Happy Easter!

Yes, you may have seen this before, this was my Happy Easter from Heidelberg 2012, thanks to my blog editors  at the time B & R!

The colds we have/had are certainly overstaying their welcome. Different strain in Europe but we’re getting there.

So glad I asked Christoph about which train to take to Breisach because for this week there isn’t one from Freiburg! They are doing track maintenance and so we were bused to Gottenheim and trained from there. Very crowded coming back on the bus. We’ve been to Gottenheim before, in August, 2012 for a wine and dance festival. Pretty town but didn’t see much of it this time wanting to catch the train or bus.

We had a lovely lunch with Christoph in Breisach and caught up with each other.  He’s Austrian by birth, has a very good handle on speaking and thinking in English where he can discuss religion, politics, philosophy, Bruce and he banter all about. 

Beautiful sweets they do so well at this restaurant.

The restaurant has very high quality food and Easter decorations are everywhere, so colourful!

Bunnies made in the restaurant

The exciting thing we learned is that he is hoping to start up a guiding business, sort of along the lines we had with Ivan in Sevilla.  We’ve offered to become his “guinea pigs”.  Since he doesn’t have a car we’ll use the excellent train system in Germany and may hire a car a couple of times when it makes sense. To us this is wonderful news, it’s always better to see a place and hear it’s history from a local guide, again, like we did with Ivan.  We might even learn a bit more German along the way, also good. 

Breisach church, Christoph works there and attends

You may remember we injured a car in Cornwall. We sent the credit card company all the documentation last week. Bruce got an email from them requiring a phone call to get a claim number. They were very good on the phone and helpful. So now we’ve done, got, and I had to send all the documents again via email.  Here’s hoping they can reimburse us for at least some of the money. It wasn’t too much in GBP (Pounds) but when converted into Canadian dollars turned out to be a lot.

We’ll have to get a Euro credit card to avoid this kind of situation. Conversion from Canadian dollars to Euro or any other currency is expensive and only requires the use of a Euro credit card to make the difference.

Also went to the place I bought the train tickets from Calais to Paris. Wrong date on the ticket as reported in long ago previous post were we were almost kicked off the train. Waited quite a while for what turned out to be the wrong agent, oh well, all resolved, they refunded us what we paid on the train. 

So my point in this is to say we’re getting some of the monies back that cost us extra while away.  I guess what is a little surprising to me is the cordial way we’ve been treated in doing so. We haven’t come on strong and demanding, after all I still think it is my responsibility or anyone’s to check a ticket purchased before leaving the store to ensure it is correct. The insurance company for the car was also very accommodating on the phone, we’ll see what they come back with.

I follow a travel blog(s) of a couple that are from the US now living in Freiburg, hope to meet them one day. I had a meal from a Taco truck at our local market, walking by the smell just hit me – Mexican! Yeah! A change of food, so bought a meal from them, yum. The bloggers from the US wrote an entire post on the experience so I had to go back. Now this is one fellow who does everything, cooking, taking orders, taking money and he has a regular line up of a lot of people! It takes him time to cook and assemble the food but no one seems to mind the wait. The only problem is he regularly runs out of quacamole and his is good! He hasn’t been doing this long so has some teething pains but he has a winner. His site is www.theholytacoshack.com His logo is a heart with the slogan “You are the salsa on my taco” which I think is pretty much perfect. Here is Ali’s site and the explanation of his food www.aliadventures.com You might enjoy her site if you have time, both her's and her husband Andy’s. They are truthful, read sometimes blunt, about challenges and joys of travel and living as expats. 

Enjoy your Easter! Cheers, Bx2 & Lexi Cat