it.

Route 66 song from Nat King Cole

If you ever plan to motor west

Travel my way

Take the highway that’s the best

Get your kicks on Route 66

It winds from Chicago to LA

More than two thousand miles all the way

Get your kicks on Route 66

Now you go through St. Louis

Joplin, Missouri

And Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty

You’ll see Amarillo

Gallup, New Mexico

Flagstaff, Arizona

Don’t forget Winona

Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino

Won’t you get hip to this timely tip

When you make that California trip

Get your kicks on Route 66

Won’t you get hip to this timely tip

When you make that California trip

Get your kicks on Route 66

Get your kicks on Route 66

Get your kicks on Route 66

We had a blast! The USA makes it easy to fall over and over in love with!

Phoenix, AZ – London Bridge, AZ – Palm Springs, CA – Barstow, CA – Santa Monica, CA

Leaving hot Phoenix & rolling on towards West.

Finding England in the middle of the desert. Last stop in Arizona: the London Bridge at Lake Havasu. And the story goes like this: an American loved the London bridge in London/UK so much that he purchased it in 1968, and transported it to the USA for use. Unbelievable but true.

Obligatory border control: no fruits or veggies allowed into California. Check passed. We are in California! Yeah!

California is different than the other states: a little more liberal, a little less religious, and a little more worried about the environment. California is representing quite a few cultures of the world: every 4th person living here was born outside the USA. And where else could the terminator be the elected governor? California, the focus of the American dream & the target of Route66.

A quarter of California is desert. And that’s how we came in: 350km without gas station or mobile service and hardly any traffic. Just a straight highway through the sandy desert. It’s great to see houses & humans again after some time. We got extreme heat warnings in the day. It „cools“ a little down in the night to 32C degrees. Haha. We enjoyed listening to the natural sounds of the desert landscape. At first a bit scary but also very relaxing, the star gazing is amazing out here.

We arrived at a place where it hasn’t rained in 2 years!!! Hummingbirds flying around. Road runners crossing just in front of us. Lizards sunbathing. Coyotes around at night. If snakes come too close, their head is being cut off. Arghhhh. Slightly terrifying. The dessert is wild & alive!

Surrounded by Joshua trees.

It’s still very hot here with 46C degrees… it’s that kind of hot when you still sweat despite A/C running in the car… it’s time to leave the dessert. We are ready for the pacific coast. Yeah!

Passing a lot of trucks transporting onions. Coke trucks. A lot of Teslas. Cars with long CB radio antennas. The last kilometers on Route66…

Another town which died after the silver rush was over and turned into a ghost town.

Passing by an airplane graveyard & a biker saloon. Checking the gas needle before starting another adventurous ride on the Angel Crest Highway. 80 miles. Wohoo. We love those winding roads. 7381ft altitude and nice temperatures. Finally, it’s cooling down.

The Hollywood Sign, a landmark of the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles, was made of 14m tall and 110m long letters in 1923!

Traffic gets a little crazier. 6 lanes leading us into the second largest city in the USA: Hello Los Angeles!

Wow! Wow! Wow! We made it! We finished >4000km on the mother road and arrived at the end: Santa Monica, California.

Cheers!

We arrived at the pacific. Temperatures are better now: 26C in the daytime… it almost feels cold. Haha.

Time to relax for a couple of days at Venice Beach before heading to South Carolina (by airplane. Lol). See ya!